Free Republic

Perhaps because it came out the year I was born, I have a hard time imagining a world without A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Leone and the spaghetti western. It's easy to forget how much this single film changed not just the western but the movie hero, whose credibility forever afterward came with stubble and unkempt hair, abundant sarcasm and an implacably bad attitude. It became an article of faith that the only honest way to look back at the world arrayed against the hero was through a squint. By the time I actually understood what a western was, Leone...

Dating all the way back to the very birth of American cinema in the 1910s, the western genre was pioneered by national filmmakers like John Ford, Howard Hawks and Sam Peckinpah, releasing such respective classics as The Searchers, Rio Bravo and The Wild Bunch. Though, after decades of dominance, by the 1960s, the genre had become stiff, with the arrival of Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone shaking up generations of stuffy cowboy tales. Inspired by Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, Leone brought an iconic style to his Western trilogy that included A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and his...

From the way most film nerds talk about the Spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, you'd think he was the only italiano who ever thought to emulate his neighbors across the pond. Not so! Many of the era's exploitation-loving directors dabbled in the cowboy arts, and some of the westerns they created deserve just as much attention, if only for the extra-brutal sensibility they brought to the form. Read on for a list of these wicked, underrated gems. Django (1966) Sergio Corbucci's Django was one of the most internationally acclaimed Spaghetti westerns ever, at least outside this country - for whatever...