In the documentary "A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies," Clint Eastwood reflected on a genre that has endured many ups and downs: the Western.

"Just when you think that the western has been exhausted, that there's nowhere else to go with it, something will come along with a new slant on things," he said. "It's very exciting when that happens."

In the 1960s, when the Western was all but dead, the genre got an unexpected revival. Ironically, it was not an American filmmaker that dusted off the genre but Italian director Sergio Leone. Leone has earned his place in cinema history as one of the best directors of the modern-era Western. His work has earned legendary status because he never played by the conventional rules of the genre. Leone would take his inspiration from the classic American Westerns, and answer back with a "A Fistful of Dollars," "The Good the Bad and the Ugly" and "Once Upon a Time in the West," that were distinctly unique, and distinctly his own. Leone's style was marked by high-octane action, brutal violence and realism, morally ambiguous characters and sprawling, gritty scenery.

Indeed, the Western never seems to be truly dead. Films like the Oscar-winning epics "Dances with Wolves" and "Unforgiven" updated the genre in the late 1980s and early 90s, and even today with HBO's popular series "Deadwood" and video games such as Gun and the upcoming Call of Juarez, the Western is riding high again. TwitchGuru looks at the evolution of the Spaghetti Western and its founding father to see how it influenced generations of popular culture.

SergioLeone