Psychological Warfare in Cinema - GREAT

When encountering a Western where the good guy has perhaps the worst things driving his actions of all the characters, one knows it is a special film, and anyone who appreciates the Western and intelligent film making will walk away from "For A Few Dollars More" a changed theater goer.

Eastwood is the "Man with no Name," pursuing ruthless bandits in order to kill them and collect the reward money. In other words, a bounty hunter, whose services in cleaning up towns marks him as a hero.

Lee van Cleef, the most remarkable Western villain in history, is also a bounty hunter, and is pursuing the same bandits as Eastwood's character. Van Cleef is such a natural heavy that he is generally seen as a villain, even in this film, (and his extremely villainous role in the next film) and yet to me it is different entirely for this movie. After all, his character is driven to hunt this bandit as revenge for a horrid wrong done to someone very close to him by their leader, a madman who has to smoke heavily after killing someone, allows the murder of children, and listens all the time to a musical watch. Seldom has cinema produced an easier man to hate; his never blinking, half-glazed eyes present the facts on his mental condition, his actions are never with anything but evil intentions, and his mockery of his victims is vile to the utmost degree.

And it will be in their relationship that Eastwood will come to understand van Cleef a great deal better, for in the end, it is van Cleef who is by far the more noble of the two.

As was the way always with Leone's Westerns, and later Eastwoods, this movie challenges dull genre stereotypes and does more than simply show moral men kill immoral men. It tells a story, a great story, and shows that you don't have to be good to be human.

And lastly, the music is brilliantly orchestrated to provide the utmost suspense in certain scenes...the musical watch becomes a mind-blowing system of terror!