The Dollar Trilogy1964’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.
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Clint
Eastwood in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
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.
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