Weekend DVR Alert

You might want to set your TIVO whatever on Saturday night to catch the two Sergio Leone movies that turned Clint Eastwood from a second-tier TV cowboy to a certifiable marquee attraction: “A Fistful of Dollars” and “For a Few Dollars More,” both on Turner Classics Saturday night at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. respectively. They were filmed in 1964 and 1965 but released in the U.S. in 1967 along with “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” the final film in the “Dollars” trilogy, and together they established Eastwood as a quintessential post-modern movie star, embodying a cool nihilism that may or may not have had anything to do with who he actually was.

That “Man with No Name” pose, controversial and intriguing, turned complicated as Eastwood moved through “Dirty Harry” provocations into directing his own movies, all of them more gnarly with nuance than his fans or critics have ever cared to countenance. But the Leone films are the reboot he needed in the early 1960s, and they play as wonderfully ironic comic strips today, no matter that “Fistful”  was such a ripoff of Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” (1961) that the director sued and won 15 percent of Leone’s worldwide proceeds. (“It was a fine movie,” Kurosawa said of “Fistful,” “but it was my movie.”) No matter: the holy trinity of Eastwood, Leone, and composer Ennio Morricone created an indelible pop moment that the culture is still riffing on 60 years later.