But the final showdown between the Man with No Name and Ramone sets up so many others – in this series and other media.ģ. Production value is not always so good – night scenes are filmed during the day and then dimmed, one of the more disappointing results of a lower budget. Ennio Morricone’s score and Leone’s style of close-ups have since become iconic, the foundations of Leone’s films that build up to grand proportions as the series progresses. It’s up to Eastwood’s character to pit the two gangs against each other (earning a fistful of dollars in the process).

Why? Mainly because it kept on getting better from there.īased on Akira Kurosawa’s samurai film Yojimbo, (which was in turn based on Dashiell Hammett’s detective novel Red Harvest), the film introduces Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name, a mysterious outlaw who rides into a town run by two rival gangs. The outstanding quality of Sergio Leone’s Westerns means that one film has to be ranked last, and that film is the one that started the all. A Fistful of Dollars (1964, Dollars #1)ĭon’t get me wrong, A Fistful of Dollars is an all-around classic and deserves all the praise it receives. (Note: I’m not ranking Leone’s final Western, Duck, You Sucker, mainly because it’s not on Netflix right now. But how do these films stack up against each other? Which film, of the four investigated, top the list? Hence the “Dollars Trilogy.”įeaturing iconic close-ups and the musical magic of Italian composer Ennio Morricone, Leone’s Westerns left a profound impression on American pop culture.

Sergio Leone’s films shifted the Western from a clear-cut world of heroes and villains to stories of moral ambiguity, often featuring episodic quests that let the characters traipse around the mythic Wild West, most often searching for money.

The king of the “spaghetti Western” is often cited as Sergio Leone, the director behind the “Dollars Trilogy” featuring Clint Eastwood as the “Man with No Name” and the classic Once Upon the Time in the West. There are some great Western movies out there, and some of the greatest were made by Italian directors. This summer’s release of Seth MacFarlane’s Western spoof A Million Ways to Die in the West may be just another attempt to send up the oft-forgotten movie genre in the tradition of Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, but the truth is that Westerns have been supplanted since 1992’s Unforgiven by the wave of comic book movies that have brought in young audiences.

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