Clint Eastwood as the Man With No Name in A Fistful of Dollars.

Between 1960 and 1975, European film production companies made nearly 600 Westerns. Critics either blasted or ignored these films, and because most of them were financed by Italian companies, they called them Spaghetti Westerns. Fans of the genre embraced the term which is now lovingly used to label any Western made and financed by Continental filmmakers.

Europeans have always loved Westerns and have always made them. As early as 1901, European directors tried their hand at this most American of art forms. The relatively few Eurowesterns made prior to 1960, though historically significant, never signified a trend and remain largely unknown, at least in the United States. People on the Continent relied on the American Western for their entertainment.

In 1962, however, German producer Horst Wendlandt and director Harald Reinl teamed up to make The Treasure of Silver Lake, based on the frontier stories of German writer Karl May. Filmed in Yugoslavia with American actor Lex Barker and Frenchman Pierre Brice in the lead roles, this tongue-in-cheek adventure proved extremely popular with European audiences. Other producers jumped on the bandwagon and by 1964 some two dozen German, Italian and Spanish Westerns had been made. Quality was still generally bad and the films stylistically fared no better than the sword-and-sandal adventures (peplums) they replaced. One notable film of this period was Ricardo Blasco's Gunfight at Red Sands (1963) with Richard Harrison, who would eventually star in seventeen Spaghetti Westerns.

Then, an obscure director named Sergio Leone was given $200,000 and a load of leftover film stock and told to make a Western. With a script based on Akira Kurosawa's samurai epic Yojimbo, an American TV actor named Clint Eastwood, a music composer named Ennio Morricone, and a cameraman named Massimo Dallamano, Leone made what was essentially supposed to be a throw-away film; Per un Pugno di Dollari -- A Fistful of Dollars. This violent, cynical and visually stunning film introduced The Man With No Name, the anti-heroic gunslinger for whom money is the only motivation and the villains are merely obstacles to be removed. Many later films followed this formula of the lone gunman in pursuit of money to the exclusion of all else. Leone's unique style, artistic camera angles, extension of time and raw, explosive violence presented a skewed view of the West, making his film different from any Western that had come before. Critics panned it for its brutal depiction of an unromantic West, but audiences loved it, and the Spaghetti Western took off like a bullet from a Colt .45.

The success of A Fistful of Dollars had producers financing more and more Westerns with bigger and bigger budgets. Leone quickly followed in 1965 with a sequel -- For a Few Dollars More, this time teaming Eastwood with a retired Hollywood bit player named Lee Van Cleef as rival bounty hunters after a crazed killer. The success of this second film cemented Leone's reputation as a Western director and helped make international stars of Eastwood, Van Cleef, and composer Morricone.