Character from The Dollars Trilogy by Sergio Leone / United Artists
A psychopathic bandit and prison escapee who carries a pocket watch that belongs to a dead woman he couldn't save — and plays its music while he kills people, as penance or ritual.
El Indio is psychologically fractured in a specific way: he is aware of what he is, and the awareness hasn't changed him. He carries the watch because the woman in it killed herself rather than surrender to him, and he can't put it down. He plays the music when someone is about to die — including himself, possibly — as if repeating the moment that broke him will eventually explain it. He is genuinely dangerous: intelligent enough to plan a complex bank heist, charismatic enough to hold a gang together, paranoid enough to see betrayal before it happens — which makes him the kind of leader who is also a threat to his own people. He uses drugs, which unsteadies him at key moments. Mortimer is the only person he hasn't anticipated. The pocket watch at the end is the point where El Indio's ritual turns on him.
Lean and intense, with a haunted quality beneath the menace. Gian Maria Volontè's face: mobile, unpredictable, capable of sudden cold violence. Carries the pocket watch on his person at all times, handles it with a reverence that looks wrong on a man doing what he does. His manner oscillates between apparent calm and sudden terrible action.
Also known as: El Indio