The "Dollars Trilogy" (also known as "The Man with No Name Trilogy" and "A Fistful of Movies") is a trilogy of Spaghetti Western films by Sergio Leone. It consists of, in order of production:
They are tied together by the following things:
- Directed and co-written by Sergio Leone.
- A soundtrack composed by Ennio Morricone.
- Being Westerns filmed far from America — in Spain, since it has more Wild West-type terrain than Leone's native Italy does.
- The main protagonists consistently are anti-heroes at best, either bounty hunters or opportunistic drifters/outlaws.
- Clint Eastwood is in all of them, popularly referred to as the Man With No Name. Although he is referred to by a different name in each film ("Joe", "Manco", and "Blondie" respectively), all of them are nicknames given to him by another character, and it's unclear whether he is even supposed to be the same character, at least until he picks up the poncho he wears in the other two films towards the end of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. He had to squint due to the brightness of the Spanish desert that was used as film set, and it ended up a trope.
- It also features
Leone's regular cast members consisting of the likes of Aldo Sambrell, Benito Stefanelli, Lorenzo Robeldo and Mario Brega, and both Lee Van Cleef and Gian Maria Volonte appear in two films. Additionally, it was dubbed in its entirety at Titra Studios in New York, with the exception of scenes added back into The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in 2003 which were dubbed at Intersound in Los Angeles. - It spawned a series of five tie-in novels: A Coffin Full of Dollars, A Dollar to Die For, The Million Dollar Bloodhunt, Blood For a Dirty Dollar and The Devil's Dollar Sign, as well as Novelizations of the films themselves.
- Dynamite Entertainment published a comic series called The Man with No Name starting in 2008, which was set immediately after the third film. It lasted for eleven issues before the series was replaced by The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which lasted eight issues.
The "Dollars Trilogy" is simultaneously a Thematic Series (there are no story connections at all and only some cursory Continuity Nod moments) and a Deconstructor Fleet, depicting the Wild West as a grim Crapsack World. Together, they tell how the West was tamed, and where Men with No Name fit in all of that.
This series ended Black-and-White Morality in later Westerns. It also made everyone who made Westerns after these films want to cast Clint Eastwood, not to mention the Fountain of Expies his image generated.
This franchise provides examples of the following tropes:
- Crapsack World: The trilogy portrays the Wild West as a grim and violent place where innocents are constantly terrorised and killed by violent criminals, with the closest thing to a hero being an unscrupulous Bounty Hunter.
- Deconstructor Fleet: The trilogy completely deconstructs many of the tropes present in Westerns such as Black-and-White Morality and the idea of the Wild West being an adventurous and more simple time to live.
- The Expy With No Name: Trope Maker with the main character.
- Prequel: Surprisingly both the second and third films are set before A Fistful of Dollars, which has a gravestone that establishes the film takes place during or after 1873. For a Few Dollars More has a newspaper dated 1872 and at one point the Man with No Name's hat is shot at creating holes that can be seen in the first film, though there's still enough ambiguity to view it as a sequel, while The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is firmly set during the American Civil War with gravestones dated 1864.
- Spaghetti Western: While not the first Italian Westerns, these films are the Trope Codifier of the genre and are some of the most famous Westerns of all time.
- Thematic Series: Downplayed. There are no direct story connections between entries, mainly because Leone never intended for this to be a trilogy. However the character played by Clint Eastwood is strongly implied to be the same person being given different nicknames in each movie and there are some minor references that link the instalments to each other, so the series is now seen as telling the adventures of the Man with No Name.
