There were two types of western movies that arose from either a fascination with the Wild West in Europe or a critical examination of American western movies produced in the 1940s and 50s. The first type is the Italian spaghetti western but here, the fascination doesn't equal idealization. Spaghetti westerns were brutally honest in their depiction of the Wild West while the original US westerns were falsifying history and full of racism. But a new type of western emerged in the US itself: the revisionist western. Those were more realistic in their portrayal of the Wild West and critical of many traditional American values associated with the Old West. The westerns directed by Sam Peckinpah were revisionist or anti-westerns and most of them were produced between the mid-60s and mid-70s.
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