“[Spaghetti westerns] fuse the operatic and film melodrama, producing a highly affective style that ranges from the expression of rage at blatant and ubiquitous violence, disgust in the contemplation of monumental aspirations to power, and elegiac mourning in the face of death.” – Marcia Landy, “Which Way is America?”: Americanism and the Italian Western.
The western has long symbolized American ideals of rebirth, freedom and justice in the American frontier. Westerns capture the ideals of the American character and harken back an agrarian era that wasn’t complicated by the stresses of modern society. These films have developed their own rules that can be used to classify films with similar trappings in the western genre. In 1964, Italian director Sergio Leone introduced the world to the sub genre of westerns that would be known as spaghetti westerns with the release of A Fistful of Dollars (1964).
Though Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) wasn’t the first spaghetti western, it was the most popular and successful at its time and introduced new trappings to the orthodoxy of the western genre. Even though some critics lauded Leone’s revisions to the genre as contributing to “the death of the western,” American filmmakers like Sam Peckingpah, George Roy Hill, and Richard Brooks have since adopted Leone’s western style into their cinematic explorations of the American west. “Though largely associated internationally with Leone, Italian westerns were also made by such filmmakers as Sergio Corbucci, Sergio Sollima, and Damiani Valerii.”
Leone was born in Naples in 1929 into a cinema family. His father was a silent film director and his mother was an actress. Leone began his film career in the 1940s as an assistant director and began directing his own films in the 1950s. “Leone himself has cited the importance of such films as Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Shane, and Vera Cruz to his own work.” The 1960s were a time of globalization and Leone decided to make his own brand of westerns to comment on what was going on in the contemporary world by revisiting the American past.
When audiences first watched A Fistful of Dollars (1964), they were introduced to a new kind of hero. Heroes in the classic westerns portrayed by John Wayne, Gregory Peck, and Gary Cooper had resembled mystic knights. Western heroes in classic westerns like the Ringo Kid in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) were driven by a sense of justice the audience clearly understood. The new western hero known as the man with no name, ruggedly portrayed by Clint Eastwood, resembled something entirely different. This hero had ambiguous moral agendas and only seemed to be driven by the want of money. In A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the nameless gunslinger plays both sides of the warring groups in town and pits them against each other. As the film plays out, the audience learns that the man with no name does have a sense of justice and loyalty, but that loyalty is only devoted for those who he considers innocent or who befriend him.
The Man With No Name would continue his search for riches in the sequels For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966). The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (1966) opens with a sequence claiming the nameless gunslinger as “the good,” but his motives are still questionable. He pairs up with an outlaw named Tuco the “ugly” and searches for hidden gold. On their journey, they cross paths with the ruthless Senteza “the bad.” The film climaxes in a scene with a three way draw between the good, the bad, and the ugly. Even after finding the gold and being in a perfect position to cross the ugly, as promised the nameless gunslinger only takes with his share of the treasure and rides off.
Just by watching the title sequence of A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the audience can immediately see they’re in for a different western spectacle than what they were accustomed to. The film opens with a combination of animation and rotoscope sequence showing cowboys being shot down over an incredible score by Ennio Morricone.
The music from Morricone definitely added to the theatricality of Leone’s westerns. “The scores for Leone’s films serve a number of functions: as affective commentary on character’s actions or state of mind as mockery, cliché, leitmotiv, thematic continuity, and hence, as a comment on reiteration, variation, or ironic reversal.” There are specific scenes in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) that push the envelope in celebrating the mythical western hero through the man with no name. In the third act in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the nameless gunslinger appears before the final confrontation with the villains. He steps out of the smoke of an explosion with his serape blowing in the wind to a fanfare score by Morricone, like something out of legend.
Another stylistic decision that is very evident in Leone’s westerns is the use of gratuitous violence. Classic westerns showed scenes of gunfights with the cowboy shooting
and the villains falling over dead without any bullet holes. Leone changed the landscape by showing men being mowed down by gunfire and all of the gruesome aftermath. There is a scene in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966) where Tuco drags the nameless gunslinger through the hot desert. The aftermath of the relentless sun is shown on the man with no name’s face, as skin peals from his dried face. Critics at the time abhorred Leone’s use of violence, but the violence reflected the troubling world of the times and would influence other filmmakers to push the violence in their westerns.
Classic westerns idolized the American west while spaghetti westerns portrayed it as lawless and gritty. “Leone’s films rely on a certain dry and dusty desert landscape that comes to signify “the west” but provides an arena of open space for action.” In A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the sheriff of town who happens to be the patriarch of the Baxter family has no power over the rival Rojo family or the man with no name. The land is lawless and the only authority is the cold steel of a gun. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966) shows lands and people torn apart by the civil war. There is a scene at the end of Act 2 where the nameless gunslinger and the ugly meet soldiers at bridge before they head into battle. The battle scene shows how merciful war is and how unromantic the devastation of it was.
Influences of the spaghetti western style can be seen in American filmmaker Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). The protagonists in the The Wild Bunch (1969) are aging outlaws out for one last score, their motives being much less than chivalrous. Their saving grace is their loyalty and friendship to one another. John Belton describes the characters in the post-Leone westerns in his book American Cinema American Culture:
A handful of westerns, made in the 1960s and early 1970s and set in the period after the closing of the frontier, look back nostalgically to the old west and feature legendary characters who have outlived the heroic gold, silver, and bronze ages of the west and are regarded as either curiosities or unwanted embarrassments by an indifferent or openly hostile twentieth-century society. The values of the world around these old West character types has become corrupted by the forces of corporate capitalism, such as railroads, banks, mining interests or trusts. These institutions play an increasingly significant role in the rooting out of these defiant individuals who have fallen out of step with the advancing parade of modern times.
The Wild Bunch (1969) opens with a very stylized scene of the main cast riding into town with frame frames naming the actors, setting a sense of theatricality akin to the Leone films. The directing style during the gunfight sequences emphasizes the chaotic atmosphere and aggression of bullets ripping through the air. The beginning bank robbery style scene explodes as bank robbers and lawmen fight while the townsfolk are caught in the middle. The violence in this film is top notch showing the bloody remains of gunfire, shredding soldiers, cowboys, and innocent bystanders apart. The world of The Wild Bunch (1969) not black and white like in classic westerns, instead it’s gritty and lawless, and the men with the guns are ones in control.
Leone passed at age 60 on April 30, 1989 in Rome, Italy. Besides the Dollars Trilogy, Leone directed two other spaghetti westerns such as Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Duck, You Sucker (1971). Leone’s initial pick for casting for the man with no name was Henry Fonda whom he really looked up to, but went with TV actor Clint East instead due to budget reasons. Upon the success of the Dollars Trilogy, Leone was finally able to work with Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).
Leone set his own stylizations in his spaghetti westerns and influences can be seen in the westerns that came afterwards as is evident in The Wild Bunch (1969).
Bibliography
1. Belton, John. American Cinema American Culture. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2009.
2. Landy, Marcia. “Which Way is America?”: Americanism and the Italian Western.
Boundary 2 23:1 (1996): 35-59.
3. McClain, William. Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the “Death of the Western” in
American Film Criticsm. Journal of Film and Video 62.1-2 (2010): 52-66.
