How Italy Won the West

Cheap, violent, and badly dubbed, Spaghetti Westerns were revolutionary

In the dusty hills of Spain’s Tabernas Desert -- a place that looks more like the American southwest than the actual American southwest -- a small group of Italian film directors inadvertently changed cinema history.

Dismissed in the 1960s as low-budget knockoffs of a dying American film genre, Spaghetti Westerns left their fingerprints on everything th…