spaghetti western

spaghetti western, subgenre of movies set in the 19th-century American West that were made by Italian filmmakers and filmed throughout Europe during the 1960s and early ’70s. Spanish journalist Alfonso Sánchez is generally credited with coining the term spaghetti western.

Italian filmmakers began experimenting with westerns as early as the 1910s. Known as Eurowesterns, these films were primarily parodies of American westerns and did not receive much attention. It was not until the 1960s that filmmakers began introducing the attitudes, grit, and styles that would go on to define the spaghetti western subgenre. Between 1964 and 1973 roughly 500 spaghetti westerns were made.

Style and themes

Stylistically, spaghetti westerns are known for their low-budget sets and costumes, dramatic close-up shots of characters’ faces, and opening credits with colorful graphic designs. In addition, the genre is closely identified with composer Ennio Morricone, whose melodramatic electric-guitar-inflected scores feature in many of the best known spaghetti westerns. Many of the films were shot in the dry Almería province of Spain as a stand-in for the Chihuahuan, Sonoran, and Mojave desert settings of North America. The filmmakers typically cast American actors, including Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef, in the lead roles.

What sets spaghetti westerns apart from traditional American westerns thematically is their cynical and violent outlook, embodied in antiheroic lead characters. The Wild West period typically was idealized by Hollywood filmmakers as a time of virtuous rugged individualism and the heroic formation of U.S. institutions on the frontier. Italian filmmakers took a more morally ambiguous approach that showcased the brutality and corruption of the era, often featuring gunfights, blood, and gore that Hollywood-made westerns usually did not include, especially when the Motion Picture Production Code (also called the Hays Code) was in effect, from 1934 to 1968.

Directors and films

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The subgenre first gained wide recognition in 1964 with the release of A Fistful of Dollars, directed by Sergio Leone. Adapted from Kurosawa Akira’s samurai film Yojimbo (1961), it stars Eastwood as a wandering gunfighter, the Man with No Name, who manipulates two feuding families to his advantage in a Mexican border town ravaged by greed. A Fistful of Dollars was enormously successful and became the model for future spaghetti westerns. Leone followed up A Fistful of Dollars with two sequels, For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), both of which feature Eastwood and Van Cleef. Known as the Dollars trilogy, the three films are widely considered some of the best spaghetti westerns ever made.

While Leone is regarded as the pioneer of the subgenre, several other directors made contributions to its success by adding their own creative visions in their films. Some of the most notable are Sergio Corbucci, Sergio Sollima, Giulio Petroni, Tonino Valerii, and Enzo Barboni.

Corbucci is recognized for having made some of the most violent spaghetti westerns, including Django (1966), about an American Civil War veteran contending with a white supremacist militia and Mexican revolutionaries, and The Great Silence (1968), about a loner (Jean-Louis Trintignant) protecting a rural town against a bounty hunter (Klaus Kinski) in the snow-covered hills of Utah (filmed in the Dolomites).

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Although Sollima filmed only three spaghetti westerns, his trilogy—consisting of The Big Gundown (1967), Face to Face (1967), and Run, Man, Run (1968)—is known for including intellectual political commentary and focusing on Mexican protagonists.

Petroni explored dark psychological complexities in his movies, which sometimes feature a mentor-mentee relationship between the older and younger characters. For example, in Death Rides a Horse (1967) a young gunfighter (John Phillip Law) seeking vengeance for the murder of his family joins forces with a former outlaw (Van Cleef) who harbors his own vendetta against the killers.

Valerii is known for films that range from violent to comedic. Day of Anger (1967) tells the story of a downtrodden boy (Giuliano Gemma) and a ruthless gunfighter (Van Cleef) who takes over the town of Clifton, in Arizona Territory, resulting in corruption, violence, and bloodshed. The comedy My Name Is Nobody (1973) follows an aging famed gunfighter (Henry Fonda) who is encouraged by a happy-go-lucky gunman (Terence Hill) to take down a gang of 150 outlaws as an epic final act.

Barboni is credited with popularizing the slapstick version of the spaghetti western with the release of They Call Me Trinity in 1970. In the film, two brothers—a lazy, unkempt gunfighter (Hill) and an inept horse thief (Bud Spencer)—defend a group of Mormons from a neighbor and his henchmen who are trying to frighten them away so they can take their land. The sequel Trinity Is Still My Name (1971), in which the brothers save a pioneer family, break up an arms ring, and search for a hidden treasure, was even more successful than its predecessor and became the highest-grossing spaghetti western of all time.

Ongoing influence

Spaghetti westerns died out by the late 1970s but have proved to be an enduring influence on subsequent filmmakers. Most notably, the American directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino have incorporated many of the subgenre’s styles and themes into their work since the early 1990s.

Rodriguez’s Mexico trilogy, which includes El Mariachi (1992), Desperado (1995), and Once upon a Time in Mexico (2003), follows a mariachi musician-turned-gunfighter. The title of the last is a direct tribute to Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West (1968) and Once upon a Time in America (1984), and all three films make use of the revenge-plot themes, close-up shots, and violence of the original spaghetti westerns.

Tarantino has cited Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly as his favorite movie, and his work has frequently referenced and been inspired by spaghetti westerns. The director used Morricone’s music in several films—for example, he included a track that had originally appeared in Death Rides a Horse in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)—and later commissioned the Italian composer to create an original score for his 2015 western, The Hateful Eight. (The latter earned Morricone his first Oscar for best score.) Tarantino also directed Django Unchained (2012), a partial homage to Corbucci’s Django.