Headscratchers / Dollars Trilogy

• Why the heck does an intelligent and cunning man like Blondie/Joe/Manco have such trouble holding onto the ludicrous windfalls of cash he repeatedly earns, and build a happy life with it? Now, according to Clint Eastwood, the old-killer Bill Munny from Unforgiven is The Man With No Name who has settled down to a life of peace. The fact that Blondie/Joe/Manco ended up a lowly dirty-poor pig-farmer means that he has blown through every coin from the 100,000 Gold Pieces of Confederate Dollars he and Tuco won in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and the $29 Thousand Dollars for the lives of Indigo's Gang that Colonel Mortimer let him have every cent of in For a Few Dollars More. Surely a man a smart as "Bill Munny" would already have invested in big city canning business the very next day after killing Angel Eyes in Sad Hill Cemetery, and afford doctors who could have saved his wife's life (not to mention give his children a proper education). Instead, he wastes every penny of his hard won blood-money, leaving his wife dead and his children in poverty. How does that make any sense considering how cunning/smart/far-sighted Munny has shown himself to be in The Dollars Trilogy?
  • Or perhaps,as Leone intended, the three films are not connected beyond the general western tropes and character archtypes, and Blondie/Joe/Manco are not the same person. Also, you are taking Eastwood's words a bit too literally. Munny is not The Man With No Name, as in the movie he *does* have a name, a name that was infamous and well known. He meant that Munny was the inevitable end to a character like TMWNN, spending his youth as a carefree gunslinger, only to become a bitter old man haunted by his violent past and unable to live a normal life.
  • Or in a variation, given the theme in Unforgiven about how the squalid realities of the west tended to become distorted and mythologised by dime store fiction, we are perhaps meant to view The Man With No Name as the mythic figure who grew out at least some of the considerably grubbier real exploits of William Munny, and his stories as romanticised versions of things that actually happened to Munny in some way. For example, Munny drifts into a border town, spends a week or so working as a hired gun for a local corrupt businessman or outlaw, then kills him after being shortchanged on the fee becomes "Joe" cleverly manipulating two gangs into destroying each other in order to bring justice to the town. "Blondie" finds a fortune in Confederate gold after an epic journey through battlefields and a three-way confrontation; Munny digs up a few hundred dollars hidden in a grave after a robbery, then shoots his two accomplices in the back rather than split it. And so on.
  • It is worth remembering both that (a) Eastwood's claim about Munny being The Man is ultimately Word of Dante more than anything else (unless Sergio Leone confirmed that Munny was the Man With No Name we're under no obligation to accept it as such, and even then we don't have to thanks to Death of the Author), and has to be taken with that in mind, and (b) the Dollars films are a Thematic Series, not a cohesive linked narrative. They're not tied together by a interconnected plot wherein everything clearly follows on from everything else like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they're linked by the presence of Eastwood as The Man with No Name and some vaguely similar narrative and thematic devices. But the very fact that he has no name makes him ambiguous; is he the same man in all three films? Are we watching his actual adventures or a mythic recounting of his adventures? Did any of this happen? In short; there is just as much reason to suppose that Joe/Manco/Blondie/Munny are completely different people as they are the same man, meaning that all of them could have had very different fates once their respective films were completed.