Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars)
What can I say? This movie started a pretty huge avalanche. Both for Leone's and Eastwood's careers, the budding Spaghetti Western genre, and probably for for European genre movies in full.
As probably anyone reading this is already well aware, it's pretty much a close remake of Yojimbo. But some characters are changed both reflecting the time of the American Southwest western where it's set, and Italian film for who it was intended.
The movie is enjoyable, with a few quite memorable moments (the gigantic barrel exploding into the bad guys may be my favorite). But it's impossible for me not to think about it as just being the testing waters for the perfection that would eventually come with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. In fact the second movie in this series of sorts, For a Few Dollars More, takes many sequences and styles of this movie and gets them to a more finalized state that are basically rehashed again in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly only fitted together in a perfectly satisfying entirety.
Rating: 9/10