Spaghetti Western
The Spaghetti Western, also known as Italian Western or Macaroni Western, is a broad subgenre of Western films that emerged in the mid-1960s in the wake of Sergio Leone's film-making style and international box-office success. The term was used by American critics and those in other countries because most of these Westerns were produced and directed by Italians.
According to veteran Spaghetti Western actor Aldo Sambrell, the phrase "Spaghetti Western" was coined by Spanish journalist Alfonso Sánchez. The denomination for these films in Italy is western all'italiana. Italo-Western is also used, especially in Germany. These movies were originally released in Italian or with Italian dubbing, but as most of the films featured multilingual casts and sound was post-synched, most "western all'italiana" do not have an official dominant language. The typical Spaghetti Western team was made up of an Italian director, Italo-Spanish technical staff, and a cast of Italian, Spanish, German, and American actors. Clint Eastwood starred in three of Sergio Leone's films, now known as the Dollars Trilogy—A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Leone also made Once Upon a Time in the West in 1968, starring Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda. These films have been listed among the best Westerns of any variety.
The term Paella Western has been used for the many Western films produced in Spain. The term Eurowesterns may be used to also include similar Western movies that were produced in Continental Europe but without involvement by Italians, like the West German Winnetou films or the Soviet Ostern films. The majority of the films in the Spaghetti Western genre were actually international co-productions between Italy and Spain, and sometimes France, West Germany, Portugal, Greece, Israel, Yugoslavia, or the United States. Over six hundred European Westerns were made between 1960 and 1978.
Common elements
Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars established the Spaghetti Western as a novel kind of Western. In this seminal film, the hero enters a town that is ruled by two outlaw gangs, and ordinary social relations are non-existent. He betrays and plays the gangs against one another in order to make money. Then he uses his cunning and exceptional weapons skill to assist a family threatened by both gangs. His treachery is exposed and he is severely beaten, but in the end, he defeats the remaining gang. The interaction in this story between cunning and irony on the one hand, and pathos on the other, was aspired to and sometimes attained by the imitations that soon flooded the cinemas.Italian cinema often borrowed from other films without regard for infringement, and Leone famously borrowed the plot for A Fistful of Dollars, receiving a letter from Japanese director Akira Kurosawa congratulating him on making "...a very fine film. But it is my film". Leone had imitated one of the most highly respected directors in the world by remaking his film Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars and consequently surrendered Asian rights to Kurosawa, plus 15% of the international box office proceeds. Leone later moved from borrowing and established his own oft-imitated style and plots. Leone's films and other "core" Spaghetti Westerns are often described as having eschewed, criticised or even "demythologized" many of the conventions of traditional U.S. Westerns. This was partly intentional and partly the context of a different cultural background.
Use of pathos received a big boost with Sergio Corbucci's influential Django. In the years following, the use of cunning and irony became more prominent. This was seen in Leone's next two Westerns, with their emphasis on unstable partnerships. In the last phase of the Spaghetti Western, with the Trinity films, the Leone legacy had been transformed almost beyond recognition, as terror and deadly violence gave way to harmless brawling and low comedy.
Filming locations
Most Spaghetti Westerns filmed between 1964 and 1978 were made on low budgets and shot at Cinecittà studios and various locations around southern Italy and Spain. Many of the stories take place in the dry landscapes of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico, hence common filming locations were the Tabernas Desert and the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park, an area of volcanic origin known for its wide sandy beaches, both of which are in the Province of Almería in southeastern Spain. Some sets and studios built for Spaghetti Westerns survive as theme parks, Texas Hollywood, Mini Hollywood, and Western Leone, and continue to be used as film sets. Other filming locations used were in central and southern Italy, such as the parks of Valle del Treja, the area of Camposecco, the hills around Castelluccio, the area around the Gran Sasso mountain, and the Tivoli's quarries and Sardinia. God's Gun was filmed in Israel.Reception
In the 1960s, critics recognized that the American genres were rapidly changing. The genre most identifiably American, the Western, seemed to be evolving into a new, rougher form. For many critics, Sergio Leone's films were part of the problem. Leone's Dollars Trilogy was not the beginning of the "Spaghetti Western" cycle in Italy, but for some Americans Leone's films represented the true beginning of the Italian invasion of an American genre.Christopher Frayling, in his noted book on the Italian Western, describes American critical reception of the Spaghetti Western cycle as, to "a large extent, confined to a sterile debate about the 'cultural roots' of the American/Hollywood Western." He remarks that few critics dared admit that they were, in fact, "bored with an exhausted Hollywood genre."
