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The Dollar Trilogy

1964’s Fistful of Dollars, 1965’s For A Few Dollars More, and 1966’s The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.

The Western had fallen on hard times in the 60’s as the counter-cultural wave made mincemeat of Americana. Nobody bought it. The Italians, for some reason, after having been morally and economically demolished in the aftermath o WWII, thought this was just the right time to reinvent one of the few genuinely American genres, and gave birth to what we now call the Spaghetti Westerns.


There are a lot of these spaghetti westerns, and some of them boast fantastic titles (If You Meet Sartana Pray for Death; Django, Kill…If You Live, Shoot!; Go Kill Everybody and Come Back Alone), but the greatest of them are the ones made by Sergio Leone in the mid-60, the trilogy that made Clint Eastwood a star and revealed the genius of Ennio Morricone.


josey wales

Clint  Eastwood in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

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Well, are you gonna draw or what?

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is an engrossing actioner shot through with a volatile mix of myth and realism. Clint Eastwood returns as the "Man With No Name," this time teaming with two gunslingers (Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef) to pursue a cache of $200,000 and letting no one, not even warring factions in a civil war, stand in their way. From sun-drenched panoramas to bold,hard close-ups, exceptional camera work captures the beauty and cruelty of the barren landscape and the hardened characters who stride unwaveringly through it. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly shatters the western mold in true Clint Eastwood style.