Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood stared in Sergio Leone's classic spaghetti westerns - A Fistfull of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and The Good The Bad and The Ugly.

People refer to Clint's character in these films as The Man With No Name. This is untrue. Though Clint appears to play the same character in each film, each character is in fact a different person and each actually does have a name. Similarly the Lee Van Cleef character in Good Bad is not the same character he plays in Few Dollars More, nor does he have the same name.

Few Dollars is not a literal sequel to Fistful, but a spiritual one, and Good Bad completes the "trilogy". The same actors appear, but they are not the same characters, and they tell three different stories.

It's similar to Micheal Madsen playing Mr Blond in Reservoir Dogs and later playing Bud in Kill Bill. It's the same actor and same director, but not the same character.

The Outlaw Josie Wales is the obvious Eastwood western where he has a name - it's even in the title. Many people think that Pale Rider is some kind of sequel - that Preacher is an older Josie. He isn't. And while the actor playing the villain, deliberately chosen to look like Van Cleef, is not an earlier character appearing ina sequel, the two men have a history which we see resolved in this film. So it's not a sequel. At least, not a literal one.