The Man with No Name Trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly)
Sergio Leone's trilogy of operatic spaghetti Westerns with Clint Eastwood  made the former TV star into an international sensation as the scraggly, silent Man with  No Name, a wandering rogue with a scheming mind and a sense of humor drier than the  dusty, wind-scoured desert. WithA Fistful of Dollars, a blatant rip-off of  Kurosawa's cynical samurai hitYojimbo, Leone transforms the Western hero into  a crafty mercenary. The follow-up,For a Few Dollars More, teams Eastwood up  in an uneasy alliance with Lee Van Cleef in a tale of revenge, but the masterpiece of the  set isThe Good, the Bad and the Ugly, an epic scramble for buried gold set  against the violence of the Civil War. In this filmgoodis a relative term as three  criminals make a series of tenuous partnerships broken in double-crosses and betrayals in Leone's epic  vision of the American southwest as endless deserts and clapboard towns infested with  gunmen. This was a new kind of Western: cynical, violent, stylish, and austere.  Eastwood's rough face and squinting eyes fill the widescreen frame in massive close-ups  while Leone stages action in bold compositions on empty streets and stark landscapes.  The guns ring out in cartoonish exaggeration, and the music, an eclectic, electric mix of  buzzing guitar, human voice, and harmonica by Ennio Morricone, sets the whole thing in  a world pitched between myth and modernity. Leone's shot-in-Spain trilogy ushered in a  flood of Italian spaghetti Westerns, but none hold a candle to Leone's stylish classics.--Sean Axmaker