"Sixty years ago, A Fistful of Dollars was released in Italian cinemas. What is spaghetti westerns? Here are some curiosities from Sergio Leone's sets.
Focus
September 12, 2024
[Clint Eastwood on
the set of A Fistful of Dollars, directed by Sergio Leone in 1964.]
Why a western? A Fistful of Dollars is Sergio Leone's first western film; No one, then, would have bet on such a resounding success. Perhaps not even Leone himself, who had a limited budget and a script that took up a film about the samurai by the Japanese Kurosawa (which also had a judicial aftermath). But why choose the western, a typically American genre?
The decline of the blockbusters. Cristina Bragaglia, professor of film history at the University of Bologna, explains: "The "peplum" trend, the costumed blockbusters with a Roman or mythological setting, such as The Last Days of Pompeii or Quo Vadis, shot at Cinecittà and which had kept the economic fortunes of Italian cinema high (albeit in the hands of American directors), had entered a crisis. We needed to find new subjects." It was Amadeo Tessari, alias Duccio Tessari, who focused on the western. But Italian producers could not hope to hire American actors who specialize in the genre. Little-known faces were chosen, such as that of the young Californian Clint Eastwood. Leone was not looking for a hero's face. His characters were cynical, never idealistic.
Alongside Eastwood, for the films of the "Dollar Trilogy" (in addition to A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More of 1965, The Good, the Bad of 1966), ended up Lee van Cleef and Eli Wallach. They too were very little "John Wayne". Because? "There was a desire to reinterpret the genre in an ironic way, as evidenced by the sparse dialogues, sometimes surreal to the point of humorous," says the historian. For the same reason, next to these protagonists, there was no room for strong female roles. The only exception is Claudia Cardinale, in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).
Texas in Spain. The low budget prevented it from filming in the United States. Spain was chosen as an alternative, then under the Franco dictatorship. Not only were the costs there very low, but there were also, between Castile and Andalusia, corners that seemed to have been thrown there from Texas or Arizona. In Andalusia, the area around Tabernas was chosen, today a village of 4 thousand inhabitants in the middle of 280 km2 of semi-dertic landscape, where you can still visit some sets. In Castile, the West was instead in Sala de Los Infantes, 60 km from Burgos.
The Franco government welcomed the Italians with open arms: it granted authorizations and lent a hand with logistics. It was the Spanish soldiers who built the fake cemetery of 8 thousand graves at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. And it was the Spanish military genius who built the bridge that, in the same film, is blown up in a spectacular sequence.
Historical study. Beyond the cinematographic result
(which became a cult within a generation), the "spaghetti westerns",
as the Americans called them with contempt, were not approximate. Indeed.
"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a recognized masterpiece of the Trilogy,
well represents the very harsh American Civil War," explains Bragaglia.
Leone documented himself in the United States and managed to restore, more than
the Americans, the violence of that conflict. And the director explained that,
when he was studying how to make a scene with a Northern prison camp, the Nazi
death camps crossed his mind. The violence of Italian-style westerns was not,
therefore, as some said at the time, an end in itself. After all, it was the
violence of history.
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