For a Few Dollars More Sings in the Waiting

One of the great pleasures of a well-kept and cared for movie house is the space it creates. There’s the physical space—quiet doors, comfortable seating, careful lighting, and skillful, screen, speaker, and projector placement. There’s the mental space, where the audience dials into the movie for the extent of its runtime. The Austin Film Society’s cinema is a prime example of both, as handily evidenced by July’s screening of Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More, presented in collaboration with the fine folks at Alienated Majesty Books as part of their ongoing “Paper Cuts” series.

A Fistful of Dollars introduces Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name by riffing on Akira Kurosawa and Dashiell Hammet. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly uses its vicious, mythic protagonists to tour the width and breadth of the American Civil War. For a Few Dollars More is a more intimate experience than its siblings. It’s the tale of a bounty hunter (Eastwood) caught up in a long-standing vendetta between a former Confederate colonel (Lee Van Cleef) and a murderous crime lord (Gian Maria Volonté). For this screening, it was presented in conversation with author Milo Thesiger-Meacham’s book-length essay Audible Heat, which discusses the cultural history of cicada sounds and their appearance throughout humanity’s social history.

Thesiger-Meacham quotes Eastwood, who said in an interview that “Sergio Leone felt that sound was very important, that a film has to have its own sound as well as its own look […] Leone’ll get a very operatic score, a lot of trumpets, and then all of a sudden ‘Ka-pow!’ He’ll shut it off and let the horses snort.” Cicadas are constantly present in the soundscape of the Man with No Name’s films, but each picture maintains a distinct aural feel. In the case of For a Few Dollars More, it’s chimes. Volonté’s murderous gangster El Indio carries a musical pocket watch that he treasures above all other trophies, and he is particularly fond of using it to instill terror and despair in his enemies.

“I’m sure you hate me just enough,” Indio taunts a man whose family he has just had murdered before forcing him into a duel in which they will draw once the watch’s chimes end. The chimes herald doom for the would-be avenger and act as a calming madeleine for Indio, who is both unstable and revels in violence to the point that he relies on narcotics and fond memories of his previous violence to keep from going on pointless murderous rampages. Venal and vicious though he is, he prefers his murderous rampages end in profit.

As the chimes tick down, composer Ennio Morricone interlinks the diegetic chimes with an intimidating, borderline demonic organ. It’s the sonic manifestation of Indio’s malevolence and wrath, actively aggressive and overpowering, and it makes horrible silence that follows his gunning his foe down strike harder still.

Silence is as key to For a Few Dollars More’s mood and tone as Morricone’s guitars, Leone’s choreography, and Van Cleef and Eastwood’s drawl. The three leads—Eastwood, Van Cleef, and Volonté express themselves through the ways they move and react to each other as much as they do their dialogue. Consider the famous finale, which begins with Indio disarming Mortimer and forcing him into a duel that both men know Mortimer has no hope of winning without a weapon.

Volonté magnifies the sadism of Indio’s taunt (“When the chimes end, pick up your gun. Try and shoot me, Colonel. Just try.”) with his ready but lackadaisical posture. He doesn’t need to say any more than he has. He’s assured his victory and can relish in Mortimer’s helpless anger. Mortimer, meanwhile, has nothing to say. He knows how lethal Indio is, and that the bandit has gotten the better of him. Rather than rage, he silently grieves his unavenged sister and considers whether he has any chance when he goes for his gun. Leone takes in the way his actors watch each other. By keeping the scene quiet save for a piece of music that he and Morricone have woven throughout the film, Leone creates a powerful stillness that escalates the picture’s tension.

Indeed, one of the greatest marks of Leone’s abilities in For a Few Dollars More comes when he interrupts this escalation just before the climax and then restarts it. He does this by having Eastwood’s Manco intervene via force of arms (he has a rifle) and music (he swiped Mortimer’s musical pocket watch, the twin to Indio’s, and uses Mortimer’s watch chimes to interrupt Indio’s). Rather than scuttle the climax’s tension, Leone, Morricone, Eastwood, Van Cleef and Volonté use the gap to transform and spike it. The brief break between the wind-down of Indio’s watch music and the beginning of Mortimer’s shifts not only the picture’s mood but its mode.

Manco’s timely rescue doesn’t just give Mortimer a fair shot in the duel, it throws Indio off his game and turns the myth he’s built for himself against him. Even since he stole the watch, he has used it as a weapon of terror, one he uses to emphasize not only his lethality, but the power he holds over his opponents. He’s used the watch to set the tone for his duels. Now the chimes toll to herald his doom, and he’s off his game. Morricone works this into the score by swapping the demonic organs that accompanied Indio’s triumph with a guitar and horns, creating a mournful and less malevolent hero track. Indio does not like not being in control, but even terminally rattled, he’s smart enough to keep from completely folding. It’s terrific work from Volonté, backed by Van Cleef’s growing confidence and Eastwood’s grim curiosity. When Mortimer fires, and strikes Indio down, it’s quick. The music is done, the action is done, and the silence that follows serves as the duel’s conclusive punctuation.

It’s immortal filmmaking, the sort of craft that burrows its way into souls. Getting to share moments like the conclusion of For a Few Dollars More with an appreciative audience is one of the great joys of communal filmgoing, and the good folks at AFS and Alienated Majesty deserve gratitude and laurels.

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