This is the little movie that spawned an industry. There were other Spaghetti Westerns before Sergio Leone’s
A Fistful of Dollars, but it was its worldwide box office phenomenon that created a gigantic, global market for Italian movies with European financing shot in Spain featuring an international cast. Clint Eastwood was frustrated with his television career and inability to choose his own projects while under studio contract so he gambled on this stylized Western reworking of Akira Kurosawa’s
Yojimbo (1961), which is itself inspired by Dashiell Hammett novels. A gifted gunman wanders into a town where there is a power struggle between two men and he decides to play both sides against the middle for profit. It is very simple yet what made the movie so exciting and fresh, and continues to engage each subsequent generation, is its dark sense of humor, Eastwood’s limitless cool, the distinctive visual style, and an iconic score by Ennio Morricone.
A Fistful of Dollars was on twenty-seven ballots including first, second, and fifth place votes, four sixth, two seventh, an eighth, two ninth, and a tenth.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is the fourth film directed by John Huston to make the countdown (following #94
The Unforgiven, #93
The Misfits, and #76
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean). This one, along with
The Maltese Falcon, may be the most enduringly iconic films of his amazing career.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre finds two down on their luck Americans in Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Bob Curtain (Tim Holt) stranded south of the border in 1925 Mexico. They meet an old man, another American named Howard (Walter Huston), who claims to be a skilled prospector. The three men pool their meager resources to outfit themselves with enough gear to head up into the mountains and look for gold. They find it, but that is not the end of the story as they must fend off bandits and, perhaps most dangerously, gold fever and mistrust of each other. A great character piece and adventure tale that is as gangbusters today as it was over seven decades ago. It won three Oscars: Best Director and Best Screenplay for John Huston and Best Supporting Actor for his father Walter.
Treasure of the Sierra Madre danced a jig onto twenty-three ballots, fourteen of them top ten votes with an eighth, a seventh, a sixth, two fifth, a fourth, two third, three second, and three first place nods. It is the first film to secure three 25-pointers.
The Sons of Katie Elder, North to Alaska, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Shootist, Red River, The Cowboys, El Dorado,
True Grit, Stagecoach, Two Mules for Sister Sara, Pale Rider, High Plains Drifter, For a Few Dollars More and A Fistful of Dollars
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