The masterpiece with which Sergio Leone rewrote the history of the western was released exactly 60 years ago, on September 12, 1964. Now the Cineteca di Bologna, with its project ‘Il Cinema Ritrovato. Al cinema’, brings back to theaters from September 16 ‘A Fistful of Dollars’, in the version restored in 4K by the same Cineteca di Bologna, Unidis Jolly Film, The Film Foundation, Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
And it does so in tandem with the film that “inspired” Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Yojimbo: The Challenge of the Samurai’, in theaters from September 23, also in a restored version. “September 12 marks the 60th anniversary of the first screening, at the Supercinema in Florence, of what should have been just a C-series film, directed by an unknown Bob Robertson and which, instead, has become a monument in the history of cinema”, recalls the director of the Cineteca di Bologna Gian Luca Farinelli. “For a Fistful of Dollars – continues Farinelli – he conquered, day after day, a huge audience, imposed a genre, the spaghetti western, which would make the Italian film industry the second in the world”.
It was the vision of ‘The Samurai’ in a Roman cinema, Farinelli recalls, “that gave him the idea of transforming it into a Western. Leone, who had adored ‘The Seven Samurai’, was well aware of the success that John Sturges had achieved in 1960 with the Western remake of Kurosawa’s masterpiece, ‘The Magnificent Seven’, and he immediately understood that ‘The Samurai’ could become a low-budget Western, because most of the scenes could take place in a single location”. A film that changed the lives of Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood and Ennio Morricone. “Now the two films exist in restored versions and it seemed like the right time to present them together to the public”, concluded the director of the Cineteca.