Began his career as an assistant on numerous Italian productions of the late 1940s and early 50s and came to prominence in the 1960s, when he revitalized the western genre with a series of gritty, semi-satirical homages known as "spaghetti westerns." "The cowboy picture has got lost in psychology," he said; "The West was made by violent uncomplicated men, and it is this strength and simplicity that I try to recapture in my pictures."