Pauline Kael, he notes, was willing to acknowledge this critical ennui and thus appreciate how a film such as Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo "could exploit the conventions of the Western genre, while debunking its morality." Frayling and other film scholars such as Bondanella argue that this revisionism was the key to Leone's success and, to some degree, to that of the Spaghetti Western genre as a whole.
Rise and fall
European Westerns from the beginning
European Westerns are as old as filmmaking itself. The Lumière brothers made their first public screening of films in 1895 and already in 1896 Gabriel Veyre shot Repas d'Indien for them. Joe Hamman starred as Arizona Bill in films made in the French horse country of Camargue 1911–12.In Italy, the American West as a dramatic setting for spectacles goes back at least as far as Giacomo Puccini's 1910 opera La fanciulla del West; it is sometimes considered to be the first Spaghetti Western.
The first Italian Western movie was La Vampira Indiana – a combination of Western and vampire film. It was directed by Vincenzo Leone, father of Sergio Leone, and starred his mother Bice Waleran in the title role as Indian princess Fatale. The Italians also made Wild Bill Hickok films, while the German twenties saw back-woods Westerns featuring Bela Lugosi as Uncas.
Of the Western-related European films before 1964, the one attracting most attention is probably Luis Trenker's Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, about John Sutter. During and after the Second World War there were scattered European uses of Western settings, mostly for comedy or musical comedy.
First Spaghetti Western
A forerunner of the genre had appeared in 1943 Giorgio Ferroni's Il fanciullo del West and a cycle of Western comedies was initiated 1959 with La sceriffa and Il terrore dell’Oklahoma, followed by other films starring comedy specialists like Walter Chiari, Ugo Tognazzi, Raimondo Vianello or Fernandel. An Italian critic has compared these comedies to American Bob Hope vehicles.The first American-British western filmed in Spain was The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, directed by Raoul Walsh. It was followed in 1961 by Savage Guns, a British-Spanish western, again filmed in Spain. This marked the beginning of Spain as a suitable film shooting location for any kind of European western.
In 1963, three non-comedy Italo-Spanish westerns were produced: Gunfight at Red Sands, Implacable Three and Gunfight at High Noon. In 1961 an Italian company co-produced the French Taste of Violence, with a Mexican Revolution theme.
In 1965, Bruno Bozzetto released his traditionally animated feature film West and Soda, a Western parody with a marked Spaghetti Western-theme; despite having been released a year after Sergio Leone's seminal Spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars, development of West and Soda actually began a year earlier than Fistful's and lasted longer, mainly because of the use of more time-demanding animation over regular acting. For this reason, Bozzetto himself claims to have invented the Spaghetti Western genre.
Since there is no real consensus about where to draw the exact line between Spaghetti Westerns and other Eurowesterns one cannot say which one of the films mentioned so far was the first Spaghetti Western. However, 1964 saw the breakthrough of this genre, with more than twenty productions or co-productions from Italian companies, and more than half a dozen Westerns by Spanish or Spanish/American companies. Furthermore, by far the most commercially successful of this lot was Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars whose innovations in cinematic style, music, acting and story decided the future for the genre.
Impact of ''A Fistful of Dollars''
The Spaghetti Western was born, flourished and faded in a highly commercial production environment. The Italian "low" popular film production was usually low-budget and low-profit, and the easiest way to success was imitating a proven success. When the typically low-budget production A Fistful of Dollars turned into a remarkable box office success, the industry eagerly lapped up its innovations. Most succeeding Spaghetti Westerns tried to get a ragged, laconic hero with superhuman weapon skill, preferably one who looked like Clint Eastwood: Franco Nero, Giuliano Gemma, John Garko and Terence Hill started out that way; Anthony Steffen and others stayed that way all their Spaghetti Western career.Whoever the hero was, he would join an outlaw gang to further his own secret agenda, like in A Pistol for Ringo, Blood for a Silver Dollar, Vengeance Is a Dish Served Cold, Renegade Riders and others, while Beyond the Law instead has a bandit infiltrate society and become a sheriff. There would be a flamboyant Mexican bandit and a grumpy old man – more often than not an undertaker, to serve as sidekick for the hero. For love interest, rancher's daughters, schoolmarms and barroom maidens were overshadowed by young Latin women desired by dangerous men, where actresses like Nicoletta Machiavelli or Rosalba Neri carried on Marianne Koch's role of Marisol in the Leone film. The terror of the villains against their defenseless victims became just as ruthless as in A Fistful of Dollars, or more, and their brutalization of the hero when his treachery is disclosed became just as merciless, or more – just like the cunning used to secure the latter's retribution.
