Formal Film Study: The Dollars Trilogy

I remember buying my dad the Dollars Trilogy when I was much younger for his birthday, and at the time, it did not really interest me because Western movies were just a weird genre that my dad would watch.  As I got older though,  I began to enjoy the genre more and more with movies like True Grit and My Name is Nobody.  So when I was given this assignment, the first thought I had was to go back to where the Spaghetti Western started.  The Spaghetti Western start with the three Sergio Leone films,  A Fistful of Dollars(1964),  A Few Dollars More(1965), and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly(1966).  Their influence can be seen through the rest of the Western genre and it is from this that I came to the conclusion that the modern western was born from these three movies. 

The trilogy was shot with a distinct style in mind from the beginning.  Sergio Leone wanted to do something new with the Western genre because he felt that they began to fall short of what a
Western should be.  He has stated that he felt that, "the American westerns of the mid to late fifties had become stagnant, overly-preachy and not believable"(Leone).  With this in mind we can begin to look at the techniques and styles he used to make a different more believable Western.  With these techniques he reinvented the western genre.  Starting with the characters in the movie, the line between hero and villain is a lot less clear.  Leone uses an anti-hero in all three films where the protagonist is greedy and ruthless just like the villains but also lives and acts by a set of morals that keep the audiences favor with the lead.  For example in The Good, The Bad , and The Ugly we get introduced to the three title characters with their titles next to their still after a character defining action.  For Clint Eastwood who plays The Good, his action is that after he teams up with one of his bounties to collect the money he helps them escape so that they can do the plan again in another town.  After Eastwood cheats his partner and leaves him tied the movie pauses and we are introduced to him as The Good.

This is a drastic change in not only Western movies but the industry as a whole, because even though the noire style anti-hero was now a popular character, they had to yet to go as far as Leone's characters.  Also, the majority of movies were still Frank Capra style family friendly movies with a happy ending and message at the end.  Eastwood confirms this by saying on his end that,"In Rawhide I did get awfully tired of playing the conventional white hat. The hero who kisses old ladies and dogs and was kind to everybody. I decided it was time to be an anti-hero"(Eastwood).  Through the Dollars trilogy the good guys can only be seen as relatively good. 

Leone uses through his directing, techniques that at the time were unthought of.  This is shown within the movies and is used repeatedly for common effect.  For example the use of spacing between characters and buildings were used to give a deeper more paced feel to the movie.  This allowed the director to also use a deep space composition to show more action and depth at once giving the movie a more realistic town feel.  Lastly, now a trademark in the genre, Leone implemented closeup and extreme closeups, not as reaction shots or for dramatic lines which was popular during the time, but for increasing the tension between connected characters. This popularized the Eastwood scowl that was imitated by movies eversince.  Also this allowed the score to become as important as the dialogue and to give its own flavor to the movie.   

Also, common in the Man With No Name trilogy is the story and plot.  In all three movies the main character, Clint Eastwood puts himself in situations where there is a conflict between two  parties and he controls the parties through manipulation to push the movie forward and to gain as much through the two as possible.  He is then caught by one of the two parties and is beaten but not broken, he then escapes his captors and returns for the climax fight scene.  Through the movie there is a lot that pushes the boundaries of American cinema and with the gained popularity of the first movie the second and third take much more risks then the first.  For example in the first movie there is still a lot of killing and shooting but the actors fall certain ways to cover the shots and prevent showing the injuries, but in For a Few Dollars More,  the opening scene shows a man being shot in the head falling back into the camera only to reveal the bleeding bullet hole in his head.  Also, in A Fistful of Dollars, the main character saves a family that is about to separated and killed, but in For a Few Dollars more before the main character enters the city, the villain orders a wife and her 18 month year old baby to be killed off screen.  Lastly, one of the characters in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, breaks into a hotel to find a woman bathing.  These important plot points pushed the envelope as far as American cinema code went and made for a more realistic grittier movie. 

This change of direction for such a popular genre had huge effects on culture.  The main influence on culture is the change in protagonist because for decades after these movies,  Clint Eastwood was the image of a tough guy.  He was a man that other men would strive to be.  This is a change of culture compared to the self described white hat protagonist that ruled before the Dollars Trilogy.  This gave a message that a tough guy or a real man takes what he wants, but not from the innocent bystanders, only the bad that were guilty of exploiting their power.  This message was powerful considering the size of audience. 

In conclusion the Man With No Name trilogy had an impactful influence on not only the Western genre or the movie industry, but on society as a whole.  This can seen through the movies that they influenced and the audience that they reached.  Without the Dollars Trilogy perhaps the Western as we know it may have never came to be.