The Spaghetti Western Subgenre, Explained

 How European Westerns broke the American mold.

Movieweb

By Mona Bassil

April 4, 2023

The classic American Western movie genre depicts the adventures and struggles of the Old West/Frontier life in the 1800s, but from a romanticized point of view. Starting with The Great Train Robbery in 1903 and continuing to this day, traditional Westerns have followed a specific formula. Directors like John Ford or Howard Hawks, and actors like John Wayne or Gary Cooper created iconic films that enthralled audiences globally in the genre’s heyday, between the 1940s and the early 1960s. The Searchers, Shane, High Noon, True Grit, and Johnny Guitar are fine examples.

There was a clear line between protagonists and antagonists, and most stories concluded happily. Sure, there was gun, dynamite, and close-combat violence, but it wasn’t gratuitous and over-the-top. The dialogue was mostly engaging, with minimal profanity. The good guys were high on morality and had a clean look. On the other hand, the bad guys were instantly identifiable. Women were beautiful, slender, nurturing homemakers who needed to be rescued from kidnappers and robbers. Romances, albeit bittersweet, abounded. And children and pets were essentially used for emotional momentum; in Shane’s iconic closing scene, Little Joey screaming “Shane, come back!” to the drifter (Alan Ladd) who saved his little town and then rode away, broke the viewers’ hearts.

European filmmakers did not have Hollywood’s budgets but they, too, wanted to present trigger-happy characters, albeit in their own stylized way. So, they came up with a bolder formula that deviated from Hollywood's stereotypes. It’s unclear when the first Spaghetti Western was released, but most critics agree it was Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, in 1964, that paved the way for at least 500 titles. The “Spaghetti” term was slapped because those movies were considered cheaper knockoffs of the American classics, and were filmed and produced by Italians for the most part.

Here are the essential ingredients to this messy and tantalizing sauce.

Filming

Unlike American westerns, which were often shot in the canyons and deserts of New Mexico and California, Spaghettis were low-budget and mostly filmed in Italy’s Cinecittà studios and in Spain’s Tabernas desert and the Cabo de Gata-Níjar natural park. The filmmakers imitated the CinemaScope style with spherical Techniscope lenses and used 35mm film, which resulted in a grainier image. This paired well with the unconventional editing of extreme close-ups alternating with wide angles, and the excessive use of the dramatic zoom.

Notable Directors and Actors

The 3 Sergios, Leone (The Dollars Trilogy, Duck, You Sucker, Once Upon a Time in the West), Corbucci (Django, The Great Silence), and Sollima (Face to Face, The Big Gundown, Run, Man, Run), gave us bonified classics. But Tonino Valerii, Damiano Damiani, Lucio Fulci, Enzo Barboni, and Giulio Petroni also left their mark. Besides Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach, veteran actors included Franco Nero, Giuliano Gemma, Klaus Kinski, Terence Hill, Tomas Milian, George Hilton, and Gian Maria Volontè.

Scoring

Maestro Ennio Morricone (Cinema Paradiso, Exorcist II, The Thing, The Mission, Red Sonja) composed a new style of Western film scoring with operatic vocals, eerie whistling, electric guitars, and the use of unusual elements, such as watch-chimes and whiplash. His work on The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame. Other composers, like Bruno Nicolai, followed in his footsteps.

Antiheroes and Psychotic Villains

Both main and secondary characters were morally ambiguous, and the protagonists (bounty hunters, revolutionaries, thieves, lone drifters…) were only considered “good” compared to their terrifying, neurotic opponents. They were all driven by greed, lust, and/or power. Some of them used outrageous signature weapons, like four-barrel shotguns, explosive cigars, razor-throwing cards, pipe-organ cannons, machine guns hidden in coffins, or shotguns masquerading as musical instruments.

Violence, Profanity, and Nudity

Until the late 1960s, American films were bound by the Hays Production Code, which promoted the triumph of morality (meaning the good guys should always win), and prohibited “ridicule on any religious faith, dances suggesting sexual actions, seduction or rape, indecent or undue exposure, graphic violence,” and similar content. So, Spaghetti Western filmmakers had a field day and included a copious amount of those forbidden, provocative elements. Even women and children were not spared

Disillusionment and Cynicism

While Hollywood glamorized the Old West, Spaghetti Westerns were more brutal, abrupt, and realistic, and often tackled the ugly side of human nature, like greed, corruption, abuse, and cruelty. Both the Civil War and the Mexican Revolution were explored, too, adding more blood, injustice, and devastation to the mix. It’s no wonder Blondie (Clint Eastwood) remarked in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, “I’ve never seen so many men wasted so badly.”

Spaghetti Westerns were occasionally released in American theaters, but were mediocrely dubbed. Sometimes, even titles and taglines were lost in translation. The iconic Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo (The Good, the Ugly, The Bad) was translated into The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, thus making Lee Van Cleef’s character “the ugly” instead of “the bad.” This might seem like a trivial matter, but in a movie that is considered the quintessential Spaghetti Western, the good is only “good” compared to the other two, and “the ugly” is only moderately bad compared to the main antagonist; because unlike their American counterparts, these movies were actually meant to be morally gray.

While modern filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino are still attempting to recapture its spirit, this trend technically fell out of fashion in the late 1970s, and titles like the 1973 My Name is Nobody (with Terence Hill and Henry Fonda), the 1976 Keoma (with Franco Nero), and the 1976 God’s Gun (with Lee Van Cleef), are considered the ultimate farewell to this cult subgenre.