The Man with No Name Trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly)

Disc 1: FISTFUL OF DOLLARS Disc 2: FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE Disc 3: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

This was a new kind of Western: cynical, violent, stylish, and austere. The follow-up, For a Few Dollars More, teams Eastwood up in an uneasy alliance with Lee Van Cleef in a tale of revenge, but the masterpiece of the set is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, an epic scramble for buried gold set against the violence of the Civil War. Leone's shot-in-Spain trilogy ushered in a flood of Italian spaghetti Westerns, but none hold a candle to Leone's stylish classics. --Sean Axmaker Sergio Leone's trilogy of operatic spaghetti Westerns with Clint Eastwood made the former TV star into an international sensation as the scraggly, silent Man with No Name, a wandering rogue with a scheming mind and a sense of humor drier than the dusty, wind-scoured desert. In this film good is a relative term as three criminals make a series of tenuous partnerships broken in double-crosses and betrayals in Leone's epic vision of the American southwest as endless deserts and clapboard towns infested with gunmen. With A Fistful of Dollars, a blatant rip-off of Kurosawa's cynical samurai hit Yojimbo, Leone transforms the Western hero into a crafty mercenary. The guns ring out in cartoonish exaggeration, and the music, an eclectic, electric mix of buzzing guitar, human voice, and harmonica by Ennio Morricone, sets the whole thing in a world pitched between myth and modernity. Eastwood's rough face and squinting eyes fill the widescreen frame in massive close-ups while Leone stages action in bold compositions on empty streets and stark landscapes.