A Movie Quentin Tarantino Called Cinema’s “Greatest Achievement” Just Came to Prime Video
A Fistful of Dollars, the 1964 Sergio Leone Western starring Clint Eastwood, has arrived on Prime Video, prompting renewed attention to a film Quentin Tarantino has repeatedly praised as transformative for cinema. The movie launched the "Dollars Trilogy" and helped popularise the spaghetti Western genre, in which American-style films were made by Italian directors and crews, reshaping expectations of what a Western could look and feel like.
Directed by Leone with a score by Ennio Morricone, the film follows Eastwood's unnamed "Man with No Name" as he arrives in the violence-plagued border town of San Miguel and manipulates two feuding families for his own profit, drawing on Akira Kurosawa's 1961 film Yojimbo as its source material. Speaking at Cannes on the film's 50th anniversary, Tarantino called it "the birth of what we now call modern filmmaking", crediting Leone's operatic close-ups and tense showdowns with establishing a new visual language for genre cinema, while Eastwood's morally ambiguous, largely silent anti-hero broke from the traditional noble Western lead epitomised by John Wayne.
- A Fistful of Dollars (1964) is now streaming on Prime Video
- Tarantino has called it a defining, genre-reshaping masterpiece
- Eastwood's silent anti-hero redefined the Western protagonist archetype
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A Fistful of Dollars is a 1964 Western made in Europe, directed by Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood as a nameless drifter who plays two rival families against each other in a lawless border town. It was loosely based on Akira Kurosawa's Japanese film Yojimbo, and its score was written by composer Ennio Morricone. The film became the first in what is known as the "Dollars Trilogy" and helped establish the "spaghetti Western", a term for Westerns made by Italian production teams rather than Hollywood studios.
The film is widely regarded as a turning point for the Western genre, replacing the clean-cut, honourable hero typified by actors like John Wayne with a morally ambiguous, largely silent anti-hero. Its style, including tight close-ups and drawn-out tension before gunfights, went on to influence many later filmmakers, among them Quentin Tarantino, the American director known for films such as Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, who has spoken publicly about the film's importance to his own work.
The film's move to Prime Video, a streaming service, has brought it back into public conversation, making it more accessible to audiences who may not have seen it before.