Fistful of Dollars, A (UK Import) (4K UHD Review)

• Reviewed by: Stephen Bjork
• Review Date: Jun 24, 2025
• Format: 4K Ultra HD
• 

Director

Sergio Leone

Release Date(s)

1964 (May 12, 2025)

Studio(s)

Jolly Film/Constantin Film/Ocean Films (Arrow Video)

• Film/Program Grade: B
• Video Grade: A-
• Audio Grade: B
• Extras Grade: A

https://www.arrowvideo.com/

https://diabolikdvd.com/

Review

A Fistful of Dollars (aka Per un pugno di dollari) was Sergio Leone’s first foray into the Western genre, and while it established a few of his trademarks, it remains somewhat anomalous compared to the rest of his filmography—and not just in regards to his Westerns, either. That’s primarily due to the story that he chose to tell in the film. Transplanting the basic concept of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo into a Western context was unquestionably a brilliant conceit (albeit a costly one, since Leone’s adaptation was unauthorized, and Kurosawa successfully sued). The problem is that this story ended up constraining him from fully fleshing out the new Western mythology that he would end up developing in his sequel For a Few Dollars More, and that mythology would inform not just the rest of his Westerns, but arguably his final film Once Upon a Time in America as well.

Leone’s biggest gift to the cinematic world was the way that he simultaneously demythologized and remythologized the traditional Western genre. He stripped it of many of the classic tropes, substituting instead what author Danny Peary referred to as a mythic race of ancient superwarriors, all of whom inevitably found themselves in conflict with encroaching civilization. (Leone even made that point explicit in Once Upon a Time in the West by having Harmonica openly refer to himself as being part of “an ancient race.”) As Perry pointed out, the key element in expressing all of that was Leone’s conception of an Unholy Trinity: three distinctly different versions of these superwarriors whose lives become intertwined. The nominally Good one was always in opposition to the Bad, with the flawed one (the Ugly) caught in the middle. In one form or another, Leone would end up exploring that concept throughout the rest of his career.

Unfortunately, the nature of the Yojimbo story that Leone borrowed/stole for A Fistful of Dollars precluded using that multifaceted structure. Instead, Clint Eastwood’s character Joe (yes, he always has a name in Leone’s Westerns) is a singular force who has inserted himself between two rival sides in a largely irrelevant conflict. There’s no real Good or Bad in this film, or any other superwarriors for that matter, with only the villainous Ramón (Gian Maria Volonté) coming even remotely close to being one (he’s an expert shot, but not much else). The chatty saloon owner Silvanito (José Calvo) is the nearest thing to a flawed, Ugly character, but he’s anything but a superwarrior. There are also no traces of civilization anywhere to be found in A Fistful of Dollars. instead, it takes place in a parallel universe to the worlds that Leone created for his other Westerns—which were themselves parallel universes to those of traditional Westerns. If the majority of Leone’s Westerns are one step removed from Western tradition, then A Fistful of Dollars is two steps removed.

Where Leone did hit the ground running in A Fistful of Dollars was with his cherished anti-capitalist themes. Death equals profit in Leone’s west, and if killing is your business, then business can be very good indeed. A Fistful of Dollars may lack the scope of later Leone Westerns like The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, where even the mass death and destruction of the Civil War served as an opportunity for enterprising souls to make a buck, but it still explores the same theme on a smaller scale. Silvanito may not be a superwarrior, but be still becomes a mouthpiece for Leone’s cynical worldview:

“I know, you have no money. After all, you just got into town. But if you don’t mind doing a little killing, you will have no problem finding someone eager to pay you... Here, you can only gain respect by killing other men. So nobody works anymore.”

Leone would flesh out that theme in For a Few Dollars More, where Eastwood’s character ended up counting his victims by adding up the value of their bounties. For a Few Dollars More also codified the concept of the Unholy Trinity, with Col. Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef) serving as the Good, El Indio (Volontè) as the Bad, and Eastwood’s flawed character Monaco as the Ugly. That structure worked so well that Leone openly named his third Western after it, he and continued to use it in Once Upon a Time in the West and Duck, You Sucker! (and arguably in Once Upon a Time in America as well). Yet even without it, A Fistful of Dollars was still a necessary first step in Leone’s evolution as a filmmaker, as it showed him that he needed to find a more appropriate narrative structure in order to support what he really wanted to say about the genre. A Fistful of Dollars works well enough taken on its own merits, but Leone found much more compelling ways to express himself going forward.

Cinematographers Massimo Dallamano and Federico G. Larraya shot A Fistful of Dollars on 35mm film in 2-perf Techniscope using spherical lenses. The resulting flat negative was then blown up optically for anamorphic release prints that were framed at 2.39:1. This version is based on the same 16-bit 4K scans of the original camera negative that were done by L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna back in 2018, but it’s been newly regraded for SDR, Dolby Vision, and HDR10 by Silver Salt Restoration in London. A 35mm dye-transfer Technicolor print from The Cinema Museum was used as color reference (hold onto that thought for a moment). While Arrow has being switching things up lately in regard to disc authoring, this one was encoded by David Mackenzie at Fidelity in Motion, so there isn’t even a whiff of compression artifacts to be seen anywhere, and the grain is perfectly resolved.

