60 years ago, the opening scene of this western was unprecedented and is still talked about today

Sencacine

By Sara Heredia

April 23, 2025

This feature film marked a generation, and these minutes are still being analyzed

For a Few Dollars More is a key western film. It is the second installment of the Dollar Trilogy and came after the release of the successful Fistful of Dollars in 1964. Seeing how well his first feature film had worked, director Sergio Leone wanted to develop the sequel as quickly as possible, but they needed a key player: Clint Eastwood.

The star was not ready to commit, but after enjoying a screening of A Fistful of Dollars Among Friends he accepted the proposal. He received $50,000 for it and made history. It was even more successful than its predecessor, selling 14.5 million tickets in Italy. In Spain it also became the highest-grossing Spanish film of all time with a gross of 272 million pesetas.

Many have enjoyed Leone's film, but do you remember the opening scene?

This is how it all begins...

In the distance, a horseman advances silently through the desert. The silence of the scene is broken by a relaxed whistle from someone we guess is close to us, at a height, watching the rider. The latter continues to advance at a man's pace and the whistle continues. When suddenly a noise is heard.

It's the sound of a Winchester makes when it's cocked. We don't see it, but the threat exists. The whistle stops. A shot sounds, the rider falls from his mount, which drives away. Our whistler was also a gunslinger. And the credits roll.

It's a perfect first few minutes, which defines very well what comes next. They're already warning that this is a film with a lot of guns and a lot of deaths. In fact, all the names that appear afterwards are shot, one by one.

They were designed by Iginio Lardani, a graphic and film title designer known for his iconic work in the Spaghetti Western genre. If we add to this the music of Ennio Morricone, what we have is an initial sequence that is pure art. As reported on the Art of the Title website, Lardani created his own label. "My father really invented this kind of work. Sure, titles have always existed since the invention of cinema, but he, in a way, renewed art. He tried to contribute ideas, do peculiar things... he was born as a painter," his son Alberto recalled in 2002.

"Lardani was equally ingenious with other effects, both camera and practical, using water to guide ink strokes and coffee grounds to simulate sand moving. "He poured ground coffee and filmed it with high-contrast film and the camera inverted," Alberto said. 'Basically, he placed the coffee and filmed it with the camera upside down. It seemed as if the wind was blowing it away," they explain in the media.

This opening sequence leads to the film's first scene, a close-up of a Bible that hides the face of Colonel Mortimer, a character played by Lee Van Cleef. Death Had a Price would mark Sergio Leone's first major commercial success, and it was from this success that Americans began to speak of "spaghetti westerns" to describe this emerging genre in Italy and understand its impact.