For A Few Dollars More : How Clint Eastwood returns as “The Man with No Name”, how to take down a ruthless outlaw?

If A Fistful of Dollars began the Eastwood legend, then its sequel, For a Few Dollars More, cemented it. Clint Eastwood makes his return as “The Man With No Name,” this time teaming up with a rival bounty hunter (Lee Van Cleef as “The Man In Black”) to take down a ruthless outlaw and his band of renegades.

But all is not as it seems in the hard-hitting second installment of Sergio Leone’s trilogy starring Eastwood as the famed “Man With No Name.” This gritty, western masterpiece would be followed one year later by The Good, The Bad and The Ugly to complete director Sergio Leone’s brilliant Spaghetti Western Trilogy.

The Man With No Name trilogy started off with a bang with A Fistful of Dollars (see my review here) and that film’s success made all the parties involved want to make a sequel. Unfortunately, director Sergio Leone and the production company that financed the film, Jolly Films had a falling out which owned in a lawsuit over who financed the character.

A court decided that the character was adequate between the two movies and clothed in a fashion that wasn’t unique enough to be copyrighted, that the case was dismissed. Alhough technically the two characters are supposed to be different people, it can be that they are the exact same person as both characters wear the exact same it took from the first movie.

Eastwood’s character in this movie seems to have a new nickname of “Monco” which in Spanish is “One Handed” which is an appropriate nickname since the character always has his right hand on his gun which reduces himself to using his left hand to do everything else. This Man With No Name (at least nothing firmly established) character is now a successful bounty hunter. His rival bounty hunter is Colonel Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef) and we quickly see how proficient both men are at their jobs at the beginning of the movie. Both men are ruthless and coldy efficient at their jobs and Mortimer shows no hesitation in breaking the law when he forces a train to make an emergency stop for his convenience.

Soon, both bounty hunters learn of a new bounty that’s been placed on a psychopathic bandit known as El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté) whose reputation was earned by his willingness to kill men, women, and babies. For Indo, the bounty is $10,000 which is a lot more money than the standard bounties the two men usually collect.

We later learn that Mortimer has his own personal reasons to hunt down Indio, but for The Man With No Name, money is his sole motivation. After sizing each other up by shooting each other’s hat, the two bounty hunters form a partnership to go after Indio and his gang of fourteen men. No one in this movie can be completely trusted as there’s betrayals, double-crosses, and a lot of twists and turns.

After being successfully sued by Akira Kurasawa for copying Yojimbo for A Fistful of Dollars, Leone created a new direction and story for For a Few Dollars More. Now partnered with producer Alberto Grimaldi, the sequel had a bigger scope, a larger budget, and a built in audience that loved the first movie. This sequel builds on everything that was done right the first time and makes it even better than before.

This feels more like a John Ford western with it’s wide vistas and the larger budget also allowed for the entire town of El Paso to be built (which still stands and is a tourist spot), and the extra money also allowed for a great co- star to raise the stakes of the movie. In a repeat of what happened during the first movie, Leone offered a lead role to Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson and both turned it down again (although in a humorous bit of trivia they both learned their lesson and later starred in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in The West). Lee Van Cleef had appeared in countless westerns and TV shows, but this movie turned out to be his big break and he ran with it.