To celebrate the re-release of ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, we’re screening new prints of the first and second instalments in Sergio Leone’s ‘Dollars’ trilogy. The first, ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ is an unofficial remake of Akira Kurosawa’s great samurai picture ‘Yojimbo’, which happened to be one of Clint Eastwood’s favourite films. Leone cast Eastwood, who was popular as Rowdy Yates in the TV series ‘Rawhide’, as a far more amoral western character: an anonymous gunslinger playing two rival gangs off against each other in the godforsaken Mexican town of San Miguel. Clad in a brown poncho, wearing a battered hat and chain-smoking black cigarillos, the laconic figure of the Man with No Name established Eastwood as a star. Crucially, the film’s success also allowed director Leone and composer Ennio Morricone to develop their themes and ideas on a much grander scale in two sequels.