How does a man who never set foot in the United States and spoke no English define the American cowboy for the whole world? This episode explores the life of Sergio Leone, born in Rome in 1929 to a pioneer film director and a silent film actress, who left law school at 18 for the movies. We look at his two opposing schools of training: assisting on the neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves and working on massive American epics like Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur at Cinecittà, before stepping in to finish The Last Days of Pompeii and directing The Colossus of Rhodes.

We trace the birth of the Spaghetti Western with A Fistful of Dollars, an unauthorized adaptation of Kurosawa's Yojimbo that made Clint Eastwood a star, and explain why an outsider free of patriotic baggage could show the dirt and ruthlessness Hollywood's morality plays could not. We dig in ...