:08:03
a well-known Spanish actor
who'd appeared in Italian Westerns.
:08:06
Fistful of Dollars was not the first
Italian Western, as people think.
:08:11
There had been about 25 Spanish
and Italian and West German Westerns
:08:15
made between 1962 and 1964.
:08:18
But they were copy American Westerns.
:08:22
Where Fistful of Dollars scored was it was
the first distinctively Italian Western.
:08:26
The critics compare copyists to
Italianisers, and Italianisers begin here.
:08:31
The distinctive features are those
of an Italian movie applied to the West.
:08:35
And this came through
in Fistful of Dollars for the first time.
:08:45
José Calvo had, in fact, been making
movies since the early 1950s in Spain,
:08:49
and bore a startling resemblance to Walt
Disney's Geppetto in the film Pinocchio,
:08:54
which endeared him
to audiences in the west.
:09:25
The coffin maker, Piripero, is played
by an Austrian actor called Joseph Egger,
:09:30
who was 75 years old at
the time he made this film,
:09:34
and went on to appear as the old prophet
in For A Few Dollars More, his last movie.
:09:40
He was a music-hall star,
a sort of stand-up comedian,
:09:43
who was very popular
with West German audiences.
:09:45
So Spanish bartender, American
stranger, Austrian coffin maker outside.
:09:52
And the three choruses in this movie,
:09:54
the three characters who introduce us
to the theatre of San Miguel,
:09:58
this flyblown village
just across the Mexican border,