I was reminded yesterday by our
friend Jayne Smart that yesterday (September 12th) marked the 55th
Anniversary since A Fistful of Dollars made its Italian premiere in 1964. I
thought it would be nice to mark the occasion with a little bit of post history
and why the film was delayed in other countries. For this particular post, I
have borrowed from Wiki, which is all pretty accurate.
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| Sergio Leone counting his Dollars |
Initially, releasing A Fistful of
Dollars was difficult, basically because no major distributor wanted to take a
chance on a faux-Western and an unknown director. The film ended up being
released in September, which is typically the worst month for sales. The film
was shunned by the Italian critics, who gave it extremely negative reviews.
However, at a grassroots level, its popularity spread, and it grossed $4
million in Italy, about three billion lire. American critics felt quite
differently from their Italian counterparts, with Variety praising it as having
‘a James Bondian vigor and tongue-in-cheek approach that was sure to capture
both sophisticates and average cinema patrons’. The release of the film was
delayed in the UK and the United States, because distributors feared being sued
by Akira Kurosawa, as A Fistful of Dollars was immediately identified as an
unofficial remake of his film, Yojimbo (1961). As a result, A Fistful of
Dollars was not shown in American and UK cinemas until 1967. This made it
difficult for the American public or Hollywood to understand what was happening
to Clint in Italy at the time. An American actor making films in Italy met with
considerable prejudice, and was seen in Hollywood as taking a step backward,
rather than a career development.
A Fistful of Dollars was released
in Italy in September 12, 1964. Over the film's theatrical release, it grossed
more than any other Italian film up to that point. In January 1967 the film premiered in the United States grossing $4.5 million for the year. It
eventually grossed $14.5 million in its American release. In 1969 it was
re-released, earning $1.2 million in rentals.
Upon the film's American release
in 1967, both Philip French and Bosley Crowther were not impressed with the
film itself. Critic Philip French of The Observer stated:
‘The calculated sadism of the
film would be offensive were it not for the neutralising laughter aroused by
the ludicrousness of the whole exercise. If one didn't know the actual
provenance of the film, one would guess that it was a private movie made by a
group of rich European Western fans at a dude ranch... A Fistful of Dollars looks
awful, has a flat dead soundtrack, and is totally devoid of human feeling.’
June 11th, 1967
Bosley Crowther of The New York
Times treated the film not as pastiche, but as camp-parody, stating that nearly
every Western cliché could be found in this ‘egregiously synthetic but engrossingly
morbid, violent film’. He went on to patronise Eastwood's performance, stating:
‘He is simply another fabrication of a personality, half cowboy and half
gangster, going through the ritualistic postures and exercises of each... He is
a morbid, amusing, campy fraud’ February 2nd, 1967
The retrospective reception of A
Fistful of Dollars has been much more positive, noting it as a hugely
influential film in regards to the rejuvenation of the Western genre. The 67th
Cannes Film Festival, held in 2014, celebrated the "50th anniversary of
the birth of the Spaghetti Western... by showing A Fistful of Dollars".
Quentin Tarantino, prior to hosting the event, in a press-release described the
film as ‘the greatest achievement in the history of Cinema.’
