The Dollars Trilogy chronology can be a bit confusing, but the loose connection between the three movies adds to the enjoyment of watching them. Starting with 1964's A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone helped to popularize the Spaghetti Western film movement that revitalized the genre. A Fistful of Dollars also launched the movie career of then-TV star Clint Eastwood. Following A Fistful of Dollars, Leone directed the loose sequel, 1965's For a Few Dollars More. This was followed by a third Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western, 1966's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Leone remains influential today with Star Wars taking inspiration from Eastwood's Western hero while filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino have expressed their love of Leone's work. According to the filmmaker, his films were not meant to spark a cinematic revolution, yet they inspired 200 additional Spaghetti Westerns. The three movies of the Dollars trilogy, also known as the Man with No Name trilogy, were popular and influential, largely because of Leone's masterful direction. Despite the iconic nature, there are still many who wonder how movies of the Dollars Trilogy are connected.

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What The Dollars Trilogy Is

The Unplanned Trilogy Was A Boost To The Western Genre

The Dollars Trilogy is the unofficial, overarching name assigned to Leone's trio of films. While A Fistful of Dollars was an instant smash hit overseas, American audiences had largely grown tired of the Western genre. Though there was the occasional standout production – see John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in 1962, John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven in 1960, or Howard Hawk's Rio Bravo in 1959 – most of the Western films of Hollywood in the late 1950s and early 1960s were products seen as self-parody.

Critics, filmmakers, and big box office names had more or less distanced themselves from the genre, with even Western icon John Wayne in a career decline. With Leone's films, however, American distributor United Artists sought a strong angle to help boost the release of the pictures in the Americas. They were the first to come up with the notion of The Man with No Name – the mysterious character portrayed and immortalized by Eastwood – and therefore, the notion of corralling these films as a trilogy.

The marketing campaign was based around the fact that Clint Eastwood's character in all three films dressed and acted similarly. In reality, much of the character's outfit, including the iconic poncho and sheepskin vest, were brought overseas by Eastwood as part of his own wardrobe from the set of Rawhide.

The Best Order To Watch The Dollars Trilogy

Start With The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966)
For a Few Dollars More (1965)
A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

While Leone never intended his three Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Westerns to be a trilogy, there are events in the movies that establish a timeline. The unofficial order for Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy is The Good, The Bad and The Ugly at the forefront, acting as a prequel to For a Few Dollars More, and then finishing with A Fistful of Dollars. Remarkably, despite the director's intentions, or lack thereof, the three films do not contain any major continuity errors when viewed as a continuous series.

Given its expansive reliance and commentary on the American Civil War, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is chronologically the earliest movie, despite being produced last. Leone implemented the infamous American conflict into his film in order to deliver some stark commentary against the brutality of war, primarily using Eastwood's character. In of events, Blondie slowly picks up the pieces of his iconic outfit throughout before finally donning the whole get-up in the end.

For a Few Dollars More takes place after The Good, the Bad and the Ugly not only because Colonel Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), the vengeful bounty hunter, is a veteran of the Civil War, but also because a newspaper can be seen in the film containing the year 1872. The only factor that puts For a Few Dollars More before A Fistful of Dollars, however, is that Manco and Mortimer engage in a bravado shooting contest where the target is the Man with No Name's hat. The holes from that squabble can be seen in A Fistful of Dollars.

Where To Watch The Dollars Trilogy Online

All Movies Are Available To Stream, Rent Or Buy

While all three of the movies in the Dollars trilogy are available to rent, there is thankfully also a streaming option that allows fans to watch the entire trilogy in one place. Fistful of Dollars, Few a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly are all currently available to stream on Prime Video.

Inconsistencies In The Dollars Trilogy

Small Continuity Issues Don't Take Away From The Trilogy's Impact

While the Dollars Trilogy connects in interesting ways, there are a few inconsistencies that make sense as the three movies were not initially viewed as a trilogy. Most prominently, while United Artists' campaign strategy revolved around branding Clint Eastwood's character as The Man with No Name, he has a different nickname in each: in A Fistful of Dollars, he is referred to as Joe; in For A Few Dollars More, he's called Manco; and in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, his name is Blondie.

