A Fistful of Dollars offers a vision of America that perhaps only a non-American could devise, and is one of the most powerful cornerstones of the revisionist westerns of the 1960s and 1970s. Sergio Leone doesn’t treat the frontier as a source of mythology or a promise of futurity but instead looks back from a future in which the mythology of the American Dream has been exhausted. The narrative begins with that most fundamental of western tropes, a man arriving in a settlement, but this is a very different kind of town, and a very different kind of man, from what we find in the traditions of Howard Hawks and John Ford. For this is our first introduction to Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, who we meet as he rides into the frontier town of San Miguel. Usually the towns of classical westerns were centred on production – the town was where it was because something was being planned, constructed or harvested. However, San Miguel has long since ceased to operate as a town in this sense and now exists entirely on an economy of guns, alcohol and above all graves; the local undertaker is the only person doing business in a traditional sense. In place of that normal pattern of capitalist exchange, two smuggler families are attempting to gain control of the town – the Rojo family, who are Mexican, and the Baxters, who are the family of the local American sheriff. These two families have transformed the town into what Marx described as a sphere of exchange detached from production, in which proper labour (apart from the undertaker) has ceased to exist and money endlessly circulates but without creating anything of enduring utility, in a grotesque caricature of American capitalism devoid of any productive rationale. In other words, San Miguel is a necropolis, evacuated of everything except illicit commerce, murder-for-hire, and the frightened faces of the remaining locals who peek out at the Man as he arrives at the town limits and succinctly summarises its commerce of guns and graves: “Never saw a town as dead as this one.”

By hollowing out the western town in this way, Leone brings A Fistful of Dollars closer to prohibition era gangster films than to Ford or Hawks. As in the gangster genre, we’re presented with competing clans warring over a criminal economy, while tactically occupying strongholds in a fortified claustrophobic space rather than setting themselves against the demands of the natural landscape. This gangster vibe also verges on horror at times, due to the uncanny character of the town as a space that should be alive that isn’t – an empty shell without a public sphere, as if the ghost of the western genre itself were haunting Leone’s film. In place of the expansion of the western, Leone presents us with enclosure, as the Man’s journey takes him from a lurid room that is painted bright red, to a wine cellar sequestered beneath the Rojo household, to a crypt whence he emerges, reborn or undead, for the film’s final showdown. On the few occasions when the Man walks alone around the empty town (mostly at night), Leone’s mise-en-scenes take on the surrealism of a Giorgio de Chirico painting, evoking a zone where time has halted but space remains eerily intact, suspending us in a metaphysical doldrums that undercut the western’s normal dynamism. As with many horror films, the dread here comes from the sense of a distended present, the endless “now” of a dead end town that languishes amidst the worst of both America and Mexico. Rather than the frontier being a place to renew American identity, it becomes a strange, almost science fictional space where history has come to an end – a frontier beyond the frontier, where the promise of Manifest Destiny has simply run out.

That vision of the west might just cut it in the classical era if our hero were a counterpoint, but the extraordinary thing about A Fistful of Dollars is just how attuned the Man is to the values of San Miguel, only using comically inept innkeeper Silvanito (Pepe Calvo) as a bridge to Ramon Rojo (Gian Maria Volonte). The hero in the vein of John Wayne was invested in securing the American future (whatever we might think about his vision of that future) but Eastwood’s Man serves market logic rather than national mythology. His opening gaze, his panoramic scrutiny of the town, is not one of moral reckoning but capitalist expropriation, in which the San Miguel’s evil becomes a resource he can harness; in that respect, the title of the film says it all. Initially, he’s not even softened by the tears of Jesus, a local child, crying for his mother, and it’s hard to think of a more brutal retort to American manifest destiny than that. So brutal indeed, is this moment, that Leone ends up having the Man save the parents of Jesus, and Jesus too, because he once “knew a woman” like Jesus’ mother, but this is his only glimpse of empathy and feels quite out of character, and Leone never return to the backstory of this Mary-like woman, let alone permits us to invoke “trauma” as an explanation for the Man’s character. We’re not quite at the nihilism of Sam Peckinpah but we’re getting there – all the pieces are in place, notably the suit of armour that circulates around the town as a running joke, a metafictive nod at the utter lack of chivalry exhibited both sides as they construct feeble narratives to justify their ongoing battle.

