

After being offered the lead role in A Fistful of Dollars, his first in film, Eastwood took the low-paying gig out of interest in visiting Europe.

Leone's professional relationship with Clint Eastwood came to be after the director spotted the up-and-coming actor in the television series Rawhide.

Related: Richard Jewell True Story What The Movie Gets Right & Changes According to the filmmaker, his films were not meant to spark a cinematic revolution even so, they inspired 200 additional Spaghetti Westerns, and half of them contained the word "dollars" in the title. The scope often felt larger than life, the music, courtesy of iconic movie score composer Ennio Morricone, was instantly iconic, and the stories, while perhaps not as singularly spectacular as something like John Ford's The Searchers or Stagecoach, were episodic and grand. Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy founded the Spaghetti Western genre, largely because of Leone's masterful direction. Comprised of 1964's A Fistful of Dollars, 1965's For a Few Dollars More, and 1966's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the Dollars trilogy helped change filmmakers' approach and the aesthetic style of the entire Western genre. Leone's influence continues today, as seen with titles such as The Hateful Eightand The Mandalorian.

Italian auteur Sergio Leone's iconic trio of Spaghetti Westerns with Clint Eastwood - unofficially dubbed "the Dollarstrilogy" - have become an essential piece of the Western film landscape. Although they were not released as a trilogy, the films are connected to each other, and there's a best order to watch them in.
