Description: The Italian film director Sergio Leone reinvented the American Western with his movie A Fistful of Dollars, a spare reworking of Akira Kurosawa's Japanese outlaw drama Yojimbo transferred to the Texas-Mexican border. In doing so, Leone also created a new kind of Western protagonist -- silent, mysterious, morally ambiguous -- and found a new star to embody this new archetype: Clint Eastwood.

Leone's entire rife pointed toward his reinvention of the American Western: he grew up during the Nazi occupation of Italy, a period in which he saw terrible parallels to the traditional Western. When he was in a position to direct his own firms, the low budget of his first "spaghetti" Western meant that he could only afford to hire a relatively unknown American actor, Clint Eastwood, to star in A Fistful of Dollars, which has been credited with reviving the Western as a credible film genre in the 1960s. This book is the first to document not only Leone's life but also to explore fully the development -- and phenomenon -- of the Italian film Western. In addition, Christopher Frayling examines Leone's rate masterwork, Once Upon a Time in the West, which TimeOut says "ranks among the greatest examples of 'pure cinema' in the history of the medium".

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