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My name's Christopher Frayling.
I wrote the book Spaghetti Westerns,
:00:04
and then I wrote this large
biography of Sergio Leone,
:00:07
and I'm going to talk you
through Fistful of Dollars.
:00:12
The credit titles for Fistful of Dollars
were designed by Luigi Lardani, in Rome,
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and signalled this was to be
a different kind of Western.
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They were half-based
on the James Bond credit titles,
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with the idea of Rotoscoping,
and semi-animation,
:00:27
and Andy Warhol-type colours.
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With a noisy soundtrack.
That was the first new thing.
:00:32
The second was, of course, the title track
of the music, by Ennio Morricone.
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You have sounds of gunfire,
and bells, and whip cracks,
:00:41
and incomprehensible lyrics.
:00:43
Fender Stratocaster guitar, which was
very fashionable with the Beach Boys,
:00:47
and the Shadows, and other such bands.
:00:50
So this isn't a Western with orchestral,
Hollywood-type score.
:00:54
It's a rock-and-roll score.
This is a rock-and-roll Western.
:00:57
And the emphasis in the Rotoscoping
is on the most violent scenes,
:01:01
or the most action-type
scenes in the movie.
:01:04
The cast is a mixture of American lead,
:01:08
Italian actors,
Spanish actors, West Germans.
:01:10
This is an Italian-Spanish-West
German coproduction,
:01:14
and each wanted a slice
of the action with the cast.
:01:17
Here's a direct James Bond reference.
:01:19
The iris looking down onto the horseman.
:01:23
James Bond had been successful
in Italy, and you could say
:01:26
part of the impetus for this film is
to bring Bond together with the Western,
:01:30
to turn it into a mid-1960s
grown-up kind of Western
:01:34
that would appeal to the audience
for James Bond movies.
:01:45
Shot in Techniscope, known as
the poor man's CinemaScope,
:01:48
a two-perforation system where you
printed two frames for the price of one.
:01:52
It was quite difficult to use,
and encouraged the use
:01:56
of either long shots or extreme close-ups,
:01:59
which, of course, is one of the technical
innovations of the Italian Western.