Spaghetti Westerns & American Myth: The Wild West Through Italian Eyes [Part 2 of 4]

The Collector

By Katrina Funk

October 4, 2025

Tracing the Origins: Who’s Who of Spaghetti Westerns

Though Leone was undoubtedly the most influential and well-known of the Spaghetti Western directors, two other directors, also named Sergio, managed to make their mark on the sub-genre. Like Leone, Sergio Corbucci began his filmmaking career creating Biblical epics. His first Spaghetti Westerns were the 1964 film Grand Canyon Massacre and the cult classic Django. Where Leone had American actor Clint Eastwood as his favored leading man, Corbucci frequently cast Italian actor Franco Nero as his. Director Sergio Sollima is perhaps most well-known for The Big Gundown, which was released in 1966 and starred Spaghetti Western-staple actor Lee Van Cleef.

Though Leone, in particular, is often regarded as the father of the European Western, its origins can be traced to Germany. Popular German author Karl May had published a variety of books in the late 1800s and early 1900s, featuring clashes between cowboys and Native Americans set against the backdrop of a romanticized American West. In the 1960s, many of May’s pulp-fiction novels were turned into films, which became highly popular among German audiences. However, Leone’s Westerns broke from both European and American Western traditions by creating something reminiscent of but totally different from previous films of the genre.

[To be continued]