A Fistful of Dollars / Yojimbo Paired for 60th Anniversary

A Fistful of Dollars / Yojimbo Paired for 60th Anniversary

A big thank you to our Australian friend Travis Trewen who recently sent me this piece celebrating the 60th Anniversary of A Fistful of Dollars. September 12th marked sixty years since the first screening at the Supercinema in Florence of what was supposed to be just a B movie, directed by an unknown Bob Robertson and which, instead, became a monument in the history of cinema. 'A Fistful of Dollars' conquered, day after day, a vast audience, imposed a genre, the spaghetti western, which would make the Italian film industry the second largest in the world.

Sergio Leone was thirty-four years old, with a career as an assistant director, a debut, 'The Colossus of Rhodes', which had led him into a dead end. It was the viewing of 'Yojimbo' in a Roman cinema, distributed in Italy after its presentation at the Venice Film Festival, where Mifune won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor, that sparked for him the possibility of turning it into a western.

Leone, who had adored 'Seven Samurai', knew the success that John Sturges had achieved in 1960 with the western remake of Kurosawa's masterpiece, 'The Magnificent Seven', and immediately understood that 'Yojimbo' could become a low-cost western because most of the scenes could be shot in a single location. Leone studied Kurosawa's film frame by frame and created a faithful copy. Art history is made up of insights and a continuous transmission from one director to another. What Leone manages to do is something that only the greatest artists can achieve, because 'A Fistful of Dollars' owes everything to its original but at the same time is completely different, due to the infinite variations and inventions that turn it into the archetype of the new season of westerns. A film that changed the lives of Leone, Eastwood, and Morricone.

Now the two films exist in restored versions and it seemed like the right time to present them together to the Italian audience.

(Gian Luca Farinelli)

Below: The Italian 2 sheet poster

Below: The Italian Locandina poster

Below: The superb trailer celebrating the limited Italian release