“A fistful of dollars”, masterpiece of Sergio Leone turning 60 years old. It was September 12, 1964 when the movie was released Clint Eastwoodmaking him a movie superstar, it was released for the first time. First in Florence, then in Rome and the following years all over the world.
Inspired by “Yojimbo – The Samurai’s Challenge” by the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa, “A Fistful of Dollars” was an extraordinary success that did not completely change the characteristics of Italian cinema. inventing the “spaghetti western” genre.. Sergio Leone chose Clint Eastwood, who until then had never made a feature film, to play “The Man with No Name”, a shy and rude anti-hero who would stay with him throughout his career. The iconic and unforgettable music was written by Ennio Morricone, who had been Sergio Leone’s schoolmate in elementary school. This partnership remains unchanged throughout Sergio Leone’s Dollar Trilogy and will change everyone’s career.
To celebrate this important anniversary, the Cineteca di Bologna brings a 4K version of the film to the big screenrestored by the Cineteca di Bologna itself, Unidis Jolly Film, The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. And he does so, as part of ‘Il Cinema Ritrovato’. At the cinema’, with the film that inspired it, ‘Yojimbo’. From September 16 it will be possible to see Leone’s masterpiece, while from September 30 Kurosawa..
“The 12th of September celebrates the 60th anniversary of the first screening, at the Supercinema in Florence, of what should have been only a film of the C series, directed by an unknown Bob Robertson and which, instead, has become a monument in the history of cinema,” recalls the director of the Bologna Film Library Gian Luca Farinelli. “‘Sergio Leone was 34 years old, – continues Farinelli – a career as an assistant director, a debut, “The Colossus of Rhodes”, which had led him to a dead end. It was the vision in a Roman cinema of ” The Challenge of the Samurai’, distributed in Italy after its presentation at the Venice Film Festival, where Toshiro Mifune won the Volpi Cup for the best male performance, which gave him the chance to turn into a western Leone, which he had loved “The Seven”. Samurai’, he was well aware of the success that John Sturges had achieved in 1960 with the Western remake of Kurosawa’s masterpiece, “The Magnificent Seven”, and he immediately realized that “The Samurai Challenge” could become a Western soon budget, because the majority of certain scenes could happen in a single place Leone studied Kurosawa’s film, the history of art is made of intuitions and continuous transmission from one author to another, but only the greatest artists” A Fistful of Dollars” owes much, in terms of inspiration, to its original but, at the same time, is completely different from it, due to the endless variations and inventions that transform it into the archetype of the new season of the western. A film that changed the life of Sergio Leone, that of Clint Eastwood and that of Ennio Morricone. Now both films exist in restored versions and we thought it was time to present them together with the public.”