The Dollars Trilogy (“A Fistful of Dollars” 1964, “For a Few Dollars More” 1965, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” 1966)

 

First of all, this trio of films by Sergio Leone, starring Clint Eastwood, is not a true trilogy. It is more of a cycle. Eastwood does not exactly play the same character in each film (nor does Lee Van Cleef, who co-stars in the last 2 films). Clint does appear in each film as a laconic, poncho-wearing gunfighter, whose name we are never sure of, such that he has come to be referred to in these films as “The Man With no Name.”

In “A Fistful of Dollars,” Eastwood's character, whom the locals end up calling “Joe,” rides into a town divided between 2 families. The Rojos and the Baxters are at war, with the townsfolk trapped in the middle. Joe hires on with one family, then the other, partly to help out the locals, but mostly to make himself a fistful of dollars.

The movie is a re-imagining of the samurai film “Yojimbo”, by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. It was not the first or the last time that a Kurosawa film was made into a western. 1960's “The Magnificent Seven” was based on “The Seven Samurai,” and 1964's “The Outrage” is a remake of “Rashomon.”

Clint Eastwood was not Sergio Leone's first choice for Joe. The role was offered to a number of famous American actors, including Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson. Eastwood was known for his TV role on “Rawhide,” but he was not a movie star. He did come cheap, however, and Leone, like all directors of European westerns or so-called “Spaghetti westerns,” was working on a tight budget, reportedly about $200,000. Both Eastwood and the $200K turned out to be good investments. Building on word-of-mouth, the film became a hit in Europe, then in the U.S., earning almost $19 million at the box office and becoming a classic. This is despite mixed reviews at the time.

Those negative reviews were, in some sense, justified. The film does border on self-parody, and it could have easily been titled “A Fistful of Cliches.” The reality, though, is that the whole western genre at that time was already a self-parody. Every character in a cowboy hat had come to be a cliché of one kind or another. Leone's genius was in distilling those cliches down to their essence, removing the white-hats-versus-black-hats moralizing, and elevating the spaghetti western to its own iconic genre. Eastwood's genius was in saying as little as possible. Most actors are hungry for as many lines in a script as they can get, but Eastwood understood that the less his character talked, the more mysterious and cool he seemed. 

 

 

Hot off the success of “A Fistful of Dollars,” Leone convinced Eastwood to join him for a followup the next year. Not exactly a sequel, “For a Few Dollars More” depicts Eastwood as a bounty hunter. His character is called “Manco,” which is Spanish for “one-armed” or “one-handed,” which may be a reference to his character's preference for a handgun over a rifle. Manco crosses paths with another bounty hunter, Colonel Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), who uses an interesting variety of weapons to ply his trade, including a shoulder brace that he can clamp to his pistol for better accuracy. The two find themselves both pursuing an outlaw named El Indio (Gian Maria Volonte), and they reluctantly join forces.

Eastwood is as cool as ever, smoking his little cigars and keeping his mouth shut, and Lee Van Cleef doubles the film's cool quotient. Gian Maria Volonte plays El Indio with sweaty brilliance, his maniacal laughter and cold stare punctuating moments of cruelty or cunning. 

 

 

“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” is the third film in the cycle, but it is set during the American Civil War, predating the other 2 films. Eastwood's character this time around is referred to as “Blondie,” a drifter who teams up with an outlaw named Tuco (Eli Wallach). The two run a scheme where Blondie turns Tuco in to the law for a reward, then frees him by shooting the rope just as he is about to be hanged. They make good money off the scheme for a while, but eventually have a falling out. Meanwhile, a hired killer nicknamed “Angel Eyes” (Lee Van Cleef) becomes aware of a cache of Confederate gold, and begins searching for the rebel soldier who knows where it is buried. Eventually Blondie, Tuco, and Angel Eyes all wind up hunting for the gold and gunning for each other.

Where Lee Van Cleef played a heroic character in “For a Few Dollars More,” his Angel Eyes is bad to the bone, “the Bad” from the title. There is nothing wrong with Eli Wallach's looks, but he is “the Ugly”. He provides the comic relief for the film, but he doesn't let his character slide into sheer buffoonery. Tuco can be cunning and resourceful when needed, and he is the only one of the three whose past we learn about, when he visits his brother, who is a monk. Eastwood sticks with what works: smoking his cigars, looking cool, and saying as little as possible. As he described his approach to the character,

“I wanted to play it with an economy of words and create this whole feeling through attitude and movement. ... I felt the less he said, the stronger he became and the more he grew in the imagination of the audience.”

Each of the films in this cycle is a classic, but “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” is probably the first among equals, and it is the most indispensable film of the trilogy. A true classic, the film is a bit long, but worth every minute. Besides being a cool story, the movie makes some statements about the American Civil War, and, really, war in general. It also features the definitive Mexican standoff, with the 3 main characters facing off for a sweaty eternity before drawing their guns, a slow dance to Ennio Morricone's haunting score.

And that brings us to the music. More iconic than the gunfights, the cigars, or any of it is Morricone's classic music, punctuated by whistling, gunshots, and whip cracks. He did the scores for all three of these films. His creative use of sound effects, electric guitar, and voice was partly due to budgetary constraints. He didn't have access to the kind of large orchestra that was traditionally used for a western movie score. Necessity breeds invention, as they say, and Morricone's music has come to be more widely respected than any of those swelling orchestral numbers.

All of it comes together to create one classic series of westerns. “For a Few Dollars More” is the least known of the trilogy, but it is just as much a classic as the other two films, and its title could serve as a summary for all three. Each of these films is a story about the lengths men will go to, the killing and double-crossing, for a few dollars more.

4 stars out of 5 for “A Fistful of Dollars” and “For a Few Dollars More”

5 stars for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (even if it does lack an Oxford comma)