In 1964, Italian director Sergio Leone redefined the Western with A Fistful of Dollars. Eschewing the relatively simplistic morality tales of earlier Westerns, Leone’s central gunslinger wasn’t a noble hero, but an opportunistic cad who uses two rival factions in an Old West town against each other in order to score a big payday. Despite the moral complexity of it all — or, more likely, because of it — the film became an international success and proved that audiences were ready for a new kind of Western, that Americans no longer had a monopoly on the genre, and that Clint Eastwood was a bankable star outside of television.
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