A major artistic advance on A Fistful Of Dollars, and boasting a larger budget, the middle sec­tion of the Dollars trilogy depicts Eastwood as the nameless professional bounty hunter who forms a highly competitive and duplicitous alliance with Colonel Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), an enigmatic ex-soldier. They are both pursuing El Indio (Gian Maria Volonte), a notorious bandit and, apart from the obvious lure of a lucrative reward, a per­sonal revenge motive is gradually revealed in a series of flashbacks, a stylistic device that would become a recurrent motif in Leone's work.