For a Few Dollars More

After the box-office success of A Fistful of Dollars in Italy, director Sergio Leone and his new producer, Alberto Grimaldi, wanted to begin production of a sequel, but they needed to get Clint Eastwood to agree to star in it. Eastwood was not ready to commit to a second film when he had not even seen the first. Quickly, the filmmakers rushed an Italian-language print (a U.S. version did not yet exist) of Per un pugno di dollari to him. The star then gathered a group of friends for a debut screening at CBS Production Center and, not knowing what to expect, tried to keep expectations low by downplaying the film. As the reels unspooled, however, Eastwood's concerns proved to be unfounded. The audience may not have understood Italian, but in terms of style and action, the film spoke volumes. "Everybody enjoyed it just as much as if it had been in English," Eastwood recalled. Soon, he was on the phone with the filmmakers' representative: "Yeah, I'll work for that director again," he said. Charles Bronson was again approached for a starring role but he passed, citing that the sequel's script was like the first film.[9] Instead, Lee Van Cleef accepted the role. Eastwood received $50,000 for returning in the sequel, while Van Cleef received $17,000.[1]

Screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni wrote the film in nine days.[10] However, Leone was dissatisfied with some of the script's dialogue, and hired Sergio Donati to work as an uncredited script doctor.[11]

The film was shot in Tabernas, Almería, Spain, with interiors done at Rome's Cinecittà Studios.[1] The production designer Carlo Simi built the town of "El Paso" in the Almería desert;[12] it still exists, as the tourist attraction Mini Hollywood.[13] The town of Agua Caliente, where Indio and his gang flee after the bank robbery, was really Los Albaricoques, a small "pueblo blanco" on the Níjar plain.

As all of the film's footage was shot MOS (i.e. without recording sound at time of shooting), Eastwood and Van Cleef returned to Italy where they dubbed over their dialogue, and sound effects were added.[14] Although it is explicitly stated in the movie that the Colonel Mortimer character is originally from the Carolinas, Van Cleef opted to perform his dialogue using his native New Jersey accent rather than a Southern accent.[15]

The musical score was composed by Ennio Morricone, who had previously collaborated with director Leone on A Fistful of Dollars. Under Leone's explicit direction, Morricone began writing the score before production had started, as Leone often shot to the music on set.[16] The music is notable for its blend of diegetic and non-diegetic moments through a recurring motif that originates from the identical pocket watches belonging to El Indio and Colonel Mortimer.[17] "The music that the watch makes transfers your thought to a different place," said Morricone. "The character itself comes out through the watch but in a different situation every time it appears."[18]

A soundtrack album was originally released in Italy by RCA Italiana.[19] In the United States, Hugo Montenegro released a cover version as did Billy Strange and Leroy Holmes who released a cover version of the soundtrack album with the original American poster art. Maurizio Graf sang a vocal "Occhio Per Occhio"/"An Eye For An Eye" to the music of the cue "Sixty Seconds to What?". Graf’s performance(s) did not appear in the film but were released as tie-in 45 RPM records.

All tracks are written by Ennio Morricone.

For a Few Dollars More was released in Italy in December 1965 as Per Qualche Dollaro in Più.[20]

The film proved to be even more commercially successful than its predecessor.[21] By 1967, the film became the highest-grossing film in Italy with a gross of 3.1 billion lire (US$5 million) from 14,543,161 admissions.[22][23][3][24]

The film opened in Spain on 17 August 1966 as La muerte tenía un precio and became the highest-grossing Spanish film of all-time with a gross of 272 million pesetas.[4]

It was the seventh most popular film at the French box office in 1966.[25]

In the United States, the film debuted on 10 May 1967, four months after the release of A Fistful of Dollars, grossing $5 million.[20]

It initially received mediocre reviews from critics. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times said, "The fact that this film is constructed to endorse the exercise of murderers, to emphasize killer bravado and generate glee in frantic manifestations of death is, to my mind, a sharp indictment of it as so-called entertainment in this day."[26] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described the film as "one great old Western cliché after another" and that the film "is composed of situations and not plots."[27] Its platitudinous character immediately laid it open to parody and one followed in the same year as Lando Buzzanca's For a Few Dollars Less (1966).[20]

The film has since grown in popularity, while also gaining more positive feedback from contemporary critics. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports a 92% approval rating with an average rating of 8/10 based on 36 reviews. The website's consensus reads, "With Clint Eastwood in the lead, Ennio Morricone on the score, and Sergio Leone's stylish direction, For a Few Dollars More earns its recognition as a genre classic."[28]

In a retrospective review of the Dollars Trilogy, Paul Martinovic of Den of Geek said, "For A Few Dollars More is often overlooked in the trilogy, awkwardly sandwiched between both the original film and the best-known, but it's a stunning film in its own right."[29] Paolo Sardinas of MovieWeb said, "Eastwood gives it his all and turns in another iconic performance along with scene stealer Lee Van Cleef, who helps make For a Few Dollars More twice as good as its predecessor."[30] Film historian Richard Schickel, in his biography of Clint Eastwood, believed that this was the best film in the trilogy, arguing that it was "more elegant and complex than A Fistful of Dollars and more tense and compressed than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." Director Alex Cox considered the church scene to be one of "the most horrible deaths" of any Western, describing Volonté's Indio as the "most diabolical Western villain of all time."[31]

British journalist Kim Newman said that the film changed the way bounty hunters were viewed by audiences. It moved them away from a "profession to be ashamed of," one with a "(ranking) lower than a card sharp on the Western scale of worthwhile citizens," to one of heroic respectability.[32][33]