29 - A Fistful of Dollars

    An anonymous man drifts into the town of San Miguel, where two rival gangs are in competition.  The Rojos, and the Baxters.  The man decides to use both gangs against each other to make a little money, and possibly free the town from being in the grip of both gangs.
    Another classic I never had seen before, I was surprised at how little I knew about this movie.  I think the only specific thing was the scene that was shown in Back to the Future II.  I didn't have many strong feelings about it.  I like the story in a certain way.  I mostly liked that the audience is kept in the dark, even as we see exactly how the story plays out from the man's point of view.
    The violence has a strange habit of being comical, since most of the effects work is people seizing up as if they've been shot, but there's a very dark edge to it.  We see two sequences that I would probably qualify as being massacres.
    I have one primary complaint about the movie, and that's the problem of the Baxter gang.  While four of the men from the gang are pestering Eastwood near the beginning, we never get a sense that the gang is actually bad.  In fact, there appears to be a certain amount of legitimacy to their existence.  While Eastwood kills the four that pester him, that seemed to be as a way of starting off his ploy.  It seems a little more unethical to have the Baxters treated this way without a clear sense of evildoing from them.
    Also of note - I really liked the credits sequence.  Some rotoscoped animation, done in a very impressionistic style.