For a Few Dollars More

For a Few Dollars More (1965)
IMDB #121 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059578/]

The Gist:
For a Few Dollars More is a continuation of Leone's famous Man With No Name Trilogy, which starts with the carbon copy of Kurosawa's Yojimbo and ends with the glorious holy grail of westerns that is The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Between the two, For a Few Dollars More is much closer to latter. Of course, what I didn't realize until I watched this film is that the three are more of a spiritual trilogy than an explicit one. For some reason it took Van Cleef being a villain in The Good and ending up being a pretty swell guy in For a Few Dollars for me to go "wait a second, they aren't the same character, are they?" Anyway, not that Fistful of Dollars isn't excellent, but this film feels more original (because it is), more visually stunning, more tautly directed. We get badass shootouts, Mexican standoffs, people shooting a cigar from Eastwood's mouth and Eastwood calmly smoking the butt that is left (because he's a badass), and so on. One of the best Westerns ever made, and still debatably only Leone's third best. Guy is an animal.