Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy

When Rome-born director Sergio Leone made A Fistful of Dollars, he managed to do two seemingly opposite things. The film was an unofficial remake of Kurosawa’s successful samurai picture Yojimbo, so it was accused of copying and plagiarism, yet it was also so novel that it also launched a completely new genre: the spaghetti western.

Dollars Trilogy

The Italian director’s works were more operatic, intense, and gritty than traditional American westerns, focusing on anti-heroes rather than clearcut good-versus-evil stories. His mastery of widescreen mise-en-scène, inspired partly by Kurosawa’s meticulous visuals, and his collaboration with composer Ennio Morricone elevated familiar stories to new heights, often using music to enhance the stories about characters who speak little.

Clint Eastwood’s protagonist – later marketed as ‘the Man with No Name’ in the U.S. – actually represents three distinct characters across the trilogy comprised of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Each film stands alone but watching them in chro - nological order reveals Leone’s increasingly bold and risk-taking direction.

Of all the features made in the heyday of 20th century Italian and even European cinema, it is perhaps Leone’s Dollars Trilogy that most clearly warrants a big-screen – and big-sound! – viewing, to better immerse the viewer in a world in which nothing is simply black-and-white.

I never thought of making a western even as I was making it. I think that my films are westerns only in their exterior aspects. Within them are some of my truths, which happily, I see, belong to lots of parts of the world. Not just America. If you look closely at all my films, you find in them the same meanings, the same humour, the same point of view, and, also, the same pains.

Sergio Leone