Attention, masterpiece! Rediscovering Sergio Leone's Trilogy of Dollars

Sergio Leone's genius lies in getting the best out of Clint Eastwood, his animality, his charisma.

bvoltaire

By Nicolas Gauthier

October 4, 2026

Good news: when it comes to militant cinephilia, physical media are resisting, according to Les Années Laser, a monthly magazine for lovers of beautiful sounds, beautiful images and great films. A revival that is all the more lively as the platforms offer only an increasingly limited choice, between turnips that have failed in theaters and the most debilitating TV series. This means that the reissue of Sergio Leone's "Trilogy of Dollars" is an event. Admittedly, these three films had been available for a long time. But now they are being ripped off with fresh fees, at the publisher ESC. And it is perhaps an opportunity to look back at the career of this giant of the seventh art whose life was told in this definitive work that is Sergio Leone, something to do with death, by the English academic Christopher Frayling, a veritable sum of nearly eight hundred pages. For completionists of the subject, reading the works of Noël Simsolo, a French journalist who became a close friend of the maestro, we can only recommend Conversations with Sergio Leone.

Disgusted with ideologies from a very young age...

But let's get back to our man, the only son of a family of artists. His father, Vincenzo Leone, directed the first Italian western, The Indian Vampire, in 1913. According to the confessions made by little Sergio to Christopher Frayling, he will be one of Benito Mussolini's first blackshirts. But as his section leader was getting away with the treasurer's wife (and the cash register that went with it), he judged that this nascent fascism was not very serious. Hence his membership of the Communist Party. Enough to disgust the young Sergio forever with the ideologies of the time. In the years that followed, he was nevertheless fascinated by America and, above all, by its cinema. The behaviour of the liberating troops in Italy during the Sicily landings in 1943 and its procession of abuses against the civilian population, nevertheless left a bitter taste in his mouth; this was to be the case for many of his future fellow filmmakers, including Sergio Sollima, who was nevertheless an anti-fascist resistance fighter and was particularly skeptical about the period, as recalled in his memoirs, Cinema with a Knife.

Filming reality rather than legend...

Sergio Leone’s fundamental pessimism is reinforced, if it were still needed. This was evident early in these three westerns, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), And for a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). In John Ford’s The Man Who Killed Liberty Valencia (1962), there is this sentence that has since gone down in history: “We are in the West, here. When the legend exceeds reality, the legend is published. Our man will do exactly the opposite, as he had done before. Thus, in The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), his first signed film (The Last Days of Pompeii, shot two years earlier, remaining anonymous), he delivers a raw reality of the Roman Empire, just as violent as his contemporary rivals.

The West he depicts in his first opus, A Fistful of Dollars, is imbued with the same lucidity. Everything is dirty and cynical; in other words, a portrait of America far from the fantasies of the American Way of Life, which was very much in vogue at the time, due to the Marshall Plan. And for a few dollars more, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly are in the same vein. Logical. After all, isn’t the dollar the unsurpassable model of this New World endorsed by God himself? We are not likely to make a mistake: it is written on their tickets.

“Spaghetti Western”? An insult made in the USA…

It was during this period that many American film critics gave this new genre the ugly nickname of "spaghetti western", when it would have been much more elegant to evoke the "European western". But the mirror that the filmmakers of the Old World reflect back to them is not particularly flattering; This probably explains it. Moreover, are they really "westerns"? Nothing is less certain. A Fistful of Dollars is directly inspired by Carlo Goldoni's play, Harlequin, Servant of Two Masters, already adapted for the big screen by the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa in his Yojimbo (1961). Leone was accused of plagiarism for copying the latter (which was quickly settled amicably); but it is above all the descendants of Goldoni who should have put him on trial.

It doesn't matter, because the mythology is already there. Thanks to Clint Eastwood, then a clean supporting role for Rawhide, a television series, which then became legendary. He is the "man with no name", "the man in the poncho". Sergio Leone's genius lies in getting the best out of Clint Eastwood, his animality, his charisma. The less dialogue it has, the better it is. The sequel, And for a Few Dollars More, relaunches the career of American actor Lee Van Cleef, an equally mineral actor. Sergio Leone highlights bounty hunters, those who kill for money, figures who have been forgotten in American westerns until now, because they are morally not very presentable. And, above all, there is the music of Ennio Morricone, an actress in her own right, who gives an operatic look to the director's images.

The American Civil War as seen by Sergio Leone...

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the final part, sees the arrival of a third sidekick, Eli Wallach, playing a truculent Mexican bandit. Unlike his two partners, Wallach comes from the Actors Studio. Suffice to say that he makes crates and cans, watching himself play rather than playing for the spectators to come. Here again, the motivations of the three protagonists are not noble, ready to do anything to get their hands on a treasure in the middle of the Civil War. We are far from John Wayne. Similarly, the American Civil War is shown in its ugliest light, with camps where Southern soldiers are kept. Mistreatment was a daily occurrence for the prisoners, some of whom were even forced to play the violin so that the cries of their tortured comrades could not be heard too much. Once again, the American critics did not appreciate it.

And yet, what a film! There will be no fourth part. Clint Eastwood felt that he had covered the whole issue, remarking, with his usual humor: "In the first one, I was alone. In the second, there are two of us. Here, there are three of us. At this rate, in the next one, I'll have all the American cavalry with me! For his part, Sergio Leone intended to put an end to the western. However, he directed two others, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Once Upon a Time in the Revolution (1971), which were just as disenchanted. His last opus, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), was in the same vein.

Unsurprisingly, it was more popular in Europe than in the USA. His filmography is thin, but nothing but masterpieces. Few of his colleagues have such a track record.