Now FASTing: Sergio Leone's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS Made Clint Eastwood a Star

Your first choice should be the region-free 4K option from Kino Lorber, if you can afford it. (Check out a representative review at Blu-ray.com.) You may hesitate if you've never seen the film before. It's a Western from 1964! Big deal!

To answer, watch the movie. It's now streaming on Prime Video, if you've got it. If not, The Roku Channel is just one option among FAST (Free Ad-supported Streaming Television) platforms.

More comments below on watching the film on The Roku Channel, but first: why watch?

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
Now streaming on The Roku Channel , as well as Pluto TV and Tubi TV.

Last weekend, I began reading Shawn Levy's fabulous-so-far Clint: The Man and the Movies, which was just published, reading about his life up to the point where he had become the sidekick (and second lead) on television's Rawhide. On Monday night, I attended an advance screening for Ari Aster's provocative, if unsatisfying Eddington (read our critic Shelagh Rowan-Legg's provocative yet fair review, in which she came to a similar conclusion, if a bit more positive), which has been described as a modern Western.

These two events in my life crisscrossed when I started looking for something to watch on The Roku Channel yesterday and saw A Fistful of Dollars on the site's front page. It's a movie that I remember seeing on broadcast television many years ago while living with my parents. The wildly animated, extremely colorful title sequence drew me in, and then director Sergio Leone hooked me with the first sequence.

All through the movie, Leone's framing, camera movements, and extremely close-ups -- Clint Eastwood's eyes, especially -- mesmerized me, beyond the point where I lost track of the narrative. Suddenly, I remembered that the plot was strongly influenced by Kurosawa's Yojimbo, which plot, in turn, was strongly influenced by Dashiell Hammett's great Red Harvest. Kurosawa's visual language, and his use of Toshiro Mifune's magnetic performance at its center, is what sticks in the memory, and it's similar here.

Clint Eastwood plays Joe -- referred to in the U.S. advertising as "The Man With No Name" -- a stranger who rides into town, dressed unlike everybody else. (Shawn Levy's book informs that Eastwood picked out different items in his wardrobe from different sources.) He doesn't talk much, which helps to make him a haunting, mysterious character. (Again, Shawn Levy's book explains why Clint Eastwood keep cutting dialogue from the script.)

It's astounding to me that this was Sergio Leone's sophomore feature. It's made with stirring confidence on a shoestring budget, but it's clear from the first frames that the director knew what he wanted to put on screen. And how he wanted it to hear. (Again, Shawn Levy's book points out that film made composer Ennio Morricone a star too.)

I haven't seen A Fistful of Dollars for many years. Watching it again, I was constantly surprised and thoroughly engaged. It's a true foundational film for modern-day genre film fans.

The biggest objection to watching A Fistful of Dollars on a FAST service is that the aspect ratio is wrong. Rather than true 2.35:1, it's scanned to fill the screen, which lowers the color density and pushes many of the faces, already in extreme close-ups, even closer to the screen.

Frankly, I watched the entire movie without noticing because I haven't seen it for decades. Then, after I finished, I realized that the movie is available on Prime Video, to which I have a subscription. Mea culpa. I sampled the first few minutes on Prime Video, which is owned by Amazon, which also owns MGM, which owns the distribution rights, and it looks far superior on Prime Video.

To make up for it, I then watched For a Few Dollars More, which is even better than A Fistful of Dollars, and is also now streaming on Prime Video. (It's also not a sequel, though it is the second time that Clint Eastwood starred in a Sergio Leone movie.)

The ad breaks, which are often a huge annoyance, were few and far between on my viewing: four ad breaks, each only 15 seconds, and each a service ad for Roku itself. I'm sure that's not the norm, but I'll report again in a future feature when I have a little more experience with The Roku Channel.

Now FASTing celebrates independent and international genre films and television shows that are newly available on legal FAST (Free Ad-supported Streaming Television) services.