To be fair, all three of these names, especially the latter, are assigned to the character by other figures in Leone's Wild West. Another issue is that actors appear in different roles in the Dollars Trilogy. For instance, Lee Van Cleef, who played Colonel Mortimer in For a Few Dollars More, also played Angel Eyes (aka "The Bad") in The Good, the Bad and The Ugly.

Though Mortimer survived the events of the previous production, his devilish character arc would be nonsensical in the latter, especially if The Good, the Bad and the Ugly took place prior to For a Few Dollars More. Also, Italian actor Gian Maria Volontè played the central antagonist in both A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. Ultimately, since the actors are playing distinct characters in the different movies, the recasting doesn't undermine the Dollars Trilogy in a major way.

Which Is The Best Dollars Movie?

Each Movie Is Highly Regarded In The Western Genre

With the Dollars Trilogy chronology worked out, there is also a debate over which is the best movie of the three. While all of the films are highly acclaimed, the final movie released in the trilogy, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, is generally regarded as the best. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and ranks in the top 150 of They Shoot Pictures' list of the greatest movies of all time, as voted on by film experts. There's a good reason for these accolades.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly represents the maturation of the style that Leone was developing throughout the earlier two "Dollars" movies, as well as Eastwood's most fully realized version of The Man with No Name. It also features amazing ing performances from Lee van Cleef and Eli Wallach as the other two parts of the title triad. At nearly three hours in length, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a stylized epic and one of the best Western movies ever made.

Why Are They Called Spaghetti Westerns?

The Spaghetti Western Influenced Continues Today

Notable Spaghetti Westerns Outside The Dollars Trilogy:

Movie	Director
Django (1966)	Sergio Corbucci
The Great Silence (1968)	Sergio Corbucci
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)	Sergio Leone
Death Rides a Horse (1967)	Giulio Petroni

The Dollars Trilogy is the most well-known example of the "Spaghetti Western" trend that continues to inspire movies like Django Unchained. In contrast to bigger-budget American Westerns by the likes of John Ford, these Western movies were typically filmed for low budgets in Italy using European actors, hence the "Spaghetti" name. Actors typically spoke different languages on set and were dubbed over for release in various countries.

While these movies were often seen as cheap knock-offs while they were being released, some spaghetti Western directors like Leone and Sergio Corbucci developed a following for their stylized, postmodern take on a quintessentially American genre. Watching the entire Dollars Trilogy is a great way to see how the Spaghetti Western genre developed throughout its heyday in the 1960s.

The Dollars Trilogy Is A Culturally Significant Western Series

The Trilogy Reshaped What The Western Genre Could Be

While each of the Dollars movies can be enjoyed on their own, together they helped change the landscape of Western movies and are still looked back on as some of the great masterpieces of the genre. Sergio Leone came with his bold vision of Westerns, as American productions were starting to go out of style. There was a time when Westerns were the biggest and most sure-fire draw in Hollywood, with the likes of John Wayne becoming iconic as the stoic hero taking down the bad guys.

However, as America entered the 1960s, these stories began to seem outdated and old-fashioned. There was a growing desire to see something more challenging in cinemas following a safer period of filmmaking in the 1950s. The Dollars Trilogy was a direct answer to that, whether it was planned or just lucky happenstance. The violence was more brutal, the hero was morally gray, and the filmmaking had a unique vision that did not conform to what Westerns looked like in the past.

Quentin Tarantino spoke about how the Dollars Trilogy managed to do something that few movie trilogies ever did, which is to consistently get better.

The result of these movies' success helped to pave the way for a new era of Westerns with the Revisionist Western movement. However, just as Hollywood found success in drawing inspiration from Hong Kong in the 1990s era of action movies, they could never quite replicate the excitement and style of the Italian director's take on the genre, specifically, the instantly recognizable work of Leone.

60 years after the trilogy began, it is still being talked about as one of the greatest movie trilogies of all time. In a recent episode of Club Random with Bill Maher, Quentin Tarantino spoke about how the Dollars Trilogy managed to do something that few movie trilogies ever did, which is to consistently get better:

"It does what no other trilogy has ever been quite able to do. The first movie is terrific, but the second movie is so great and takes the whole idea to such a bigger canvas that it obliterates the first one. And then the third one does the same thing to the second one, and that’s kind of what never happens. You'll see this big jump from the first to the second and they don’t really land the third one."