 | Directed by the incomparable Sergio Leone, these three movies A Fistful Of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, were among the first so-called "spaghetti westerns" to achieve real commercial success in the US, blasting Clint Eastwood (the iconic "Man With No Name") and Lee Van Cleef (who plays two completely different characters in the latter two movies) to major league stardom.
Unencumbered by the Christian values implicit (if not explicit) in the vast majority of Hollywood westerns prior to this time, the heroes here (the Man With No Name, and also Van Cleef's Colonel Mortimer in For A Few Dollars More) are bounty hunters motivated by the self interested goal of financial reward as much as notions of upholding justice; and are willing and able to be just as ruthless and merciless as the criminals where necessary.
Watched in chronological order (The Good, The Bad And The Ugly FIRST - trust me here), we see the Man With No Name transformed from a cynical, corrupt and conceivably criminal bounty hunter, to a much less cynical, genuinely honourable hero figure, who despite his essential selfishness does show some compassion for innocents caught up in the fighting.
All this, of course, is played out to Ennio Morricone's magnificent operatic scores. Tremendous.
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