In the beginning some films mixed some of these new devices with the borrowed US Western devices typical for most of the 1963–64 Spaghetti Westerns. For example, in Sergio Corbucci's Minnesota Clay that appeared two months after A Fistful of Dollars, an American style "tragic gunfighter" hero confronts two evil gangs, one Mexican and one Anglo, and the leader of the latter is the town sheriff.
, one of the most representative directors of the genre.
In the same director's Johnny Oro a traditional Western sheriff and a half-breed bounty killer are forced into an uneasy alliance when Mexican bandits and Native Americans together assault the town. In A Pistol for Ringo a traditional sheriff commissions a money-oriented hero played by Giuliano Gemma to infiltrate a gang of Mexican bandits whose leader is played typically by Fernando Sancho.
''For a Few Dollars More'' and its followers
After 1965 when Leone's second Western For a Few Dollars More brought a larger box office success, the profession of bounty hunter became the choice of occupation of Spaghetti Western heroes in films like Arizona Colt, Vengeance Is Mine, Ten Thousand Dollars for a Massacre, The Ugly Ones, Dead Men Don't Count and Any Gun Can Play. In The Great Silence and A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die, the heroes instead fight bounty killers. This was also the time when every other hero or villain in Spaghetti Westerns started carrying a musical watch, after its ingenious use in For a Few Dollars More.Spaghetti Westerns also began featuring a pair of different heroes. In Leone's film Eastwood's character is an unshaven bounty hunter, dressed similarly to his character in A Fistful of Dollars, who enters an unstable partnership with Colonel Mortimer, an older bounty killer who uses more sophisticated weaponry and wears a suit, and in the end turns out to also be an avenger. In the following years there was a deluge of Spaghetti Westerns with a pair of heroes with conflicting motives. Examples include: a lawman and an outlaw, an army officer and an outlaw, an avenger and a army officer, an avenger and a guilty party, an avenger and a con-man, an outlaw posing as a sheriff and a bounty hunter and an outlaw posing as his twin and a bounty hunter posing as a sheriff.
The theme of age in For a Few Dollars More, where the younger bounty killer learns valuable lessons from his more experienced colleague and eventually becomes his equal, is taken up in Day of Anger and Death Rides a Horse. In both cases Lee Van Cleef carries on as the older hero versus Giuliano Gemma and John Phillip Law, respectively.
Zapata Westerns
One variant of the hero pair was a revolutionary Mexican bandit and a mostly money-oriented American from the United States frontier. These films are sometimes called Zapata Westerns. The first was Damiano Damiani's A Bullet for the General and then followed Sergio Sollima's trilogy: The Big Gundown, Face to Face and Run, Man, Run.Sergio Corbucci's The Mercenary and Compañeros also belong here, as does Tepepa by Giulio Petroni – among others. Many of these films enjoyed both good takes at the box office and attention from critics. They are often interpreted as a leftist critique of the typical Hollywood handling of Mexican revolutions, and of imperialism in general.
Betrayal stories
In Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly there is still the scheme of a pair of heroes vs. a villain but it is somewhat relaxed, as here all three parties were driven by a money motive. In subsequent films like Any Gun Can Play, One Dollar Too Many and Kill Them All and Come Back Alone several main characters repeatedly form alliances and betray each other for monetary gain.Sabata and If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death, directed by Gianfranco Parolini, introduce into similar betrayal environments a kind of hero molded on the Mortimer character from For a Few Dollars More, only without any vengeance motive and with more outrageous trick weapons. Fittingly enough Sabata is portrayed by Lee Van Cleef himself, while John Garko plays the very similar Sartana protagonist. Parolini made some more Sabata movies while Giuliano Carnimeo made a whole series of Sartana films with Garko.
''Django'' and the tragic heroes
Beside the first three Spaghetti Westerns by Leone, a most influential film was Sergio Corbucci's Django starring Franco Nero. The titular character is torn between several motives – money or revenge – and his choices bring misery to him and to a woman close to him. Indicative of this film's influence on the Spaghetti Western style, Django is the hero's name in a plenitude of subsequent westerns.Even though his character is not named Django, Franco Nero brings a similar ambience to Texas, Adios and Massacre Time where the hero must confront surprising and dangerous family relations. Similar "prodigal son" stories followed, including Chuck Moll, Keoma, The Return of Ringo, The Forgotten Pistolero, One Thousand Dollars on the Black, Johnny Hamlet and also Seven Dollars on the Red.
