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62 Years Later, Clint Eastwood’s Genre-Redefining Western Is Officially Free on Streaming
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62 Years Later, Clint Eastwood’s Genre-Redefining Western Is Officially Free on Streaming

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There was a time when Westerns were fairly straightforward movies. The white-hat-wearing good guys did battle with the black-hat-wearing bad guys and the white hats won in the end. These were usually morality tales about the nature of right and wrong, and the heroes were flawed in superficial ways, if at all. This was true of early, pre-World War II Westerns, as well as many of the films in the “Golden Era” of Westerns from 1940 until 1960, when the genre was at the height of its popularity.

As the glory days of classic Westerns began to fade in the 1960s, so did some of the romance associated with it, bringing about the more complex, morally ambiguous “Revisionist Westerns.” One of the most important films from the early days of the Revisionist Western is 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars starring Clint Eastwood in his first major film role. It’s directed by Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone. A Fistful of Dollars is currently available for free on YouTube and is a can’t-miss for film fans — even those that aren’t so into Westerns. That’s mainly because A Fistful of Dollars is also a solid crime and action story that just so happens to take place in the Old West.

Image: Amazon MGM Studios

In the small frontier town of San Miguel, a mysterious, unnamed stranger (Eastwood) rides his horse into town and learns of two rival families struggling for control of the local smuggling operation. There are the Rojo brothers, who the stranger witnesses slaughter a troupe of Mexican soldiers and steal their gold. Then there are the Baxters. Their patriarch, John Baxter, is also the town’s corrupt sheriff. But the stranger isn’t someone who arrives and brings law and order with him. He decides to play both sides against each other, making money from both before skipping town. By getting involved in the rivalry, the stranger ends up exacerbating the already tense situation, resulting in widespread bloodshed.

There’s no hero in A Fistful of Dollars. The Rojos and the Baxters are both lawless and deadly, and the stranger has no moral superiority over them. You root for him because he’s put at the center and Eastwood plays him with a rugged, mysterious charm, but he’s not an honorable protagonist. He’s compelling, but hardly ever heroic in the classical sense. He’s an opportunist who makes everything worse.

A Fistful of Dollars Clint Eastwood

Image: Amazon MGM Studios

If there’s one thing that makes the movie feel dated, it’s the poorly-synced dubbing of various characters. The film was made by an Italian director in Spain with an international cadre of mostly European actors — Eastwood, of course, being the American exception. The movie was designed for international distribution, and thus American dialogue was filled in later. If you can get used to that, however, you’re in for a satisfying ride. At just 99 minutes, A Fistful of Dollars feels modern in its pacing, with brutal, bloody outbursts — very different from the romanticized and sanitized American Westerns of the Golden Era of the genre.

How A Fistful of Dollars redefined the Western

A Fistful of Dollars Clint Eastwood Image: Amazon MGM Studios

Besides being a Revisionist Western, A Fistful of Dollars is one of the earliest and best examples of what’s called a “Spaghetti Western,” which means a Western made by an Italian filmmaker. They existed before this movie, as the culture of America’s Old West was fascinating to those outside the U.S. as well, but A Fistful of Dollars was the breakthrough hit that put the genre on the map.

It also transformed Eastwood into a leading man. Eastwood had been a supporting player on the more traditional TV Western Rawhide since 1959, then A Fistful of Dollars proved he could carry a major movie all on his own. Leone’s two follow-up films, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, where Eastwood played the same character, would confirm this. Eastwood then went on to become one of the most prominent American actors and directors for the next 60 years.

If you’ve ever been curious about Westerns, or about the overall course of cinema history, A Fistful of Dollars is essential viewing, not only for how it broke the mold of Westerns and catapulted the career of Eastwood, but it also, in turn, influenced American Westerns leading to more complex, morally ambiguous films like Unforgiven and No Country for Old Men. It’s one of those great films that everyone needs to see, so why not watch it while it’s free?

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