Interestingly the Man also latches onto this metafictive potential by engineering a narrative that inflames the opposition between the two families, so that he can harvest the spoils before he once more heads into the horizon. This is perhaps Leone’s most volatile critique – that the western genre is itself little more than a commodity that only gains value in its exchange between the various parties that are invested in its mythology. Much of the film’s drama hinges on the Man’s effort to retain control of this narrative, which becomes more tentative and precarious from about midway through, when he is discovered and tortured. This adds to the uncanniness of the town, which hovers between a naturalistic and diegetic space, and what it in fact is – a set built in the middle of the desert, both in the eyes of Leone as director but also from the perspective of the Man as protagonist, who immediately launches into a campaign to use it as the backdrop for a capitalist passion play with him at its centre. Lapsing between diegetic space and the non-diegetic gazes of both character and director, San Miguel fluctuates and shimmers until it barely seems to exist except as fantasy.

Of course this all begs the question of why Leone has made the film at all if his take on the western is so vituperative – does the vitality of the film stem purely from its deconstructive impulses? It doesn’t and to understand exactly where Leone’s visceral investment in the western stems from, it’s useful to revisit (in broad terms) the thesis of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image. In Cinema 2, Deleuze argues that both cinema and masculinity undergo a sensory-motor crisis in the wake of World War II whose hallmark is a dissociation between sight and action. Post-war cinema becomes suffused with witnesses to history who cannot intervene, characters who are so overwhelmed by the act of looking that it precludes actually acting; men who fail to translate what they see into what they do. When the Man arrives, San Miguel is a symptom of this moment – it’s a town populated on the one hand by eyes at windows, people who see but cannot act, and on the other hand by the criminal families, who act but without ever fully commanding the panoramic position occupied by the Man. What makes the Man so powerful is that he promises to restore this sensory-motor slackening, and to reintegrate hand and eye once again. Pairing his preternatural gaze with ultra-dexterity, he seems to shoot with his eyes – “things look different from high up” – and even when he’s reduced to watching, as when he witnesses a battle on the border that quite explicitly invokes the trench warfare of World War II, he’s not overwhelmed by sight, confident that he can regain action when he’s given the chance.

As ambivalent as Leone might be about the American western, it’s in this genre that he finds a vehicle for hypothesising what it might take to reintegrate sight and action in the post-war era. From that perspective, the drama doesn’t just revolve around the Man doubling down on American capitalism but his response to the pivotal moment in the film – the torture scene when he is beaten and eventually blinded in one eye. This leads onto the most shocking sequence in the film, in which the Rojos set fire to the Baxter home and massacre the family as they flee unarmed. One tortuous tableau after another unfolds of the Baxters dying in mid-flight, torqued into contorted positions by the bullets, while already attempting to twist themselves out of the flames, culminating with an older man being shot in mid-air as he falls off a balcony and Baxter’s wife facing a hail of gunfire as she berates the Rojos for their cowardice. This would be horrifying in itself but Leone takes it to the next level in his contrast between the gleeful gaze of the Rojo brothers, whose rationale for shooting quickly exceeds any practical goals and is instead fueled by the insatiable scopophilia of witnessing violence, and the debilitated gaze of the Man, who by this stage has been temporarily blinded in one eye and is using the other to peer out of the coffin where he is hiding, as it is transported across the square. Both the Rojo brothers and the Man therefore have a front-row seat to the action, in the same way as the audience themselves, and yet in both cases sight and action have become dissociated: the Rojos’ actions have become enslaved to their gaze while the Man is unable to act upon his depleted gaze.

