The spaghetti Western is a broad subgenre of Western films produced in Europe. It emerged in the mid-1960s in the wake of Sergio Leone's filmmaking style and international box-office success. The term was used by foreign critics because most of these Westerns were produced and directed by Italians.
The majority of the films in the spaghetti Western genre were international co-productions by Italy and Spain, and sometimes France, West Germany, Britain, Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia, and the United States. Over six hundred European Westerns were made between 1960 and 1978, including nearly five hundred in Italy, which dominated the market. 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.
Leone's films and other core spaghetti Westerns are often described as having eschewed, criticized 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.Frayling (2006), pp. 39–67. In 1968, the wave of spaghetti Westerns reached its crest, comprising one-third of Italian film production, only to collapse to one-tenth in 1969. Spaghetti Westerns have left their mark on popular culture, strongly influencing numerous works produced in and outside of Italy.
Terminology The phrase spaghetti Western was coined by Spanish journalist in 1966, in reference to the Italian food spaghetti.Joyner, C. Courtney. Aldo Sambrell Interview The Westerners: Interviews with Actors, Directors, Writers and Producers McFarland, 14 October 2009, p. 180. Spaghetti Westerns are also known as Italian Westerns, meatball Westerns or, primarily in Japan, macaroni Westerns. In Italy, the genre is typically referred to as western all'italiana (Italian-style Western). Italo-Western is also used, especially in Germany.
Similar concepts The term Eurowesterns has been used to broadly refer to all non-Italian Western movies from Europe, including the West German Winnetou films and the Eastern Bloc Red Western films. Taking its name from the Spanish rice dish, "Paella Western" has been used to refer to Western films produced in Spain.Frayling, Christopher. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone I. B. Tauris, 27 January 2006, p. xxi. The Japanese film Tampopo was promoted as a "Ramen Western".
Production The majority of the films in the spaghetti Western genre were international co-productions by Italy and Spain, and sometimes France, West Germany, Britain, Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia, and the United States. Over six hundred European Westerns were made between 1960 and 1978.Riling (2011), p. 334.
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.Frayling (2006), pp. 68–70. The movies typically had a B-movie setting or lower budget production similar to classic Western films.
The typical spaghetti Western team was made up of an Italian director, an Italo-SpanishFridlund (2006), p. 5. technical staff, and a cast of Italian, Spanish, and (sometimes) West German and American actors.
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, thus, 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 survived as theme parks, such as 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 (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.
Context and origins
Early European Westerns European Westerns are as old as filmmaking itself. The Lumière brothers had 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 of Camargue (1911–1912).Charles Ford: Histoire du Western (Paris: Ed. Albin Michel, 1976) p. 263ff; George N. Fenin and William K. Everson (New York: Orion Press, 1962), p. 322ff.
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 (The Girl of the Golden West or The Damsel of the West), which is sometimes considered to be the first spaghetti Western.
The first Western movie made in Italy was La voce del sangue, produced by the Turin film studio Itala Film.Magrin Haas (2022), p. 167ff. In 1913, La vampira Indiana was released; a combination of Western and vampire film. It was directed by Vincenzo Leone, father of Sergio Leone, and starred his mother, Bice Valerian, in the title role as the Indian princess Fatale.Frayling (2000), p. 29ff. The Italians also made Wild Bill Hickok films, while the Germans released backwoods Westerns featuring Bela Lugosi as Uncas.
Of the Western-related European films before 1964, the one that attracted the most attention is arguably Luis Trenker's Der Kaiser von Kalifornien about John Sutter.Frayling (2006), p. 1ff. Another Italian Western is Girl of the Golden West. The film's title alludes to the Giacomo Puccini opera referred to above, but is not an adaptation of it. It was one of a handful of Westerns to be made during the silent film and Fascist Italy eras.. Forerunners of the genre were also Giorgio Ferroni's Il fanciullo del West (The Boy in the West) and Fernando Cerchio's Il bandolero stanco, starring Erminio Macario and Renato Rascel, respectively.
After World War II, there were scattered European uses of Western settings, mostly for comedy, musical or otherwise. A cycle of Western comedies was initiated in 1959 with La sceriffa and Il terrore dell'Oklahoma, followed by other films starring comedy specialists, such as Walter Chiari, Ugo Tognazzi, Raimondo Vianello, and Fernandel. An Italian critic has compared these comedies to American Bob Hope vehicles.Molinari, Mario. "Prima che arrivassero gli 'spaghetti'", Segnocinema 22 (March 1986), Vicenza.
Origins of the genre
The first American-British Western filmed in Spain was The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, directed by Raoul Walsh in 1958. It was followed by Savage Guns, a British-Spanish Western, again filmed in Spain. It marked the beginning of Spain as a suitable film-shooting location for any type of European Western. The same year, in 1961, an Italian company coproduced the French Taste of Violence, with a Mexican Revolution theme. In 1963, three non-comedy Italo-Spanish Westerns were produced: Gunfight at Red Sands, Implacable Three, and Gunfight at High Noon.
In 1965, Bruno Bozzetto released his traditionally animated feature film West and Soda, a Western parody with a marked spaghetti Western theme. Although it was 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 Fistfuls, and lasted longer, mainly because of the use of more time-demanding animation over regular acting. For this reason, Bozzetto claims to have invented the spaghetti Western genre.
Because there is no real consensus about where to draw the exact line between spaghetti Westerns and other Eurowesterns (or other Westerns in general), it cannot be said which film is definitively the first spaghetti Western. However, 1964 saw the breakthrough of this genre, with more than twenty productions or coproductions 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. It was the innovations in cinematic style, music, acting and story of Leone's first Western that decided that spaghetti Westerns became a distinct subgenre and not just a number of films looking like American Westerns.Fridlund, pp. 80–81.
A Fistful of Dollars and its impact In this seminal film, Leone used a distinct visual style with large face close ups to tell the story of a hero entering a town that is ruled by two outlaw gangs, and ordinary social relations are nonexistent. The hero betrays and plays the gangs against each other to make money. 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 interactions in this story range between cunning and irony (the tricks, deceits, unexpected actions and sarcasm of the hero), and pathos (terror and brutality against defenseless people and against the hero after his doublecross has been revealed). Ennio Morricone's innovative score expresses a similar duality between quirky and unusual sounds and instruments, and sacral dramatizing for the big confrontation scenes. Another important novelty was Clint Eastwood's performance as the man with no name—an unshaven, sarcastic, insolent Western antihero with personal goals in mind, and with distinct visuals to boot—the squint, the cigarillo, the poncho, etc.Frayling (2000), pp. 118–65.
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.Frayling (2006), pp. 68–102. When the typically low-budget production, A Fistful of Dollars, turned into a remarkable box-office success, the industry began to copy its innovations. Most subsequent Spaghetti Westerns aimed to portray a laconic hero with superhuman weapon skill, preferably one resembling Clint Eastwood: Franco Nero, John Garko, and Terence Hill started out that way; Anthony Steffen and others stayed that way throughout their spaghetti Western careers.
Whoever the hero was, he would join an outlaw gang to further his own secret agenda, as in A Pistol for Ringo, Blood for a Silver Dollar, Vengeance Is a Dish Served Cold, Renegade Riders, and others, while Beyond the Law 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, often an undertaker, to serve as sidekick for the hero. For the love interest, ranchers' daughters, schoolmarms and barroom maidens were overshadowed by young Latin women desired by dangerous men, for which actresses, such as 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—similar to securing the latter's retribution.Fridlund, pp. 15–57.