Outlaws in Pajamas

Eastwood wakes to the sound of pan pipes. He looks around....

Just tonight, I think maybe, For a Few Dollars More might be inching its way ahead of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly. I mean, come on, it has Klaus Kinski in it. More twitching per second than has ever been captured on film before or since. It has also the toothless, rubber-lower-jaw old guy who is always, always a railridin' hobo, here playing an old-timer who's against trains. It has the world's most excellent (what do you call it?) footprint-off/bitch-slap combo. It has Eastwood, the tramp, shamelessly courting both Angel Eyes and Indio. And it has that eternal cigarillo, resourcefulness, manliness, a shield, just long enough to fit beneath the brim of his hat when it rains - a quality I love beyond reason and that, I admit, I may have mentioned before.

Anyhow. The first time I saw this film was during the Grindhouse Film Fest in Portland - sitting by the inimitable Sam Dodge Soule III - and his pal Dicky Dahl, whose name appears in the editing credits on the new Gus Van Sant film, Paranoid Park, about which more later - and when I saw it then, the film was HUGE but very, very pink. Smelled of vinegar at fifty paces. Not terribly macho I guess, but that kind of pink is easy to overlook once you get into it, and considering the grindhouseyness of it all.

Well, I don't know which I like better, when you get down to it. Still got a crush on Eli Wallach (the Ugly), but Indio is so sexy...and he's almost as hot in A Fistful of Dollars, which is pretty sweet but lacks the balls-out, fists-in-the-air glory of the second film, in my opinion.

Listen, mister, why'd you choose my place to commit suicide?

Even the Bank of San Francisco isn't that well protected!

I was worried about you. All alone, with ... so many problems to solve ....