Top 10 Best Trilogies: The Dollar movies
Feature by Jack Foley
2) Name: A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Gian Maria Volonte, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach, Marianne Koch, Klaus Kinski
Why so great?: One of the earliest movie trilogies, it remains defiantly one of the best. Sergio Leone’s Dollars movies transformed the Western genre and made a name of Clint Eastwood. What’s more, they began strong and got progressively better. Admirers include Quentin Tarantino, who once described The Good, The Bad & The Ugly as “the best directed film of all time”. The movies were notable for featuring stylized violence, anti-hero lead characters and extreme close-ups (sometimes featuring ugly faces). In Eastwood’s poncho-wearing, cigar chewing Man With No Name, there was also a hero who spoke very few words and preferred to let his (sometimes dubious) action do the talking. The spaghetti westerns continue to inspire filmmakers – and rightly so.
Key scenes: “I don’t think it’s nice, you laughin’” and “my mistake, four coffins” (A Fistful of Dollars); El Indio and Col Douglas Mortimer face off (For A Few Dollars More); the three-way gunfight at the cemetery (The Good, The Bad & The Ugly); the various exchanges between Mortimer and Monco (Eastwood) in For A Few Dollars More; The Civil War scenes (The Good, The Bad & The Ugly).
Soundbite review: “Art it is, summoned out of the imagination of Leone and painted on the wide screen so vividly that we forget what marginal productions these films were.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
And the best trilogy of all time? The Bourne movies