Spaghetti Western

Spaghetti Western, also known as Italian Western or Macaroni Western (primarily in Japan),[1] 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.[2] The
term was used by American critics and those in other countries because most of these Westerns were produced and directed by
Italians.[3]

According to veteran Spaghetti Western actor Aldo Sambrell, the phrase 'Spaghetti Western' was coined by Spanish journalist
Alfonso Sánchez.[4] The denomination for these films in Italy is western all'italiana (Italian-style Western). Italo-Western is also
used, especially in Germany. The term Eurowesterns may be used to also include Western movies that were produced in Europe but
not called Spaghetti Westerns, like the West German Winnetou films or Ostern Westerns. The majority of the films were international
co-productions between Italy and Spain, and sometimes France, Germany
, Portugal, Greece, Israel, Yugoslavia, or the United States.

These movies were originally released in Italian, 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.[5] The typical Spaghetti Western team was made
up of an Italian director, Italo-Spanish[6] technical staff, and a cast of Italian,
Spanish, German, and American actors, sometimes a fading Hollywood star and
sometimes a rising one like the young Clint Eastwood in three of Sergio Leone's
films.

Over six hundred European Westerns were made between 1960 and 1978.[7] The
best-known Spaghetti Westerns were directed by Sergio Leone and scored by Ennio Clint Eastwood as the Man with No
Morricone, notably the three films of the Dollars Trilogy (starring Clint Eastwood as Name in a publicity image ofA Fistful
the main character)—A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) of Dollars, a film by Sergio Leone.

and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)—as well as Once Upon a Time in the
West (1968, starring Charles Bronson). These are consistently listed among the best
Westerns of any variety.[8]

Contents
Common elements
Filming locations
Reception
Rise and fall
European Westerns from the beginning
The first Spaghetti Western
Impact of A Fistful of Dollars
For a Few Dollars Moreand its followers
Zapata Westerns
Betrayal stories
Django and the tragic heroes
Comedy Westerns
Twilight of the Spaghetti Western
Other notable films
Legacy
Notable personalities
 See also
References
References
External links

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 (the tricks, deceits, unexpected actions and sarcasm of the hero) on the one hand, and pathos (terror and
brutality against defenseless people and against the hero after his double play has been revealed) 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".[9] 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.[10] 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"[11] many of the conventions of traditional U.S. Westerns.
ferent cultural background.[12]
This was partly intentional and partly the context of a dif

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
.

Ennio Morricone's music forA Fistful of Dollars and later Spaghetti Westerns was just as seminal and imitated. It expresses a similar
duality between quirky and unusual sounds and instruments on the one hand, and sacral dramatizing for the big confrontation scenes
on the other.

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.[13] 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 Spahetti Westerns survive as theme parks, Texas Hollywood, Mini Hollywood, and Western Leone, and continue to
be used as film sets.[14] Other filming locations used were in central and southern Italy, such as the parks of Valle del Treja (between
Rome and Viterbo), the area of Camposecco (next to Camerata Nuova, characterized by a karst topography), 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.[15]

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 (1964–1966) was not the beginning of the "Spaghetti Western" cycle in Italy, but for 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."[16] 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 (1961) "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.[17]

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 ("Indian Banquet") for them. Joe Hamman starred as Arizona Bill in films made in
the French horse country ofCamargue 1911–12.[18]

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.[19][20] The first Italian Western movie was La Vampira Indiana
(1913) – a combination of Western and vampire film. It was directed by Vincenzo Leone, father of Sergio Leone, and starred his
mother Bice Walerian in the title role as Indian princess Fatale.[21] 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 (1936), about John Sutter.[22] During and after the Second World War there were scattered European uses of Western
settings, mostly for comedy or musical comedy
.

The first Spaghetti Western

A forerunner of the genre had appeared in 1943 Giorgio Ferroni's Il fanciullo del West (The Boy in the West)[23][24] 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.[25]

The first American-British western filmed in Spain was The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958), 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, Magnificent Three and Gunfight at High
Noon. In 1961 an Italian company co-produced the FrenchTaste of Violence, with a Mexican Revolution theme.