A Fistful of Dollars and the other Leone/Eastwood Westerns have had a storied history on home video ever since L’Immagine Ritrovata performed their 4K scans of the negatives. Their versions were notoriously yellow, especially in the exterior scenes, something that Kino Lorber tried to tone down a bit for their 2018 Blu-ray of A Fistful of Dollars and even further for their 2022 UHD. The latter was a significant improvement, but there was still plenty of room to refine things even more, especially since Kino didn’t include an HDR grade. L’Immagine Ritrovata supposedly had also used a vintage print as a color reference, but either it wasn’t an IB Tech print or else something had gone dreadfully wrong with it, because there’s simply no rational defense for the choices that they made.

Fortunately, Arrow’s new HDR grade is an improvement across the board. The colors are better saturated and look much more natural, or at least what qualifies as natural in terms of the richness that dye-transfer prints could produce—it’s not so much realistic as it is hyperrealistic. The sky now looks fully blue, and while it can vary a bit from shot to shot, that may well be due to the nature of the original cinematography. The iconic titles by Iginio Lardani are a genuinely brilliant shade of red that’s almost blinding in this rendition. The contrast has also been improved, with the black levels looking as rich as the colors. Arrow has also opened up the framing a bit compared to Kino Lorber, with a little more information on all four sides of the frame. Yet they don’t appear to have exposed any gate hairs or other anomalies, so if there were any rough edges or detritus visible, it’s been cleaned up here. Is it perfect? No, but this is still the best that A Fistful of Dollars has ever looked on home video.

Audio is offered in English and Italian 1.0 mono and 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English SDH subtitles for the English version and removable English subtitles for the Italian. Arrow says that these mono tracks are “newly restored” by Bad Princess Productions while the 5.1 versions are “newly remixed” by Þorsteinn Gíslason. Since there’s no way to do a direct A/B comparison between their new versions and the previous ones, it’s difficult to spot obvious differences, but they both sound quite good in these incarnations. The mono tracks still have slightly harsh-sounding dubbing that’s prone to distortion, and Ennio Morricone’s score suffers from some distortion as well. The remixed 5.1 versions sound a little smoother overall, but the differences are minor. The spatial differences are minor as well, since these aren’t really true multichannel remixes as much as they’re processed mono—they add a little ambience, but not much directionality. Purists will still probably want to stick with the mono tracks, but this is one case where they probably won’t feel that the 5.1 mixes are too revisionary.

Note that since Arrow has encoded the English and Italian versions separately, they’ve authored the disc so that the only available audio options will match the version selected. You can switch on the fly between mono and 5.1, but you can’t switch between English and Italian without going back to the main menu and swapping versions. (That also means that if you want the English dialogue, you have to accept the bogus English titles with pseudonyms for most of the cast and crew.)

Arrow’s Region-Free Limited Edition 4K Ultra HD release of A Fistful of Dollars is a two-disc set that includes a Region B Blu-ray with additional extras (the movie is UHD only). The insert is reversible, featuring new artwork by Tony Stella on one side and original theatrical poster artwork on the other. It also includes a double-sided foldout poster with both artworks, as well as a 60-page booklet featuring essays by Henry Blyth, Bilge Ebiri, Pasquale Iannone, and Eloise Ross. Everything comes housed in a rigid keepcase with the Stella artwork, and there’s also an oversized slipcover to match. The following extras are included:

DISC ONE: UHD

• Commentaries:
  • Sir Christopher Frayling
  • Tim Lucas
• Trailer Gallery:
  • Italian Theatrical Trailer (UHD – 3:40)
  • German Theatrical Trailer (HD – 3:38)
  • German Re-Release Trailer (HD – 4:31)
  • UK Teaser Trailer (HD – :59)
  • US Theatrical Trailer (HD – 2:26)
  • US Radio Spots (HD – 5:59, 10 in all)
  • US Double Bill Trailer (HD – 2:06)
  • US Double Bill TV Spots (Upscaled SD – 1:23, 2 in all)
  • US Double Bill Radio Spots (HD – 2:21, 4 in all)

DISC TWO: BD

• When It All Started (HD – 13:48)
• Wind & Fire (HD –16:56)
• Four Fingers Four Picks (HD – 15:08)
• A Night at the Movies (HD – 12:35)
• A Fistful of Outtakes (HD – 36:14)
• The Day the Soundtrack Changed (HD – 22:36)
• Marisol: Sergio Leone’s Madonna in the West (HD – 31:37)
• MGM Archive Extras:
  • The Frayling Archives (HD – 18:38)
  • A New Kind of Hero (Upscaled SD – 22:55)
  • A Few Weeks in Spain (Upscaled SD – 8:30)
  • Not Ready for Primetime (Upscaled SD – 6:21)
  • The Network Prologue (Upscaled SD – 7:45)
  • Restoration Italian Style (Upscaled SD – 5:44)
  • Location Comparisons 1964-2004 (Upscaled SD – 5:22)
  • Tre Voci (Three Voices) (Upscaled SD – 11:13)
• Alternate Credit Sequences:
  • German Opening Credits (HD – 2:46)
  • Original English Credits (HD – 3:18)
  • Italian Re-Release Credits (HD – 3:20)
• Image Galleries:
  • A Fistful in Pictures (HD – 14:52)
  • On the Set (HD – 3:57)
  • Promoting A Fistful of Dollars (HD – 15:48)

