: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.
:06:03
Instead, Clint Eastwood
is greeted by the local bell-ringer,
:06:07
who acts as a kind of chorus, like in a
Shakespearian play, or traditional theatre.
:06:13
The chorus tells him exactly what's going
on in the background to the town.
:06:31
In Yojimbo, the village in 19th-century
Japan is divided into two factions:
:06:36
the silk merchants
and the sake merchants.
:06:39
And the shambling,
itchy, bow-legged samurai
:06:42
with his sword strapped to his waist
:06:44
walks into town and sells his services,
first to one faction then the other.
:06:48
As we're told by the crazy bell-ringer,
this town is run by two factions.
:06:53
One is gunrunners,
and the other runs liquor.
:06:57
Eastwood rides into the main set
of Fistful of Dollars,