Since there is no real consensus about where to draw the exact line between Spaghetti Westerns and other Eurowesterns (or other
Westerns in general) 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
[26] When the
film production was basically low-budget and low-profit, and the easiest way to success was imitating a proven success.
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 W
estern 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, Payment in Blood and others, while Beyond the Law instead has a bandit infiltrate society
and become a sheriff. There would be a flamboyant Mexican bandit (Gian Maria Volonté from A Fistful of Dollars, otherwise Tomas
Milian or most often Fernando Sancho) 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, inSergio Corbucci's Minnesota Clay (1964) that appeared two months afterA Fistful of Dollars,
an American style "tragic gunfighter" hero confronts two evil gangs, one Mexican and one Anglo, and (just as in A Fistful of Dollars)
the leader of the latter is the town sheriff.

In the same director's Johnny Oro (1966) 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 (with more
pleasing manners than Eastwood's character) to infiltrate a gang of Mexican bandits
whose leader is played by typicallyFernando Sancho.

For a Few Dollars More and its followers Sergio Leone, one of the most
representative directors of the genre.
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 Countand 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 (Lee Van Cleef),
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 (most often) conflicting motives. Examples
include: a lawman and an outlaw A
( nd the Crows Will Dig Your Grave), an army officer and an outlaw (Bury Them Deep), an avenger
and a (covert) army officer (The Hills Run Red), an avenger and a (covert) guilty party (Viva! Django), an avenger and a con-man
(The Dirty Outlaws), an outlaw posing as a sheriff and a bounty hunter (Man With the Golden Pistol) and an outlaw posing as his
twin and a bounty hunter posing as a sheriff (Few Dollars for Django).

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.[27] 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 doesTepepa 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
[28]
Hollywood handling of Mexican revolutions, and of imperialism in general.

Betrayal stories
In Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Uglythere 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 Aloneseveral 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 performed 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.[29]

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"[30] 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, I lunghi giorni della vendetta, 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, Viva Django, The Devil's Backbone, Hate for Hate, Greatest Robbery in the
West – 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 Namegave 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 (Hill) and his big, strong and irritable brother
Bambino (Spencer).
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
[31]
religious groups or at least priests, sometimes as one of the heroes. Bud Spencer and Terence Hill in
They Call Me Trinity (1970)
The music for the two Trinity westerns (composed byFranco Micalizzi and Guido &
Maurizio De Angelis, respectively) also reflected the change into a lighter and more
sentimental mood. The Trinity-inspired films also adopted this style.[32]

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 (Man of
the East, A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe), Spencer (It Can Be Done Amigo) 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?[33]

Twilight of the Spaghetti Western

Leone's later Westerns Once Upon a Time in the West ; Duck, You Sucker! and the produced and co-directed My Name is Nobody in
1973 did very well at the Italian box-office but did not inspire the industry to imitations like his first three did. In fact, Duck, You
Sucker! has been interpreted as a critical comment on the Zapata Westerns and My Name is Nobody includes Terence Hill as a
Trinity-like character.

By the mid-seventies a few productions, likeKeoma and Four of the Apocalypse, tried to revive the pre-Trinity formulas but basically
the Spaghetti Western was dead as an active genre.

Later years have seen some "return of stories"Django 2 with Franco Nero and Troublemakers with Terence Hill and Bud Spencer.

Other notable films

Some movies that were not very successful at the box office[34] 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 (the latter among gore film audiences).

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 (1995) is essentially, the Woman with
No Name, with a motorcycle instead of a horse.[35]

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
Indians. 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 (played by Burt Reynolds in his only European Western outing) 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. T

itles like Fedra West (also called Ballad of a Bounty Hunter)
and Johnny Hamlet signify the connection to theGreek 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 (again)
with a different ending – the loving couple leave ogether
t while their families annihilate each other
.

It is acknowledged that the story of A Fistful of Dollars closely resembles Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo.[36] 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 inSergio 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 G
( iuliano Gemma) 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 isGiorgio 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
.[37]
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
.

Clint Eastwood's first American Western film, Hang 'Em High (1968), incorporates elements of Spaghetti W
esterns.

The Bollywood film Sholay (1975) was often referred to as a "Curry Western".[38] 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 (1957) and Gunga Jumna (1961) with
that of Spaghetti Westerns. Sholay spawned its own genre of "Dacoit Western" films in Bollywood during the 1970s.[39]

The 1985 Japanese filmTampopo 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.[40]

American director Quentin Tarantino has utilized elements of Spaghetti Westerns in his films Kill Bill (combined with kung fu
movies),[41] Inglourious Basterds (set in Nazi-occupied France),[42] Django Unchained (set in the American South during the time of
slavery).[43] and The Hateful Eight (set in Wyoming post-US Civil War).

The American animated film Rango incorporates elements of Spaghetti Westerns, including a character modeled after The Man With
No Name.