The Spaghetti Western: 7 Defining Examples + the Genre’s Influence on Cinema

Backstage

By Matt Goldberg

October 16, 2024

The sound of boots and spurs on the desert floor. An extreme close-up on a gunslinger’s eyes. The wah-wah-wahhhh of Ennio Morricone’s string and whistle-filled scores. You’d likely recognize the hallmarks of Italy’s “Spaghetti Western,” even if you’re not intimately familiar with the genre (or why it has such a peculiar name). Beyond their quick identifiers, these films are an essential piece of cinema’s development as a whole. Rather than a curious offshoot, Spaghetti Westerns circled back to influence American movies. It’s such a foundation, in fact, that any aspiring actor, filmmaker, or cinephile should dig in.

Why are they called “Spaghetti Westerns”?

The term was first used to describe the growing trend in the 1960s of making low-budget Westerns in Italy (although sometimes in Spain and Mexico, as well) with Italian filmmakers. Giants of the genre include Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, and Tonino Valerii.

The lack of large-scale budgets and the country’s unique landscapes both added to what became the genre’s trademarks. The scorched deserts of Italy, for example, couldn’t be mistaken for the soaring mesas of Monument Valley or other aspects of the American West. While you’re still in a desert, it’s instantly recognizable as something different from the locales used by American filmmakers such as John Ford and Anthony Mann.

Furthermore, the need to make these films on a relatively cheap budget meant a grittier look. As Jakob Straub of Boords explains:

“Italian filmmakers imitated the look of CinemaScope without the actual anamorphic lenses of the technique. Instead, they used the spherical lenses of Techniscope and shot on 35mm film to achieve a wide-screen image, with visible film grain as a byproduct. Many cinephiles consider that ‘gritty’ look an essential charm of the subgenre.”

This roughness carries over to the text of the movies, as characters engage in morally questionable behavior and inhabit places where notions of justice and fairness are completely foreign. While post-war American Westerns explored such moral complexities with movies like Ford’s “The Searchers” and Fred Zinnemann’s “High Noon,” they were still rooted in the popular mythos of American ideals and the nobility of the frontier. Spaghetti Westerns dismiss those notions from the start to deal with far more bleak and unforgiving circumstances.

Spaghetti Westerns to learn the genre

The Man With No Name Trilogy (1964–66, dir. Sergio Leone)

Leone is the biggest name among Spaghetti Western directors; he arguably created the entire feel for the genre with this trilogy of movies starring Clint Eastwood: “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), “For a Few Dollars More” (1965), and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966). In all three, Eastwood plays an unnamed protagonist who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty if it means exercising a little judgment. However, rather than a Western hero who rides into town to clean things up, Eastwood’s poncho-wearing outlaw is a man who typically wants to see a profit before even thinking of anything noble.

These movies also cement the tone of the Spaghetti Western, with Morricone’s lonely strings turning into rousing symphonies, the bleached landscapes and extreme close-ups used to capture characters’ emotions, and the bright-red blood that signified a more violent West (it was also easier to get out of laundry). But even though Leone was working with smaller budgets than his American contemporaries, he was also using that freedom to provide more nuance and shading to American mythology. Leone went even further with this inversion in a later Spaghetti Western, “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968), by casting Henry Fonda, a figure of moral rectitude and normalcy in American cinema, as a sociopathic mercenary.

“Django” (1966, dir. Sergio Corbucci)

If Leone is the best known and most revered of the Spaghetti Western directors, Corbucci is a close second, especially with his iconic 1966 film “Django” starring Franco Nero. Similar to “A Fistful of Dollars” (which itself is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai film, “Yojimbo”), a gunslinger comes into a dirty town to play the rival factions off of each other. From the outset you can tell that Corbucci is going to go much bigger than Leone. Nero’s Django arrives dragging a coffin containing a machine gun behind him. It’s all a nasty piece of work, but in a way that’s delectably fun and defiantly liberated from the mores imposed by Hollywood filmmaking.

