:04:00
kicking the baby,
and what's the hero doing?
:04:04
He's not intervening. He's just watching.
:04:07
This is a very different
kind of Wild West hero.
:04:18
These villages in Almería in Spain,
with their single-story adobe dwellings,
:04:23
whitewashed, were used
a lot in Italian Westerns.
:04:25
They were existing places. Minimal set
dressing would enable them to be used
:04:30
as 19th-century villages
on the Mexican-American border.
:04:35
The actress is Marianne Koch,
a West German actress
:04:38
who had just been voted by
the West German magazine Filmmaker
:04:42
the most popular actress
for films in Germany.
:04:45
She agreed to appear in this movie, even
though it's almost a nonspeaking part.
:04:50
Wearing a lot of eye makeup, Cleopatra
style. I guess that was the thing in 1964.
:04:59
Of course, there weren't trees
in this part of Almería. It's desert.
:05:03
According to Clint Eastwood,
Sergio Leone and his crew
:05:07
were driving past a hapless farmer's
courtyard and saw this tree,
:05:11
and thought,
"That's the tree we want."
:05:13
They got out, said,
"We're from the highway department."
:05:17
"Your tree is a danger to traffic."
Got permission to cut it down,
:05:20
pinched it, stuck it into the ground,
and put it in this opening sequence.
:05:25
You can't see the roots,
they're resting in the ground.
:05:28
It was a very low-rent production.
:05:30
This street is further north, a village
called Los Albaricoques, "the apricots",
:05:36
which appeared in
a lot of Leone's Westerns.
:05:38
The main cobbled street,
with single-story adobe dwellings.
:05:42
And the rider goes by with
"Adios, amigo" written on his back.
:05:48
In Yojimbo, by Kurosawa,
:05:50
the samurai movie on which
Fistful of Dollars was directly based,
:05:54
what happens at this moment is that a dog
walks by with a human hand in its mouth.
:05:59
And the samurai hears this
bickering family, which sets up the plot.