Spaghetti Westerns

Wallach made a career of playing the villain in films like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and The Magnificent Seven. He died Tuesday at the age of 98. Wallach talked with Terry Gross in 1990.

With his latest film, director Quentin Tarantino was inspired both by spaghetti Westerns and the drama of slavery and the Civil War. The movie is extremely violent — but, says Tarantino, "What happened during slavery times is a thousand times worse. ... If you can't take it, you can't take it."

The Sergio Leone Anthology includes A Fistful of Dollars; For a Few Dollars More; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Duck, You Sucker.

Cultural historian Christopher Frayling's new book Once Upon A Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone is a large-format, beautifully illustrated book that chronicles the history of the spaghetti western through researched text and interviews with Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese and Eli Wallach.

The Italian film director died last week at the age of 67. Film critic Stephen Schiff says that Leone's movies had a unique symbolism and vision of the American West that only an outsider could have imagined.