Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy: A Western Revolution

Director: Sergio Leone
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Gian Maria Volonté, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach
Music: Ennio Morricone

Dollars Trilogy is a great way to spend a lazy afternoon. These movies have many claims to fame. Above all, these three loosely connected movies are pure entertainment.

Clint Eastwood stars as the “man with no name” in the Dollars Trilogy. It includes three spaghetti western movies. First is A Fistful of Dollars. Next is For a Few Dollars More. Finally, there is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

It all starts in A Fistful of Dollars with a laconic, tobacco-chewing, poncho-wearing gunslinger who canters into town. He wears his hat low. His well-worn gun is within easy reach in his hip holster. He clenches a roll of tobacco in his teeth. A match lights the tobacco, which he can ignite by scratching it on any rough surface within hands’ reach. Sometimes it’s his jeans, other times it is the stubble of whoever he is talking to.

Growing up on Westerns, I loved the Zane Grey and Oliver Strange series. This made it easy for me to enjoy the Dollars Trilogy movies.

The stories are surprisingly layered given the underlying premise. A lone rider rides into a situation he chooses to get involved in. His blue eyes are intense. His weather-beaten face shows that he is not someone you want to take on in a one-on-one duel. You are never sure whose side he is on; he seems to have his own moral code.

Gunfights break out, thrilling horseback chases occur, and a whole story arc unfolds. It ends with the rider tipping his hat and riding into the sunset.

Some angles and shots that the movies employ are interestingly longer. They exceed the tiny time frame within which content is produced and consumed today. These long pauses hold the camera still. They show nothing but vast expanses of wind-blown deserts. These pauses are cathartic before the violence begins. Sergio Leone brings these stereotypical characters into fresh relief again. They have been long done to death in dramas and books. However, his style revitalizes them.

Take, for instance, the opening credit scenes in all three movies. They set the tone for the grand expanse of the backdrop within which the stories are set. Ennio Morricone doesn’t waste any time dialing up the mood. With a characteristic whistle and a few plucks of the guitar, we are off on an operatic “theme”. Soon the whole refrain is picked up by a vast ensemble, complete with church bells, sopranos, and a chorus of men barking off unintelligible but supremely catchy music before it all lulls down and we are gently placed within the story.

All three movies have iconic music threaded through the narrative. One can say that the music in For a Few Dollars More concludes the film. The same applies to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. As Clint Eastwood orchestrates a fair outcome in a high-stakes Mexican standoff between lightning-fast gunmen under sweltering sun, Morricone’s score heightens the tension, elevating mere gunfights into epic showdowns.

The first movie of the series, A Fistful of Dollars is based on Yojimbo, directed by the master Akira Kurosawa and starring the inimitable Toshiro Mifune. It would be unwise to compare them. The latter was based on an earlier hard-boiled pulp by the godfather of noir, Dashiell Hammett. We are introduced to Ramon (Gian Mario Valente), an exceptional villain. His fetish over the Winchester rifle is sweatily palpable. Many consider the first movie the weakest of the three. This is by a very thin margin. Nevertheless, some “die-hard western hats” think it ranks above the other two in its grit.

Sergio Leone continues with the extreme close-ups and the adobe towns in his next excursion, For a Few Dollars More. There is continuity in the two movies. Some characters are portrayed by faces from the earlier film, but they do not reprise the same characters. Gian Maria Volonte returns as the memorably deranged Indio. Nonetheless, Sergio teams Clint with Lee Van Cleef to balance things out. Van Cleef plays retired Colonel Douglas Mortimer. Mortimer has steely eyes and a hawk nose. He possesses a contraption that sends everyone who stares down its business end to heaven. The first movie establishes that Clint’s character knows how to handle his gun. It’s a relief that the colonel is on Clint’s side. The Colonel has plans that Clint can’t think of. He has a calmer head on his shoulders. More importantly, he has a gun that shoots farther than Clint’s revolver.

The last of the trilogy, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, builds magnificently on the first two movies. Sequels rarely match the original so well. Still, in the Dollars Trilogy, each movie firmly holds its place as a classic. This movie also spends the most time on Eli Wallach’s newest character, “Tuco- The Ugly.” Tuco is an interesting character. He is funny (“When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.”). He is vengeful (“But if you miss, you had better miss very well. Whoever double-crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about Tuco. Nothing!”). He is tragic (“You became a priest because you were too much of a coward to do what I do.”) and most importantly, he is trigger-smart to outwit any of his enemies (“There are two kinds of spurs, my friend. Those that come in by the door; those that come in by the window.”).

Lee Van Cleef portrayed the upright Colonel Douglas Mortimer in the earlier edition. He returns in this movie as the devil reincarnated himself. As “The Bad,” it is chilling how easily his smile goes from reassuring in For a Few Dollars More and shifts to sheer menace and malevolence in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Dollars Trilogy is a set of masterpieces that come together as loosely connected, wholesome, stylish, and fun stories.

One of life’s joys is watching movies that imagine and create a new universe. We can inhabit it for a few hours. Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name movies are three movies that I return to for the sheer joy of consumption.