For those hording toilet paper

"You'll get rich here or you'll be killed. Juan De Dios tolls the bell again."

The little things that we take for granted in Leone’s movies, right? The clever dialogue. Like the “three/four” coffins and how “the stranger” is told over and over that the town is made for only scum: killers, smugglers, and thieves. The undertaker is the most employed man in the town. He has learned to take measurements of “newcomers” with his eyes and mind after looking them over immediately! Two families of crooks, one dealing in guns and ammunition, the other in drugs. Eastwood’s Man with No Name arrives right as the families appear to be on the verge of war. He is, at first, sees opportunity in being a man in the middle, reaping reward working for *both* parties. This is quite a dangerous position to take: pocketing cash at the expense of two families who want to eliminate each other.

Leone is a master at faces. When I watched High Plains Drifter (1973), Eastwood has his stranger ride into Lago with a special emphasis on those who look up directly at him in the coastal township. Faces of all of Lago *need* to be emphasized, and the camera has a fascinating cast in that movie so it is a technique that pays off.  The casting of incredible faces has always been a bona fide plus in all of Leone’s movies. That shot of Henry Fonda as he is about to kill a family, for instance, with those dark, cold-blooded eyes, all steely and penetrating, in Once Upon a Time in the West, is unforgettable. 

In A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Leone certainly benefited from faces made for a gunfight. Eastwood’s face, even when caught in an expression of either confidence or pointed silent rage, has never been as painted with master stroke than by Leone’s camera. Eastwood’s own camera certainly done well as did Siegel’s.

Raf Baldassarre (as Juan De Dios, a meager storeowner) has some of the best dialogue, while the iconic bad boy, Gian Maria Volontè (as Ramon, the psychopathic brother of head gun “salesman”, Don Miguel) has the best close-ups. Want to study how to be a really unsettling human monster, Volontè is the actor to watch. How he just joyfully massacres an entire family and his peeps gives you plenty of reason to despise him. Of course, this is a film with few characters that once could sympathize with. Even Eastwood’s character eyes hefty profits during this dispute among crime bosses in the town. He’s essentially sympathetic by default. Ultimately, he is the skilled gunfighter who sees cruelty in the form of Ramone and after heavy persuasion (torture from Ramone and his boys) is dead set on making sure a coffin is built for his ass.