Another type of wronged hero is set up and must clear himself from accusations. Giuliano Gemma starred in a series of successful films carrying this theme – Adiós gringo, For a Few Extra Dollars, Long Days of Vengeance, Wanted, and to some extent Blood for a Silver Dollar – where most often his character is called "Gary".
The wronged hero who becomes an avenger appears in many Spaghetti Westerns. Among the more commercially successful films with a hero dedicated to vengeance – For a Few Dollars More, Once Upon a Time in the West, Today We Kill... Tomorrow We Die!, A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die, Death Rides a Horse, Django, Prepare a Coffin, The Deserter , Hate for Hate, Halleluja for Django – those with whom he cooperates typically have conflicting motivations.
Comedy Westerns
In 1968, the wave of Spaghetti Westerns reached its crest, comprising one-third of the Italian film production, only to collapse to one-tenth in 1969. However, the considerable box office success of Enzo Barboni's They Call Me Trinity and the pyramidal one of its follow-up Trinity Is Still My Name gave Italian filmmakers a new model to emulate. The main characters were played by Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, who had already cooperated as hero pair in the "old style" Spaghetti Westerns God Forgives... I Don't!, Boot Hill and Ace High directed by Giuseppe Colizzi. The humor started in those movies already, with scenes with comedic fighting, but the Barboni films became burlesque comedies. They feature the quick but lazy Trinity and his big, strong and irritable brother Bambino.The stories make fun of U.S. Western-style diligent farmers and Spaghetti Western-style bounty hunters. There was a wave of Trinity-inspired films with quick and strong heroes, the former kind often called Trinity or perhaps coming from "a place called Trinity", and with no or few killings. Because the two model stories contained religious pacifists to account for the absence of gunplay, all the successors contained religious groups or at least priests, sometimes as one of the heroes.
The music for the two Trinity westerns also reflected the change into a lighter and more sentimental mood. The Trinity-inspired films also adopted this style.
Some critics deplore these post-Trinity films as a degeneration of the "real" Spaghetti Westerns, and that Hill's and Spencer's skilful use of body language was a hard act to follow. It is significant that the most successful of the post-Trinity films featured Hill, Spencer and a pair of Hill/Spencer look-alikes in Carambola. Spaghetti Western old hand Franco Nero also worked in this subgenre with Cipolla Colt and Tomas Milian plays an outrageous "quick" bounty hunter modeled on Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp in Sometimes Life Is Hard – Right Providence? and Here We Go Again, Eh, Providence?
Other notable films
Some movies that were not very successful at the box office still earn a "cult" status in some segment of the audience because of certain exceptional features in story and/or presentation. One "cult" Spaghetti Western that also has drawn attention from critics is Giulio Questi's Django Kill. Other "cult" items are Cesare Canevari's Matalo!, Tony Anthony's Blindman and Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent's Cut-Throats Nine.Special interest audiences might also nurture a cult of the "Worst", as exemplified in the interest for a director like Ed Wood. His Spaghetti Western equivalent would be the Western œuvre of Demofilo Fidani. The Stranger is essentially, the Woman with No Name, with a motorcycle instead of a horse.
The few Spaghetti Westerns containing historical characters like Buffalo Bill, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid etc. mainly appear before A Fistful of Dollars had put its mark on the genre. Likewise, and in contrast to the contemporary German Westerns, few films feature Native Americans. When they appear they are more often portrayed as victims of discrimination than as dangerous foes. The only fairly successful Spaghetti Western with an Indian main character is Sergio Corbucci's Navajo Joe, where the Indian village is wiped out by bandits during the first minutes, and the avenger hero spends the rest of the film dealing mostly with Anglos and Mexicans until the final showdown at an Indian burial ground.
Several Spaghetti Westerns are inspired by classical myths and dramas. Titles like Fedra West and Johnny Hamlet signify the connection to the Greek myth and possibly the plays by Euripides and Racine and the play by William Shakespeare, respectively. The latter also inspired Dust in the Sun , which follows its original more closely than Johnny Hamlet, where the hero survives. The Forgotten Pistolero is based on the vengeance of Orestes. There are similarities between the story of The Return of Ringo and the last canto of Homer's Odyssey. Fury of Johnny Kid follows Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, but with a different ending – the loving couple leave together while their families annihilate each other.
