The second installment of the Dollar Trilogy
Death Had a Price is the second installment of the so-called Dollar Trilogy, the proof we needed that shows that there are second parts that are worth it. This is a series of three films recorded in the 1960s, directed by Italian director Sergio Leone, starring actor Clint Eastwood and with music by composer Ennio Morricone, the musical genius we said goodbye to last year. The first one is For a Fistful of Dollars; the second is Death Had a Price; and the third, is The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
A three-way production
This 1965 spaghetti western is a co-production between Italy, Spain, and Germany. After the success of A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone had a bigger budget, although this time Clint Eastwood's salary increased significantly: in total, half a million dollars, of which 50,000 went to the actor.
A gift for Lee van Cleef
The director was clear that he wanted Eastwood for the leading role, and the actor accepted without seeing the previous film, For a Fistful of Dollars. For the role of Colonel Mortimer, Leone had a tough time. He pitched it to Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, and Henri Fonda, but Lee van Cleef ended up doing it. The actor had not worked in the cinema for three years, playing small roles in series and earning a living as a painter, but of walls and ceilings. This character, as he would admit years later, changed his life. Lee Van Cleef boasted of being faster than Clint Eastwood: it is said that he drew, aimed, and fired in just three frames.
Shot between Madrid, Almería, and Rome
Sergio Leone found in Spain the perfect landscapes to shoot his films and he shot the exteriors of Death Had a Price in different places, from Almería to Madrid, leaving the interiors for the Cinecittà studios in Rome. Production designer Carlo Simi built the town of El Paso in the Almería desert, which is still standing today and is one of the tourist destinations in that area of Andalusia. The town of Agua Caliente, where Indio and his gang fled after the bank robbery, is Los Albaricoques, a white town on the Níjar plain. There are streets named after the stars of the film, for example, Clint Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef.
The story of the Clint Eastwood Poncho
The poncho that the actor wears in the three films of the trilogy was never washed and Clint Eastwood went so far as to say that he was really disgusting. What we did have to do was sew it up because, in A Fistful of Dollars, the character is shot several times at chest level. In this film you can see the patches due to bullet holes in some shots, only this time they appear on the right side. The famous poncho that Clint Eastwood wears has a history. "I bought the poncho in Spain. I never had a duplicate of it. In most of the shoots, everything is duplicated or tripled in case you lose something or it breaks. But I never had a duplicate of that poncho," the actor himself recounted in an interview. Now the garment is hanging on the wall of a Mexican restaurant that a friend of his owns in Carmel.
Ennio Morricone and the whistle of Kurt 'Curro' Savoy
Ennio Morricone put the soundtrack to the Western, one of the most popular of his entire career. Among the songs that sound, the unmistakable melody interpreted in the form of a whistle stands out, which we have hummed so many times. It was the Spanish musician Kurt 'Curro' Savoy who, under Morricone's orders, put this classic to music and, without even knowing it, made history.
The most watched film of 'History of our Cinema'
Death had a price that reached an audience record in 2016 in the program 'Historia de nuestro cine'. The film brought together more than one million viewers on television and registered an 8.2% audience share. A total of 3,705,000 viewers watched the movie starring Clint Eastwood at some point.
