How To Watch Clint Eastwood's Dollars Trilogy In Order
If you ever watched Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, you’ll already have a vague idea of Clint Eastwood’s rise in the industry.
Like Rick Dalton (played by DiCaprio), Eastwood was stuck in a rut at the beginning of the 1960s. Working on shows like Rawhide and unable to catch a break in the movies, the Hollywood dream still seemed out of reach. Then an Italian filmmaker named Sergio Leone came along with a role in a western that was going to be shot in Spain, and in a decision that would have been seen as risky at the time, Eastwood agreed to do it, and it changed his life.
That role, of course, was “The Man With No Name” and the movie was A Fistful of Dollars: the first instalment of what would later become known as ‘The Dollars Trilogy’—three antihero classics that were as inspired by the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa as the westerns of John Ford. They also shared less in terms of story than they did in mood, attitude, style and, of course, the now iconic music of Ennio Morricone. Read on to learn more about The Dollars Trilogy and use the guide below to find them on services like Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
A Fistful of Dollars is the first movie in the trilogy and, even 60 years after its release, it still packs a punch. The story sees Eastwood’s Man with No Name (credited here as ‘The Stranger’) arrive in a frontier town where he begins to work two warring families against each other. At first, he’s only in it for the money, but gradually becomes the protector of a boy and his family—confirming his status as a reluctant antihero.
For the script, Leone borrowed so heavily from Kurosawa’s near-identical story for Yojimbo that the Japanese filmmaker would eventually sue for compensation. Regardless, the movie became endlessly influential—you can still find its genetic code in as wide-ranging stories as The Mandalorian and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.
After Fistful of Dollars recouped more than 100 times its budget at the box office, Leone and his producers worked fast to capitalise on its success, releasing a sequel, For a Few Dollars More, just one year later. This time, Eastwood’s Man With No Name (credited here as ‘Manco’) enters an unholy alliance with a rival bounty hunter (played by Lee Van Cleef) to catch an even more lethal killer.
Perhaps having learned his lesson with Kurosawa’s lawsuit, For a Few Dollars More doesn’t draw directly from any movie that came before. The basic setup, however, of two antiheroes having to go against their nature and put aside their differences for a common goal, has similarly influenced endless movies—think Nic Cage and Sean Connery in The Rock, Chow Yun-fat and Donny Lee in The Killer, or Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in 48 Hrs.
Though similarly fast-tracked through production to capitalise on the demand, Leone broadened the canvas and upped the stakes with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and ended up creating one of the best movies ever made. The story follows the three archetypes of its title—a trio of men whose hunt for a stash of Confederate gold sends them hurtling towards an inevitable and violent showdown.
The first two films in Eastwood and Leone’s trilogy were nothing if not influential, but this final collaboration took the biscuit. If you’re a fan of Tarantino—The Hateful Eight, naturally, but even the standoff at the end of Reservoir Dogs carries this movie’s DNA—you’ll feel right at home.
