1) The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
In a time before Hollywood viewed franchises as an inevitability, Sergio Leone made a rare trilogy of action-westerns. And the one that completed the set is widely viewed as the best of the lot.
A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More were smart but obviously low-budgeted movies, relying on Leone’s unparalleled way with the camera, his trademark mythical storytelling and the tight-lipped charisma of his star, Clint Eastwood, the trilogy’s gunslinging hero, the Man with No Name.
For The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Leone took all the elements that made previous Man with No Name movies great and added an epic sweep. The film tells the story of three hired guns searching for a stash of gold against the backdrop of the Civil War, three killers appearing relatively sane as the world around them appears to go completely off the rails. It’s not quite Leone’s best western – Once Upon a Time in the West just tops it – but it comes damn close.