Duck You Sucker: An Intro to Spaghetti Westerns

Today’s entry in the A.V. Club’s Gateways to Geekery series is Spaghetti Westerns. Want to get into Spaghetti Westerns, but feeling a little sheepish (If God didn’t want them sheared, he wouldn’t have made them sheep) about not knowing where to start? Gateways to Geekery suggests A Fistful of Dollars.

It’s an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s cynical samurai masterpiece Yojimbo, which was itself inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s noir classic Red Harvest. And thus, an American TV actor became a movie star playing a cowboy for an Italian director working in Spain looking to a Japanese interpretation of an American crime novel for inspiration. It really is a small world after all, or at least a world pop culture helped make smaller.

You might also be interested in the Gateways to Geekery take on David Foster Wallace.

(via oh yes, radishes)

• Clint Eastwood
• movies
• Sergio Leone