The spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s, not bound by the Hays Code, were strongly revisionist by presenting morally ambiguous stories featuring an anti-hero or a sympathetic villain.
The psychological Western, which began in the 1940s and was hugely popular through the 1950s and 1960s, prioritizes character development ahead of action whilst retaining most of the traditional aspects.
[11] Even though rancher Ryker (Emile Meyer) is ostensibly the villain of the piece, he makes the point that he has striven for thirty years to develop the cattle range which is now being taken over by fence-building "sodbusters", many of whom have the mixed motives noted by Newman.
[13] Fifteen years after Stevens's Shane, Sergio Leone directed Once Upon a Time in the West, a revisionist Western[14][15] which completely subverts the traditional with complex characters and multiple plot devices, the key one being revenge – the motive of enigmatic gunfighter Harmonica (Charles Bronson).
[16] Opinion is divided on the origin of the revisionist or psychological Western but it is generally agreed that there were hints of a darker perspective in some films of the 1930s such as Westward Ho (1935), directed by Robert N. Bradbury and starring John Wayne, in which the hero leads a band of vigilantes on a quest for revenge.
[20] There had been earlier films which portrayed Native Americans sympathetically, but the breakthrough for this sub-genre was Broken Arrow (1950), directed by Delmer Daves and starring James Stewart, with Jeff Chandler as Cochise.
Kim Newman wrote that Chandler's performance established Cochise as "the 1950s model of an Indian hero" and the film inspired goodwill to other Native American chiefs such as Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Geronimo – as a result, "it became fashionable for Westerns to be pro-Indian".
[25] Although they were mostly shot in Spanish locations, featured U.S. actors, and were co-produced by European and U.S. producers, many of the most successful directors were Italian, resulting in these films being known by the misnomer Spaghetti Western.
Leone is often credited with initiating the growth of these co-produced European Westerns as he played a seminal role due to the financial success of A Fistful of Dollars.
[26] Leone popularized the morally ambivalent gunfighter through his representation of "The Man with No Name," Clint Eastwood's gritty anti-hero who was copied again and again in Spaghetti Westerns in characters such as Django and Ringo and which came to be one of its universal attributes.
[28] Monte Hellman's The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind (1966), Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (1970), Roland Klick's Deadlock (1970),[29][30] Robert Downey Sr.'s Greaser's Palace (1972), Alex Cox's Walker (1987), and Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995) fall into this category.