In order to restore this sensory-motor link, the Man has to move beyond a single firearm to something like the arsenal of later action cinema – Leone’s corpus is thus a key missing link between post-war cinema and the action genre, and made me realise the extent to which figures like Stallone and Arnie were all about restoring the link between sight and action in the most hyperbolised manner possible. Like Rambo or the Terminator, the Man has to undergo a sequence of bodily augmentations in order to reunite hand and eye, and to that end he retreats from his torture to a crypt-like mine where he crafts a series of bespoke weapons in a vivid montage sequence that again anticipates the “training” motif of 80s action. We see this foreshadowed just before the torture scene, when the Man also has to move beyond a single firearm to a more creative range of weapons, most memorably when he is stuck in a wine cellar (a forerunner to the crypt) and rolls a giant barrel down a ramp at the exact moment his captors open the door at the bottom, before setting the ensuing wash of alcohol alight and shutting them inside to burn to death. This scene functions as something of a counterpoint to the Baxter bloodbath; both involve characters being burned, but in Eastwood’s case the pleasure of watching, and the power of the gaze, doesn’t entirely eclipse action as it does when the Rojos are mercilessly mowing down the Baxter clan. There, the Rojos’ scopophilic thrill in violence overwhelms every other impulse, turning them into ciphers for a cinematic audience debilitated by their need for endless stimulation.

When the Man emerges from his arsenal, and restores this sensory-motor link, Leone’s auteurist signature also apotheosises, producing an aesthetic manifesto for his golden sweep of spaghetti westerns across the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the final showdown revolves around extreme close-ups of eyes, watching in fear, satisfaction, or just apprehensive apprehension, as if the battle can be fought on the ocular plane alone, and bullets are merely prehensile extensions of the gaze. While the Man prefaces the gunfight with dynamite, he primarily uses it to recalibrate the visual field, the smoke disrupting Ramon Rojo’s sightlines and the forensic certainty of his gaze as the Man traverses a space that distends and contracts at the same time so that it is impossible to read. The main street of the classical western turns into an optical illusion, both a physical reality and also a manifestation of the Man’s eyes, meaning that while the comically noble innkeeper Silvanito might be trussed up between them as a hostage, his position is not really different from that of the Rojos or the audience themselves – held captive to the Man’s extraordinary gaze.

In fact, all the conflicts in A Fistful of Dollars are ultimately held captive to the Man’s gaze, which is why the film itself is so incredibly captivating. As the Man moves across the square, sight reconnects with action, as the most extreme close-ups so far alternate between eyes and boots, while Leone reserves the most chaotically mobile shot of the film for the reeling perspective of Ramon after he has been vanquished – tipsy angles, blinding sun, and physical injury undo the horizon, or reveal that the horizon has become a function of a gaze willing action into existence, rather than the traditional physical limit of the classical western. There is a kind of chivalry, it turns out, in wrestling male action back from a world of debilitated sight, and so it feels right that the final ingredient in the Man’s arsenal has been the medieval suit of armour, which he is covertly wearing beneath his regular western garb. And yet, in a final twist, even when Ramon has been defeated, one last gun points through an upstairs window, shot in equally dramatic close-up, as if to evoke a gaze behind the gaze, a paranoid suspicion that action is still liable to slacken into an inscrutable locus of sight, and that Deleuze’s disembodiment will continue despite Leone’s best efforts to contest it. Of course, that fear and challenge is what will drive Leone’s auteurism over the next decade and a half too, and while his solution will become grander with later films, for now it is enough to comically and peremptorily dismiss it, as Silvanito’s improbably saves the day by taking out the shooter and so assuring the Man’s dignity and implacability.

And so the film ends as it begins, with the Man riding off into the desert, heading for the drama of For a Few Dollars More, leaving the film itself in a strangely precarious place: pessimistic about the renewal of the mythology of the American West but still sufficiently invested in it as a vehicle for this different kind of renewal of masculine sight and action in the post-war period. From an early ruse held at the San Miguel cemetery, to witnessing the Baxter bloodbath in the coffin, to building the arsenal in the crypt-like mine, the Man’s gaze is both preternaturally powerful and in some sense already dead, explaining why he’s been so adept at navigating this metropolis, since he moves through the world without ever fully belonging to death or life. For all its power, his is a waning gaze, an undead gaze, and the drama of A Fistful of Dollars, along with Leone’s subsequent films, stems from the desperate lengths they will go to, the extravagant and flamboyant aesthetic strategies they will adopt, to restore a sensory-motor dissociation that they cannot but admit has already happened.