Sergio Leone’s film was one of the earliest and most influential “spaghetti Westerns” (so called because they were produced by Italian studios), and the first to feature Clint Eastwood’s iconic Man with No Name character, who would reappear in two subsequent films, as well as going on to inspire characters such as Roland Deschain, the hero of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. The Man with No Name is also the Man of Few Words—Eastwood’s character doesn’t have a line until eight minutes into the film. Laconic though he may be, he’s both quick with a gun and clever, and he manages to cut a swath of destruction through a town ruled by two rival bosses with just a few well-placed bullets. Fistful was inspired largely by Akira Kurosawa’s classic Yojimbo (released only three years earlier), and was the subject of a lawsuit by Kurosawa, though both likely drew inspiration from other sources, such as Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. Some compare Leon’s use of close-up shots (which had previously been used largely as reaction shots) to the arias from operas, giving the audience insight into a particular character. It works well here, even if the characters are more or less archetypal in nature.