Per un pugno di dollari

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My name's Christopher Frayling.
I wrote the book Spaghetti Westerns,

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and then I wrote this large
biography of Sergio Leone,

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and I'm going to talk you
through Fistful of Dollars.

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The credit titles for Fistful of Dollars
were designed by Luigi Lardani, in Rome,

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and signalled this was to be
a different kind of Western.

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They were half-based
on the James Bond credit titles,

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with the idea of Rotoscoping,
and semi-animation,

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and Andy Warhol-type colours.

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With a noisy soundtrack.
That was the first new thing.

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The second was, of course, the title track
of the music, by Ennio Morricone.

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You have sounds of gunfire,
and bells, and whip cracks,

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and incomprehensible lyrics.

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Fender Stratocaster guitar, which was
very fashionable with the Beach Boys,

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and the Shadows, and other such bands.

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So this isn't a Western with orchestral,
Hollywood-type score.

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It's a rock-and-roll score.
This is a rock-and-roll Western.

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And the emphasis in the Rotoscoping
is on the most violent scenes,

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or the most action-type
scenes in the movie.

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The cast is a mixture of American lead,

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Italian actors,
Spanish actors, West Germans.

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This is an Italian-Spanish-West
German coproduction,

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and each wanted a slice
of the action with the cast.

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Here's a direct James Bond reference.

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The iris looking down onto the horseman.

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James Bond had been successful
in Italy, and you could say

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part of the impetus for this film is
to bring Bond together with the Western,

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to turn it into a mid-1960s
grown-up kind of Western

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that would appeal to the audience
for James Bond movies.

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Shot in Techniscope, known as
the poor man's CinemaScope,

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a two-perforation system where you
printed two frames for the price of one.

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It was quite difficult to use,
and encouraged the use

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of either long shots or extreme close-ups,

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which, of course, is one of the technical
innovations of the Italian Western.