Spaghetti Westerns: An Italian-born film genre rooted in America

Italian-American Herald

By Richard Sasso

October 23, 2025

My maternal grandfather loved serial Western television programs from the 1950s and 1960s such as “The Lone Ranger” and “Gunsmoke.” But he had come from deep in the Mezzogiorno, and we lived in suburban Chicago, which has no mountains, deserts, cowboys, or horses. So, I wondered what possible interest he could have had in these programs. One day, my father, also an Italian immigrant, explained it. A combination of factors made Western films popular in Italy: Italian movie theaters did a brisk business before television, and Hollywood produced a great many Western films whose structure and iconography made them easy to understand: They had limited and simple dialogue that was easily dubbed or subtitled, plenty of action, and much of the story telling was strongly visual with clear clues, such the fact that characters literally signaled their morality with black and white hats.

[Clint Eastwood invented an anti-hero protagonist in a series of 1960s spaghetti Westerns that came be known as “The Man With No Name” trilogy.] 

Indeed, Italians have been making art about the American West since at least 1910, with Puccini’s “La fanciulla del West” (“The Girl of the West”), but these new spaghetti Westerns were something else. The genre has its origins in three films by Sergio Leone, an Italian filmmaker who had an endless interest in the United States. (One documentary about him is titled “Sergio Leone, the Italian Who Invented America.”) This set of films is known in various ways: “The Man with No Name” trilogy, or the “Dollars” Trilogy. The first film, “A Fistful of Dollars” was released in 1964 in Italy but not in the United States until 1967. The trilogy concluded with “For A Few Dollars More” and “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.” They would revolutionize the Western film genre, and impact global cinema more generally.

A word about the names of this genre. Although the films were sometimes made in other countries, they were almost always directed and produced by Italians, lending them the name “spaghetti Western,” although another interesting name was western all’italiana, or “Italian-style westerns.”

What drove the revolutionary power of these new “spaghetti Westerns?” They were unique in many ways. Whereas earlier American Westerns were often studies in moral clarity, these films often presented a much grayer world. Indeed, the character that Clint Eastwood plays throughout the “Dollars” trilogy presented American audiences with an early example of an anti-hero, a protagonist who was only nominally better than his opponents, if not being outright morally objectionable themselves. And villains could even be sympathetic, in their own way. Indeed, it often seems as if the films have no heroes or villains, just a set of characters making their way through a morally challenging world. Also, unlike earlier American Westerns that were regulated by production codes or rating systems, these films showed violence, and not a little bit of it either. When these films’ popularity reached its peak in the late 1960s into the early 1970s, they reflected the moral ambiguities of those turbulent times. ‘

Moreover, the films looked different from the traditional fare moviegoers were accustomed to. During “the classic” period of the Hollywood studio system, most directors tried to make films in straightforward ways with little directorial flair, choosing to depend on good writing and acting to tell their stories; direction was supposed to be “invisible.” Sergio Leone and subsequent filmmakers sought to use more of the tools of cinematography to tell their stories. Zoom lenses often brought the viewer into close contact with a character on screen, and close-ups were used more often, and shots were often much longer, with the camera lingering on the actors or the landscape. The bleached-out vision of the wide-open spaces of the American West was shot less romantically, and films were often set in Mexico or featured the Hispanic culture of the American Southwest. Many spaghetti Westerns also used title credits to capture the audience’s attention in creative ways rather than being a mundane exercise in providing information about cast and crew.

But the films sounded different, too. Many students of film, such as Quentin Tarantino, have pointed out that Sergio Leone had no better collaborator than Ennio Morricone, who began to use electric guitars and musical whistles in soundtracks. Where scores for previous Westerns had employed full orchestras, Ennio Morricone often worked with different tools. But he and Leone also developed some interesting innovations, integrating the soundtrack more fully into the movie. The music became a force in the film, with the editing coordinated to the soundtrack instead of simply being played for mood in the background. Morricone’s soundtrack for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” was honored with a Grammy in 2008. Most Americans would recognize large parts of it, even if they could not name the source. Morricone would go on to win an honorary Oscar in 2007 for the hundreds of scores he composed in his career.

Eventually, spaghetti Westerns became a cultural phenomenon, first in Europe and then elsewhere. Between the years 1964 and 1978, there were nearly 500 films made in Italy alone. The films were often shot at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, but also in southern Italy and parts of Spain. The films were often shot on low budgets, used recurring, international casts, and had similar plot lines. They also borrowed from other cinematic and literary traditions – the Japanese film “Yojimbo” was the basis for several films (and ensuing copyright lawsuits!) The standoff at the end of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” is a careful reiteration of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale,” the moral of which is Radix malorum est cupiditas: Greed is the root of all evils, illustrating that these films were often reflections on individual and institutional corruption.

Eventually, the spaghetti Western would decline in popularity, but not in influence. Clint Eastwood would go on to have a long career as an actor and a director across many genres. In fact, major directors today acknowledge the influence of Sergio Leone more generally and this new type of Western, his most influential innovation. Quentin Tarantino’s filmography is strongly influenced by Leone. His “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” echoes the title of Leone’s classic film, “Once Upon a Time in the West,” as does the fact that the film’s protagonist, Rick Dalton, spends part of his career making spaghetti Westerns in Rome. Tarantino’s violent Western, “The Hateful Eight” reflects the gritty realism frequent in spaghetti Westerns. His film “Django Unchained” draws on a series of Euro-Westerns with a title character named Django.

But the simple reality is that no Western today is without debt to the spaghetti Western. HBO’s “Deadwood,” which sought to deconstruct the genre, bore the hallmarks of the moral complexity of the spaghetti Western, including high realism and sometimes unstinting, brutal violence. The Coen Brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” shows the chaos of a world in which nearly every character is morally compromised in some way, and all suffer in the end. The film could almost be seen as a modern spaghetti Western.

No one could have imagined that “A Fistful of Dollars,” a low-budget Western film made by an Italian director would not only revolutionize a uniquely American genre of film, but cinema more generally. But it did. The enduring success, appeal, and influence of the spaghetti Western speak to the power of the fusion of American history and culture with Italian aesthetic and artistic sensibilities. But that’s a story every Italian-American knows, isn’t it?