In the early 1960s, an unknown Italian film director named Sergio Leone was given USD200,000 and leftover film stock, and told to make a Western. With a script based on a Samurai epic, an American TV actor called Clint Eastwood, music composer Ennio Morricone and cameraman Massimo Dallamano, Leone was expected to make what was essentially a throwaway film. What he ended up with was A Fistful of Dollars, the first in a trilogy that came to define the Spaghetti Western. The films that complete the trilogy, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, are, like the first film, violent, cynical and visually stunning. This examination of Leone and the Italian Western contains an authoritative text written by film expert and cultural historian Christopher Frayling. It also includes interviews with Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Sergio Leone, Rod Steiger, Ennio Morricone, James Coburn, Lee Van Cleef, Peter Bogdanovich, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jason Robards and Claudia Cardinale, as well as writings by Sergio Leone on film. The text is accompanied by a wealth of visual material, including production stills, lobby cards, pictorial source sketches, costume and set designs, Italian release posters and photographs of original props.