While Clint Eastwood has always been prominently featured on Prime Video, the selection of his films on the streaming service has never been as extensive as one would expect for a star with his virtually unmatched legacy. This was especially evident on the streaming service with the extended absence of the classic Spaghetti Western films A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, collectively known as the Dollars Trilogy film series, which catapulted Eastwood to international stardom and revolutionized the Western genre.
While the architect of the series, director Sergio Leone, didn’t initially intend for the first installment, A Fistful of Dollars, to be the beginning of a trilogy, the consistent appearance and tone that Eastwood, as Leone’s The Man With No Name antihero protagonist, maintains throughout the series gave the series the aura and reputation of being a spiritual trilogy.
With the recent addition of the Dollars Trilogy films on Prime Video, viewers can fully appreciate the emergence of Eastwood’s legendary screen persona and the incredible foresight that Leone demonstrated in organizing the films in ascending order of excitement, culminating in Eastwood and Leone’s epic masterpiece.
A Fistful of Dollars Defined Clint Eastwood’s Screen Persona
With the first installment in the Dollars Trilogy film series, A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone enabled Clint Eastwood, who first gained fame as the star of the Western television series Rawhide, to transcend television stardom by providing him with a persona, The Man With No Name, which is rooted in his incomparable ability to communicate volumes through a bare minimum of dialogue or sometimes sheer silence.
A Fistful of Dollars, an unofficial remake of the 1961 Akira Kurosawa samurai film Yojimbo, opens with The Man With No Name, also known as Joe, arriving in the Mexican-United States border town of San Miguel. There, he quickly becomes entangled in a feud between two rival smuggling families while also eying a shipment of gold that passes through the town.
As an opening film within a series, A Fistful of Dollars, which had a production cost of approximately $200,000, is highlighted by Eastwood’s charismatic, distinctive presence and Leone’s meticulous, stylish direction, which merge with Ennio Morricone’s haunting, whistling musical score to achieve an operatic effect.
Moreover, Eastwood and Leone redefined the Western genre with A Fistful of Dollars by presenting The Man With No Name as an ambiguous antihero who, much like James Bond, is capable of dispensing justice and vengeance with relentless fury and violence while also seemingly being able to emerge from any dangerous situation unscathed, as if he’s a ghost.
For a Few Dollars More Turned Up the Heat
With the second installment in the Dollars Trilogy series, For a Few Dollars More, Sergio Leone altered the series dynamic by pairing Clint Eastwood with scene-stealing Spaghetti Western star Lee Van Cleef, who plays Colonel Douglas Mortimer, a former Confederate Army Colonel turned bounty hunter who joins forces with Eastwood’s The Man With No Name, who is referred to as Manco, to find El Indio, a sadistic Mexican bandit with whom Mortimer has a personal connection.
In one of the trilogy’s most intense scenes, Indio, after being freed from prison, visits the bounty hunter who previously caught Indio and challenges the man to a duel after killing the man’s child and wife. To set the stage for this confrontation, Indio produces a musical pocket watch, which he plays whenever he’s engaged in a duel. When the music stops, it’s time to shoot.
For a Few Dollars More transcends its fairly standard revenge plot through the engaging chemistry between Eastwood and Van Cleef, the introduction of a magnificently despicable villain, and Leone’s exquisite direction, particularly in terms of Leone’s masterful trademark use of extreme close-up shots. Moreover, as For a Few DollarsMore represents a clear progression from A Fistful of Dollars in terms of increased drama, plot complexity, and scale, For a Few Dollars More serves to herald an epic conclusion to the trilogy.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Is One of the Greatest Threequels and Westerns Ever Made
The concluding film in the Dollars Trilogy series, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, is set amid the American Civil War. The film opens with Clint Eastwood’s The Man With No Name, referred to as Blondie in the film, being partnered with Mexican bandit Tuco, played by Eli Wallach, in a con game in which Blondie collects bounties on Tuco, who is then scheduled to be hanged before being rescued by Blondie.
While the relationship between Blonde and Tuco might have sustained a film of the relatively modest dimensions of A Fistful of Dollars, the nearly three-hour-long The Good, The Bad and the Ugly is populated by a gallery of interesting characters and settings. Blondie and Tuco are joined in the film by Angel Eyes, a mercenary who, as played by Lee Van Cleef, is after a cache of confederate gold, which is supposedly buried in an unmarked grave within a vast cemetery in Spain. Blondie knows the name on the tombstone, while Tuco knows the name of the cemetery. This sets the stage for the most iconic standoff scene in the history of cinema.
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, which is one of the greatest and most influential films in history, established Clint Eastwood’s The Man With No Name as a perfectly conceptualized and realized screen hero and Sergio Leone as a director of towering ambition and vision. Through this historical collaboration, Eastwood and Leone created mythic identities for themselves in the course of pioneering and popularizing the Spaghetti Western genre. Stream the Dollars Trilogy on Prime Video.