“Day of Anger” (1967, dir. Tonino Valerii)

While Eastwood was able to carve out an iconic figure thanks to Leone’s movies, you shouldn’t sleep on his “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” costar Lee Van Cleef, who also made a name for himself in Spaghetti Westerns. Here, in Valerii’s 1967 film, Cleef plays Frank Talby, a gunslinger who takes Clifton, Arizona’s young custodian Scott (the sweet-faced Giuliano Gemma) under his wing when Scott wants to stop living as the town’s punching bag. While a typical American hero’s journey would necessitate the mentor figure dying and the protégé taking up the mantle, “Day of Anger” builds to a far more fascinating climax as Talby takes over the town and forces Scott to question how far he’ll follow his teacher’s amorality.

“A Bullet for the General” (1967, dir. Damiano Damiani)

If you want to get into a subgenre of a subgenre, then it’s worth looking at the “Zapata Westerns” within the Spaghetti Western. These Zapata films are set in Mexico and typically take place during the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920. Damiani’s “A Bullet for the General” is particularly effective, as we step away from straightforward gunslingers. Instead, we walk alongside the rambunctious and emotionally complex El Chuncho (Gian Maria Volonté), a man who seems addicted more to the violence and freedom of revolution rather than any revolutionary ideals. The film is particularly bold in how it uses the slimy and duplicitous American character Bill Tate (Lou Castel) as a critique of American imperialism and its mercenary desires to impose authoritarian values on other countries. John Ford would never.

“The Great Silence” (1968, dir. Sergio Corbucci)

While you likely know Klaus Kinski from his work with Werner Herzog, the German actor also popped up in more than a few Spaghetti Westerns, such as Corbucci’s “The Great Silence.” Here, he plays a delectable villain in a film about a mute gunslinger (Jean-Louis Trintignant) taking on a group of bounty hunters in a snow-swept town. The tundra-like conditions make “The Great Silence” a unique presence in the Western genre as a whole, giving the movie not only a chilly look, but also further emphasizing the unrelenting brutality of the world the characters inhabit.

Lasting influences of the Spaghetti Western

In Eastwood’s career alone, you can see what he learned from Leone with his directorial efforts such as “High Plains Drifter” (1973), “The Outlaw Josey Wales” (1976), and his Oscar-winning masterpiece “Unforgiven” (1992). Eastwood, despite very much also living within the American Western (his first major TV role was on the Western series “Rawhide”), brought with him a modern edge that both studios and audiences were looking for. That kind of moral complexity permeates Eastwood’s efforts both behind and in front of the camera—and he’s such a looming figure, it bled into the genre as a whole.

Although Westerns started to die off through the 1970s, young filmmakers still carried the torch for the bold Spaghetti Westerns, especially Quentin Tarantino. His movies carry overt references, such as 2012’s “Django Unchained” taking not only the title, character name, and theme song from Corbucci’s film, but also smaller notes such as echoing the use of Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Für Elise” in Sergio Sollima’s “The Big Gundown.” Tarantino’s contemporary and “Grindhouse” co-director Robert Rodriguez is also heavily influenced by the genre, particularly in his “El Mariachi” trilogy (the title character, played by Antonio Banderas, arrives with a guitar case, instead of a coffin, full of weaponry).

The trappings of the genre are so identifiable, they can even be used in a family film such as Chris Miller and Phil Lord’s “The Lego Movie” (2014), which signifies the characters’ visit to “the Old West” with a “Ya ya ya!” musical cue meant to evoke Morricone’s scores.

But perhaps the most lasting influence is the way Spaghetti Westerns demonstrated how outsider status leads to innovation of the Hollywood status quo. Similar to the French New Wave, Italian neorealist movement, and New Hollywood, these filmmakers came out of World War II and upended Hollywood tropes to better reflect the darkness of the world they knew. You don’t get to the extreme violence and revisionist critiques of American history in films such as Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” (1969) and Robert Altman’s “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (1971) without the influence and popularity of Spaghetti Westerns. It takes outsiders to deconstruct, re-evaluate, and rebuild what previously existed.

The name “Spaghetti Western” is silly on the surface, and it’s easy to parody tropes such as violent shootouts and Italian actors being badly redubbed into English. But these broad evaluations miss how this subgenre forced Westerns to grow, evolve, and meet a modern world. Italian filmmakers forced a stylistic evolution. Far from a foreign curio, Spaghetti Westerns are an essential part of one of cinema’s most enduring genres.