The story of A Fistful of Dollars was closely based on Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. Kurosawa in fact sued Sergio Leone for plagiarism, and was compensated with the exclusive distribution rights to the movie in Japan, where its hero, Clint Eastwood, was already a huge star due to the popularity of the TV series Rawhide: Leone would have done far better financially by obtaining Kurosawa's advance permission to use Yojimbo's script. Requiem for a Gringo shows many traces from another well-known Japanese film, Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri. When Asian martial arts films started to draw crowds in European cinema houses, the producers of Spaghetti Westerns tried to hang on, this time not by adapting story-lines but rather by directly including martial arts in the films, performed by Eastern actors – for example Chen Lee in My Name Is Shanghai Joe or Lo Lieh teaming up with Lee Van Cleef in The Stranger and the Gunfighter.
Some Italian Western films were made as vehicles for musical stars, like Ferdinando Baldi's Rita of the West featuring Rita Pavone and Terence Hill. In non-singing roles were Ringo Starr as a villain in Blindman and French rock 'n' roll veteran Johnny Hallyday as the gunfighter/avenger hero in Sergio Corbucci's The Specialists.
A celebrity from another sphere of culture is Italian author/film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who plays a revolutionary man of the church in Requiescant. This film concerns oppression of poor Mexicans by rich Anglos and ends on a call for arms but it does not fit easily as a Zapata Western. The same can be said for The Price of Power, a political allegory where an American president is assassinated in Dallas by a conspiracy of Southern racists who frame an innocent Afro-American. They are opposed by an unstable partnership between a whistle-blower and a political aide.
Though the Spaghetti Westerns from A Fistful of Dollars and on featured more violence and killings than earlier American Western films, they generally shared the parental genre's restrictive attitude toward explicit sexuality. However, in response to the growing commercial success of various shades of sex films, there was a greater exposure of naked skin in some Spaghetti Westerns, among others Dead Men Ride and Heads or Tails . In the former and partly the latter, the sex scenes feature coercion and violence against women.
Even though it is hinted at in some films, like Django Kill and Requiescant, open homosexuality plays a marginal part in Spaghetti Westerns. The exception is Giorgio Capitani's The Ruthless Four – in effect a gay version of John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre – where the explicit homosexual relation between two of its male main characters and some gay cueing scenes are embedded with other forms of man-to-man relations through the story.
Legacy
Spaghetti Westerns have left their mark on popular culture, strongly influencing numerous works produced outside of Italy.In later years there were "return of stories", Django 2 with Franco Nero and Troublemakers with Terence Hill and Bud Spencer.
Clint Eastwood's first American Western film, Hang 'Em High, incorporates elements of Spaghetti Westerns.
The Bollywood film Sholay was often referred to as a "Curry Western". A more accurate genre label for the film is the "Dacoit Western", as it combined the conventions of Indian dacoit films such as Mother India and Gunga Jumna with that of Spaghetti Westerns. Sholay spawned its own genre of "Dacoit Western" films in Bollywood during the 1970s.
In the Soviet Union, the Spaghetti Western was adapted into the Ostern genre of Soviet films. The Wild West setting was replaced by an Eastern setting in the steppes of the Caucasus, while Western stock characters such as "cowboys and Indians" were replaced by Caucasian stock characters such as bandits and harems. A famous example of the genre was White Sun of the Desert, which was popular in the Soviet Union.
The 1985 Japanese film Tampopo was promoted as a "ramen Western".
Japanese director Takashi Miike paid tribute to the genre with Sukiyaki Western Django, a Western set in Japan which derives influence from both Django and Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy.
American director Quentin Tarantino has utilized elements of Spaghetti Westerns in his films Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained., The Hateful Eight, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
The American animated film Rango incorporates elements of Spaghetti Westerns, including a character modeled after The Man With No Name.
The American heavy metal band Metallica has used Ennio Morricone's composition "The Ecstasy of Gold", from the Spaghetti Western The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, to open several of their concerts. The Australian band The Tango Saloon combines elements of Tango music with influences from Spaghetti Western scores. The psychobilly band Ghoultown also derives influence from Spaghetti Westerns. The music video for the song "Knights of Cydonia" by the English rock band Muse was influenced by Spaghetti Westerns. The band Big Audio Dynamite used music samples from Spaghetti Westerns when mixing their song ″Medicine Show″. Within the song you can hear samples from Spaghetti Western movies such as A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, and Duck You Sucker.