The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the last film in the trilogy, after A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More (1965), had a huge success worldwide, was both acclaimed and disdained by critics, some of which finally started to take Sergio Leone seriously. So was the rough devil-may-care look of his Man With No Name. Clint was in his mid-thirties when he had his breakthrough in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), taking the roles with Leone because no one in Hollywood would hire him, except in a television western series (how resembling is this to Rick Dalton’s story in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood?). And in Sergio Leone’s The Dollar Trilogy, he became the ultimate antihero, with strengths, weaknesses and a lack of virtue, laconic, cool, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, without a past, without a future. He didn’t want to be the hero, he wanted to wrangle the hero, and not just any hero, but the American hero, the western cowboy. Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) subverted the conservative cowboy type and reinvented him as a righteously ambiguous drifter. The character, “The Good”, but not entirely good, nor entirely bad either, just a different type of scoundrel than the other two. The duster coat, olive green and long-waisted, rarely featured in westerns by then. The jeans, black, not the essential all-American blue jeans. The neckerchief, no pristine accessory, but gathering dust. The poncho, not like anything seen on an American horseman. The fringed buckskins and leather waistcoats, not anywhere in sight.

The hat, with a high crown and pulled down low, not the usual cowboy hat. Clint Eastwood in ”The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, 1966 | Produzioni Europee Associate, MGM, United Artists

The man with no name clint eastwood