08. The Dollars Trilogy
The Western genre was pretty much dead before Sergio Leone came along and reinvented it. Gone were the days of John Wayne walking around telling folk to get off their horses and drink their milk, looking like he'd shat his pants with that funny little walk he had. No more Cowboys and Indians fighting for control of some land instead Leone's Spaghetti Western's were gritty violent epics where the lines were blurred between who was good and who was bad and the outlaw was the new hero, rather than the Sheriff. The greatest examples of the genre were A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, all starring Clint Eastwood. As The Man With No Name, big Clint wandered from town to town with his half chewed cigar in his mouth and his guns blazing, never so much as cracking a smile and barely having to say a word. In fact the movies consist of seemingly hours and hours and hours of silence as stories unfold with the simple use of closeups on characters eyes. They really are genius. All modern Western's try to replicate this style but the Spaghetti movies were definitely a case of lightening in a bottle and cannot be duplicated. They lack the depth and the characterisation and moreover the genre just isn't relevant to a generation that is so used to wars being fought on foreign lands. Clint Eastwood made his name performing in these movies. And his nameless outlaw will live on forever thanks to this excellent trilogy of work.