Clint Eastwood | First Impressions

I left my nephew and his kids and braved a thunderstorm to see A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (Sergio Leone, 1964) at the Cinema Moderne last night. It was a sold-out screening. I was put on a waiting list but did manage to get in, probably thanks to the rain. Everyone applauded at the end. I liked it very much. But I don’t understand its current status as one of the great masterpieces of the cinema. Influential, without question. Historically significant, of course; amongst other things, it made Clint Eastwood a star, and one can definitely understand why watching it. But Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO (1961), which borrowed its structure from American Westerns and of which this is a remake, is funnier, deeper, more complex and with characters that convey something about people, ways of life, structures of feeling. Watching A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS is a somewhat dislocating experience, the dubbed language, the Spanish landscape standing in for the West but so different from it, everything a trope, a witty take on a cliché, a referent to something else. It’s all fun with surfaces, an evocation of a certain kind of mid-sixties cool, and épater de older generation aimed at the younger one: the shooting at the kid at the beginning, the close-ups of an extremely handsome Eastwood doing his poses. It might be seen as an early postmodern film. I loved the music, the shot of the horse galloping and the poetic raising of the dust, the intriguing compositions and uses of perspective and point of view. I do think Leone is an extraordinary visual filmmaker. And this is a very fun film; but to praise it as anything more seems to me a lack of discernment. This was particularly brought to mind through the presence of Margarita Lozano, who plays Consuelo Baxter, and who was also played the maid in VIRIDIANA, and thinking of both films in relation to art. Perhaps I should re-read Christopher Frayling and figure out exactly what I’m missing, if anything

José Arroyo

A film whose brilliant conceit is so simple and compelling we can’t believe we’ve never seen it before, Juror #2 tells the story of a juror whose responsibility it is to assess the guilt of a defendant who he knows is innocent of murder – because it was the juror who did it.

Summoned to serve on a jury and quickly recognising the details of the case, Nicholas Hoult’s Justin quickly realises that the deer he hit with his car one dark, stormy night was in fact the defendant’s girlfriend, for whose supposed murder he is on trial. So begins a morality play of sorts, Justin wanting to do the right thing and keep an innocent person from prison, but unwilling to expose himself as the real, if accidental, killer.

It’s a film that sets two institutions, the family and the court, at war. Justin’s wife has a baby on the way, and is there any wrong that can’t be justified by the protection of the family? We discuss this in the particular light of director Clint Eastwood’s reputation as a lifelong conservative, Mike suggesting that the distrust the film shows towards the legal system, a government institution, has precedent in Eastwood’s other work, but its critique of the sanctity of the family is surprising and invigorating.

Juror #2 is a thoroughly engrossing exploration of a terrific idea, and you’ll take its questions home with you long after it ends. What would you do? Are you sure?

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