The Collector
By Katrina Funk
October 4, 2025
American vs. Italian Westerns: The Good, the Bad, and
the Selfish
Long-term collaborator Ennio Morricone’s haunting score featuring howling coyotes and gunshots added to Leone’s vision of a gritty, epic West. When Spaghetti Westerns first emerged, the Western film genre was already a cultural staple in the United States. In the 1950s and 1960s, television Westerns such as Gunsmoke and the Lone Ranger were household names. American Western films and TV shows usually portrayed an idealized, almost mythical version of the West. Good characters donned snow-white hats and chaps, while bad characters wore black hats and leather masks. Native Americans were antagonists, obstacles to Manifest Destiny.
American film and television Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s painted pictures of nostalgia and an idealized version of the Wild West that romanticized the era of the frontier. American Westerns presented both good and evil characters as one-dimensional, rarely breaking from their assigned moral roles.
For example, in John Sturges’s 1960 film The Magnificent
Seven, the film’s antagonist, outlaw Calvera, terrorizes a frontier town with
his gang, preying on the helpless townsfolk. The character of Calvera, played
by Eli Wallach, is a sneering villain with yellowed teeth and a thinning swath
of hair, sweat-plastered to his forehead under this hat. By contrast, the
Magnificent Seven, a group of men hired by the townsfolk to defeat Calvera, are
all clean-shaven and sharply dressed. These binary portrayals of antagonists
and protagonists were the norm in American Westerns in the 1950s and 60s.
Characters featured in Italian Westerns, on the other hand, seemed to exist in a moral gray area, their actions blurring the line between good and evil. Leone subverted the binary of good versus evil, instead making his characters more complex. For example, Leone’s male protagonists appear unshaven, sunburnt, and gruff. In his role as the Man with No Name in A Fistful of Dollars, Clint Eastwood is unsmiling, with a cigarillo dangling from the corner of his mouth for much of the film. His counterpart and adversary, Ramon Rojo, does not differ drastically in appearance. Like the Man with No Name, he is suave and a skilled gunslinger.
Though Eastwood’s Man with No Name does perform heroic acts, such as rescuing a young woman and returning her to her family, in A Fistful of Dollars, the character is largely motivated by selfish interests. Leone portrayed the American West as a brutal place where characters often performed nefarious and selfish acts to survive, defend themselves, and avoid humiliation.
Unlike the mythical West portrayed in American Westerns, Leone’s West was bleak and often cruel. Just as the Man with No Name does not act to defend the child in the film’s opening scene because he has no stake in the situation, his coming to the aid of the young woman serves only to rectify a wrong in his past. When he first enters the town at the beginning of the film, he does not intend to bring peace or order. His only goal is to earn money for an unknown cause, which he does by playing the families in the town against each other.
In addition, The Man with No Name demonstrates his ruthlessness by nonchalantly shooting and killing three men who insult his mule upon entering town. Eastwood’s character in the Dollars Trilogy cemented the reputation of Spaghetti Western protagonists as loners with shadowy pasts and few friends or allies.
[To be continued]
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