1964 - A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, still holds up pretty well.

Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood try to kick start the western genre back to life and started the spaghetti western craze instead.

For a fairly low budget production, A Fistful of Dollars looks pretty good.  The film was shot in Spain which is where most of these Italian westerns seemed to end up being filmed.  The Spanish locations always seemed to give these films a sense of dislocation, they never looked exactly like the American West. 

Anyone doing a film blog will tell you that A Fistful of Dollars is based on Kurosawa's Yojimbo and there are a lot of almost identical scenes in the Leone film.  However the presence of Clint Eastwood and the western setting probably made the wandering samurai/gunfighter story more accessible to American audiences than Kurosawa's film could ever hope to achieve.

This was the first of the misleading "man with no name " trilogy.  The films actually aren't really interconnected and the Eastwood character does have a name in each of the films. 

 In 1964, mainstream film critics and conventional western movie lovers had no idea of what to make of this mutated version of an American western with a TV actor in the lead.  The film had a nasty and violent streak in it that audiences weren't used to.  Of course today, Eastwood's anti hero and the brutal violence seem almost quaint. 

 To wrap it up with a piece of useless trivia, Eastwood's character is called "Joe" throughout the film.

100 minutes, great ready, screenplay by Sergio Leone, Víctor Andrés Catena, Jaume Comas, Fernando Di Leo, Duccio Tessari and Tonino Valerii.