New Spaghetti Western Book

The ambition of the author of ‘Spanish Western’, Pedro Guttierez ReCache is excellent. He intends to demonstrate that Spanish filmmakers, long before the Italy’s Sergio Leone, had created a genre well defined and an authentic precursor of the Italian development and aesthetics of western Europe.

400 packed pages, well resourced and fully identified in the creative business and industry: the conditions of production, filming, from its birth and use of scenery and operating through the torturous Franco censorship.

ReCache deftly draws on period documents, consulting, among others, the magazine ‘Fotogramas’ and interviews with past stars and supporting actors of the time: Fernando Sancho, Antonio Molino Rojo, Lex Barker, Giuliano Gemma, Hugo Fregonese and even ... Clint Eastwood, in an amazing interview from April 1964, conducted in Madrid, where the actor, then unknown in Spain, says he’s working in an Italian/Spanish co-production which began in Italy 15 days earlier, along with a beautiful German actress, unsure of her name Marianne Kock o Cook "(Marianne Koch), without even mentioning the name of the director ... Sergio Leone.

The article is reprinted and we then discover the man with no names face, photographed between two posters of A Fistful of Dollars, relaxed, in a beautiful designer stubble, which was required for the film, but in an elegant shirt and a wide open collar.

With a foreword by Carlos Aguilar, the book devotes a large section to Joaquin Romero Marchant, this major filmmaker and inventor has all but been forgotten in the history of cinema. Also many pictures in many sizes and CinemaScope colors that will leave for posterity the western Mediterranean .

It is rare to find a new book of any kind on Spaghetti Westerns, I would highly advise purchasing the book, even to those who do not or cannot read Spanish, given the quality and novelty of the information that can be found here..

Pedro Gutierrez ReCache, Spanish Western El Cine del Oeste como subgénero espanol (1954-1965), Generalitat Valenciana, 2010, (Foreword by Carlos Aguilar).