In Ford’s westerns, there was no doubt about the heroic
status of the cavalry. In Garrone’s western, however, there is no doubt that
the cavalry officer who betrayed Django is a representation of a selfish will
to power, corruption, and tyranny. However, even though the Union army is shown
up as a hotbed of corruption, vice, and selfish greed, the ghost of Django does
not symbolise its moral counterpart. In fact, the representation of Django as
an avenging ghost works to highlight, even more so than Leone’s westerns, the
way in which machismo stands at the heart of moral hypocrisy. As a human cowboy,
Django would have been struggling with the very immorality of his revenge
because it would lower him to the status of those very villains who had wronged
him. As a ghost, however, Django becomes a diabolical, equally self-serving
force in the course of the film: his thirst for slow and bloody revenge becomes
emblematic of the hyper-masculinity that stands at the root of the corrupt
union officers who killed him in the first place.
As in Django the Bastard, in Jose Antonio Balanos’ Lucky
Johnny: Born in America (1973), the horrors rather than the glories of the
American civil war form the backdrop of the action. The protagonists here are
again not Ford’s cavalry, but an old undertaker and his young ward, whose
parents have been killed by bandits. They seem to wander through the war-torn
West without any sense of direction in search of corpses to bury. This will
allow the old man to collect the government premium with which to build a new
cemetery to leave to Johnny as his patrimony. Whereas Leone’s Dollar Trilogy
satirised the American obsession with gold and material wealth, Balanos’s Lucky
Johnny utilizes the gothic trope of graveyard excesses to comment on the
literal status in the American West of the otherwise abstract concept of
“walking over dead bodies.” Whereas in Ford’s cavalry films the battles were
ideological and in Leone’s film’s the Civil War was pictured as an opportunity
for the trickster to make a profit, in Lucky Johnny the Civil War is reduced to
the physical encounter between living and dead bodies. The grotesque universe
of the Spaghetti western is distilled from all its comic particles when Johnny
and his stepfather are stopped in their tracks by a mountain of corpses. The
camera surveys this mountain of bodies by the dim light of a gas lamp,
heightening the surreal nature of the viewing experience and transforming the
terrifying scene into a horrific symbol for the outcome of the ideology of
manifest destiny. The old man representing the naïveté of the western pioneer
is ecstatic at their discovery and professes to Johnny that they are now rich
and kisses one of the corpses in a gesture of thankfulness for the bounty he
has received.
By its surreal and excessive piling of corpses and by
presenting these corpses as the only viable currency of exchange, the film is
not actually concerned with the American West but more with the American
economic ideal that underscored western expansionism: a free-market economy in
which every man fends for himself and his family, and in which he is
increasingly pushed by commercial demands to become ruthless and unconcerned
with moral values in order to survive.
Finally, Enzo G. Castellari’s developed Corbucci and
Garrone’s use of gothic tropes — such as the immortal wanderer and the ghost —
to create the most gothic of all Spaghetti westerns, Keoma (1975). The West in
Keoma is initially represented using only shades of grey. This colour scheme
had been utilized to great effect by Charles Dickens in the opening pages of
his gothic mystery Bleak House (1851) to portray the immorality and
hell-on-earth atmosphere of nineteenth-century London. In Keoma, too, the
photographic tone sets the moral tone. By the end of the film, this grey
western junk heap has transformed itself into a literal Hell on Earth in which
the hero, Keoma, has the ambiguous honour of becoming a Christ-like symbol for
human suffering as he is nailed to a gigantic wagon wheel while the demonic
figures rave it up in the infernal saloon.
The gothic Spaghetti western was not a temporary blip on
the popular culture radar of the 1960s and ’70s. As early as 1973, Clint
Eastwood created his own American gothic western, High Plains Drifter (1973),
followed later by another ghost story, Pale Rider (1985). Gothic Eurowesterns
would also be greatly influential on the goth counterculture of the 1980s and
’90s. British goth rockers Fields of the Nephilim (1985-1992) would copy the
look and sound of the gothic Eurowestern for their music and stage show. More
recently, the Texas band Ghoultown has successfully blended gothic imagery with
Spaghetti-western sounds, becoming key figures in the genre of Hellbilly music.
Significantly, the gothic Eurowestern has become a structural as well as
aesthetic influence on the world’s most prolific and successful contemporary
author of horror fiction: Stephen King. His Dark Tower series was partly
inspired by what King described as the “sense of magnificent dislocation” that
characterises Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.11 One of the novel’s
illustrations pictures the solitary wandering cowboy, standing on the horizon,
a gun in each hand, overlooking a trail of dead bodies; he has just
exterminated an entire town (King 66).
Note: This article was published in 2005 without
illustrations and in a different format in the e-journal kiez21.org
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Loy, R. Philip.
Westerns and American Culture, 1930-1955 (London: McFarland, 2001), 47 and 121.
Pye, Douglas.
“The Western (Genre and Movies).” In Film Genre Reader II. (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1995), 195.
J. A. Place,
The Western Films of John Ford (Secaucus, N.J.: The Citadel Press, 1974), 63.
Anderson,
Lindsay. About John Ford (London: Plexus, 1999), 124-5.
Frayling,
Christopher. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio
Leone (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).
Thomson,
Philip. Grotesque (London: Methuen, 1972), 20.
Gallagher, Tag.
“Shoot-Out at the Genre Corrall: Problems in the Evolution of the Western.” In
Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 253.
This latent
slapstick quality would be used to great effect in Bud Spencer and Terrence
Hill’s comedy westerns like They Call Me Trinity (1970) and My Name Is Nobody
(1973) that followed the international success of Leone’s Dollar Trilogy.
Clark, John R.
The Modern Satiric Grotesque and Its Traditions (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 1991), 17.
Weisser,
Thomas. Spaghetti Westerns — the Good, the Bad and the Violent: 558
Eurowesterns and Their Personnel, 1961-1977 (London: McFarland, 1992).
Stephen King.
“Introduction” to The Dark Tower 1: The Gunslinger, Revised and Expanded
Edition (New York, N.Y.: Plume, 2003), xv.
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