The commentary with Leone biographer Sir Christopher Frayling was originally recorded for the 2007 Collector’s Edition DVD from MGM, while the one with all-around film expert Tim Lucas was added for the 2018 Kino Lorber Blu-ray. While there’s naturally some overlap between the two tracks, they each have their own interests—for example, they both note Iginio Lardani’s uncredited work on the opening titles, but Lucas delves into some of the pseudonyms while Frayling focus on what he calls the “rock & roll” nature of the imagery. It’s the same way throughout the rest of both tracks; similar basic information, but different nuances. They’re both well worth a listen.

Arrow has also ported over the rest of the old MGM DVD extras while adding a significant quantity of their own, starting off with new interviews. When It All Started is with film historian Fabio Melelli, who offers an overview of the making of A Fistful of Dollars and its impact on the Western genre. Wind & Fire is with Ennio Morricone biographer Alessandro De Rosa, who recounts how Morricone came to work on the film and then develop such an indelible partnership with Leone. Four Fingers Four Picks is with guitarist Bruno Battisti D’Amario, who played acoustic guitar on A Fistful of Dollars and other Morricone scores. A Night at the Movies is with filmmaker Paolo Bianchini, who describes how he started in the business and what happened when he and Leone attended a screening of Yojimbo (Leone immediately thought of it as a Western).

The rest of the new extras consist of a visual essay and a collection of outtakes. The Day the Soundtrack Changed is by musician Lovely Jon, who traces the profound impact that Morricone had on film scores in Italy and beyond. He also analyzes Morricone’s compositions in A Fistful of Dollars. Yet the real jewel in Arrow’s crown here is A Fistful of Outtakes, which collects 35 minutes of outtakes from the six hours’ worth that survive in the archives of the original producers Unidis Jolly Films. Among other things, it includes the original opening where Joe acquired his poncho, as well as an abundance of raw footage of actors struggling with props and missing their marks.

Marisol: Sergio Leone’s Madonna in the West is an extended interview with Marianne Koch that was originally included on Kino Lorber’s 2018 Blu-ray. She explains how she was cast in the film and describes her experiences working with Leone and the other actors. She also offers some retrospective thoughts about the film and Eastwood’s political evolution.

The MGM Archive Extras collect the rest of the extras from the MGM DVD and Blu-ray releases of A Fistful of Dollars. The Frayling Archives features Sir Christopher demonstrating some of the memorabilia that he’s collected for the film. He returns for A New Kind of Hero, which traces the evolution of the Western genre due to Leone’s influence. Eastwood himself appears in A Few Weeks in Spain to discuss working with Leone. Not Ready for Primetime and The Network Prologue feature Monte Hellman and collector Howard Fridkin (respectively) to explain the creation of the new prologue for the network television debut of A Fistful of Dollars in 1977 and how Fridkin was able to record it for posterity. The latter featurette also includes the full prologue. Restoration Italian Style is an outdated look at the restoration process for the DVD, included here for archival purposes only. Location Comparisons 1964-2004 is self-explanatory, while Tre Voci (Three Voices) is a collection of interviews with producer Alberto Grimaldi, screenwriter Sergio Donati, and Mickey Knox, reminiscing about working with Leone.

Finally, in addition to porting over the three Image Galleries that were originally included on Kino’s Blu-ray release of A Fistful of Dollars, there’s also three different Alternate Credit Sequences: German, English (with the original “Bob Robertson” credit for Leone), and Italian. That’s pretty much all of the extras from MGM and Kino Lorber save for the Trailers from Hell with John Badham. (Kino also included a brief outtake reel that’s been superseded by Arrow’s lengthier version.) The 2008 Region B Blu-ray from Ripley’s Home Video in Italy did offer a documentary on Sergio Leone that hasn’t been included elsewhere, as well as a different restoration featurette. The 2013 Region B Blu-ray from Universum Film in Germany included the same restoration featurette, a collection of locations featurettes, and an interview with Ennio Morricone.

While there’s always going to something, somewhere, that’s not included on a given new release, it’s still hard not to think of Arrow’s 4K version of A Fistful of Dollars of being pretty much the definitive release of the film. It’s as comprehensive as possible, and short of someone doing a fresh 4K scan of the negative to update the work done by L’Immagine Ritrovata, it’s hard to imagine that there are any more improvements to be made in terms of picture quality. While casual viewers may be content with Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray, serious Leone fans are going to want to add this set to their collection.

-Stephen Bjork

(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).