'DIRECT' Sequel?

[Sebastian]

Doesn't it go like Good, Bad, Ugly > Fistful of Dollars > For a Few Dollars More, timeline-wise?

Last I heard it was officially a trilogy.

[Thedus]

Those three films aren't connected.

Indeed they are.  The trilogy is often referred to as "The Man With No Name Trilogy" or "The Dollars Trilogy"  My father was a big fan of the trilogy... I knew about this trilogy before the initial Star Wars Trilogy was ever a trilogy.

Doesn't it go like Good, Bad, Ugly > Fistful of Dollars > For a Few Dollars More, timeline-wise?

Indeed.  There are elements in The Good the Bad and the Ugly that tie into/explain elements in Fist Full of Dollars, however it was so well done that it can stand alone as its own story/film... as Anto has shown.   The films are often written up as being sequels and in order of their release, but The Good the Bad and the Ugly was intended as a prequel.

[Anto of the Sand]

Manco, Blondie and no-name are all different characters. Why do you think Col. Mortimer never recognises Manco ? There not connected, just have similar characters/actors like Tarantino movies.

[Nev]

Yeah, also Mortimer and Angel Eyes are two entirely different characters.

[deezelboy]

Which explains why Mortimer never recognises Manco/Blondie!

It's a thematic trilogy - there's no continuity but rather the same themes and motiviations are played out (think postmodernism!). 

Mortimer and Angel Eyes are different characters, polar opposites to each other.  The fact that they're both played by Lee Van Cleef is inconsequential (a bit like, for example, Joe Pilato playing different characters in Dawn... and Day of the Dead).

The Man with No Name (Joe/Manco/Blondie) is always the same character, however.  The least 'linked' of the films, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, reinforces this with No Name slowly gathering the same costume we see in the previous two films.

Leone made For a Few Dollars More as a sequel to For a Fistful of Dollars (there's a clue in the title!  ).  The thing is that he used a different producer for the second film.  So the first producer sued, as they held the rights to No Name.  The interesting thing is that teh court held in Leone's favour: No Name was abstract enough to have no characteristics (he was definitely the man with no name, no history) and thus was in the Public Domain.  So any of us could make a Man with No Name sequel or prequel, and we wouldn't have to worry about pesky IP rights!

[Anto of the Sand]

Yeah, also Mortimer and Angel Eyes are two entirely different characters.

Exactly. It's just people dying to make connections where they can. Everyone does it, but these are'nt connected. Similar actors/characters and themes, but seperate.

[deezelboy]

Does this also hold for Romero's Dead films or the Mad Max ones? How about the Three Colours trilogy?

[Anto of the Sand]

Would'nt know. It does for the Spaggetti Westerns though.

[deezelboy]

How so?

I mean, surely Leone being approached to make a sequel to Fistful..., accepting and making A Few Dollars More would suggest that it was in fact a sequel?

[Dan]

Its a trilogy as far as I'm concerned 

[Anto of the Sand]

How so?

I mean, surely Leone being approached to make a sequel to Fistful..., accepting and making A Few Dollars More would suggest that it was in fact a sequel?

I dunno. The stories just don't seem connected to me. Different characters.

[beckmen]

The Mad Max films seem pretty connected to me. However, Romero's flicks never seemed very sequelized. I think he intended for them to be spiritual sequels, not literal ones.

[Thedus]

Romero's films are more conceptual as sequels than they are literal sequels.  They are snap shots of a zombie apocalypse, but not necessarily the same one.  Deez and I had a conversation about this in another thread some time ago and he pointed out that the makes and models of cars are current to the time of the when a given movie was made - if the films were meant to be direct sequels this little aspect would likely have been taken into consideration.  Fashion and architecture also change from film to film. Night is an initial onset, Dawn is a look at things spiraling out of control, and Day is a look at an area (and possibly even a world) changed and over run.  Land is a look at humanity trying to make a life in a world over run, and Diary was a different look at an onset.  Day and land could take place at the same time... It's conceivable that Dawn could also take place at the same time as Day and Land, but I think that Dawn really lies somewhere between Night and Day as far as stages of an apocalypse.   Also if the films are meant as conceptual sequels then Night and Diary would co-exist in the same point in time - even though the technology is very different between the two.

The Man with No Name trilogy is very similar as Deez pointed out - they are sequels in a conceptual/thematic sense, not a traditional or linear sense.  They occur in a given order, but we can't sit back and look at them as linear chapters in a story.  They are chapters, but they deal more with concepts, conflicts, and themes relevant to the character types in a given chapter.

[beckmen]

Really? I would expect Land to have all kinds of 90s/00s anachronisms. Dawn and Day were made close enough to each other to probably work as the same time period, though.

[dude]

But isn't it just much more fun if Eastwood was the same guy in all three films? The character just becomes that much more mythic to me.