The squinting gunslinger in a poncho with a cigarillo and a whistling theme is the definitive image of the American West, yet it was shot in the Tabernas Desert of Almería, Spain, directed by an Italian who barely spoke English, and lifted almost scene for scene from a Japanese samurai film. This episode explores the spaghetti western, from the Cinecittà infrastructure left over from sword-and-sandal epics to the multinational funding from Italy, Spain, and West Germany that produced over 600 European westerns between 1960 and 1978. We explain why casts counted numbers aloud in different languages on silent sets and dubbed everything afterward.

We break down how Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars demythologized the genre with Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name, Ennio Morricone's electric guitar, whips, and anvils, and a plot borrowed from A ...