Quentin Tarantino names cinema’s only perfect trilogy
Many fans of Quentin Tarantino believe that he has no equal. He is the consummate auteur, a filmmaker whose movies are unmistakably his own. And yet, anyone who has heard the director talk about his work or cinema more broadly will know that his films are steeped in influences from other filmmakers. His movies may bear unique hallmarks, such as dialogue full of non-sequiturs, trunk shot camera angles and bare feet. However, by his own admission, much of what makes Tarantino’s films so galvanising and propulsive comes down to the directors who have inspired him.
One such director is Sergio Leone, the cinematic giant who helped transform westerns into a prestige genre with his trilogy of films starring Clint Eastwood—A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Tarantino’s reverence toward Leone doesn’t stop at a single film or set of techniques. He’s praised the Italian director for his use of music, treating it as a framework to edit a film around rather than as merely a backdrop. Tarantino is such a fan of Leone’s use of music, specifically the scores by Ennio Morricone, that he has featured it in his own movies. In 2016’s The Hateful Eight, he even had Morricone do an original score.
Of all Leone’s contributions to cinema, however, Tarantino has singled out one thing in particular. While most trilogies stumble by the second or third film, Leone’s Dollars trilogy is, as far as Tarantino is concerned, flawless. “I think there’s only one trilogy that completely and utterly works to the Nth degree, and that’s A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” he said on an episode of the podcast Club Random with Bill Maher.
“It does what no other trilogy has ever been quite able to do,” he continued. “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.”
The Dollars trilogy follows Clint Eastwood’s ‘Man with No Name’, a poncho-wearing drifter who kills bandits, collects the bounty and sets his own moral code as he travels around the Wild West. As is so often the case, the first movie was never meant to have direct sequels, but it turned into such a success in the United States that its distributor, United Artists, was determined to sell all three movies as a continuous story.
Leone didn’t write the films as a single plot line, and even though he used many of the same actors, they have different names in each film. Even Eastwood’s so-called ‘Man with No Name’ has names in all three instalments, suggesting that he is not, in fact, the same character in each one. In the decades since the films were released, however, fans have created their own continuity, pointing to subtle clues that allude to a non-linear timeline in which the films are organised in reverse order.
The fact that Tarantino views the Dollars films as a cohesive trilogy might point to another artistic device he gleaned from Leone: non-linear timelines. Throughout his work, most notably in Pulp Fiction, the younger director has crafted carefully jigsawed storylines that intersect and jump back and forth through time. This inspires multiple viewings of his movies in order to piece the puzzle together, much like the avid fans of Leone’s Dollars trilogy have done.
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