Clint Eastwood's Dollars trilogy is one of the few trilogies where every movie is a classic. Westerns weren't in great shape by the time the 1960s arrived. Younger audiences were drawn to more contemporary stories, while the genre had been overexposed thanks to multiple TV shows like Gunsmoke and Rawhide .
Clint Eastwood himself spent a productive 8 years on the latter show, though his goody two-shoes character left him yearning to play something darker. While he couldn't have known it at the time, his involvement with Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy would not only reinvent the ailing Western genre, it would propel him to movie icon status.
The first entry A Fistful of Dollars ripped off Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo , and despite its low budget, it was so fresh and creative

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