Spaghetti Western
[2] The majority of the films in the spaghetti Western genre were international co-productions by Italy and Spain, and sometimes France, West Germany, Britain, Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia, and the United States.
[10] The majority of the films in the spaghetti Western genre were international coproductions by Italy and Spain, and sometimes France, West Germany, Britain, Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia, and the United States.
[4] Many of the stories take place in the dry landscapes of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico, thus, common filming locations were the Tabernas Desert and the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park, an area of volcanic origin known for its wide sandy beaches, both of which are in the Province of Almería in Southeastern Spain.
[19] The Italians also made Wild Bill Hickok films, while the Germans released backwoods Westerns featuring Bela Lugosi as Uncas.
Of the Western-related European films before 1964, the one that attracted the most attention is arguably Luis Trenker's Der Kaiser von Kalifornien about John Sutter.
In 1965, Bruno Bozzetto released his traditionally animated feature film West and Soda, a Western parody with a marked spaghetti Western-theme; despite having been released a year after Sergio Leone's seminal spaghetti Western, A Fistful of Dollars, development of West and Soda actually began a year earlier than Fistful's, and lasted longer, mainly because of the use of more time-demanding animation over regular acting.
[26] In this seminal film, Leone used a distinct visual style with large face close ups to tell the story of a hero entering a town that is ruled by two outlaw gangs, and ordinary social relations are nonexistent.
Ennio Morricone's innovative score expresses a similar duality between quirky and unusual sounds and instruments, and sacral dramatizing for the big confrontation scenes.
Another important novelty was Clint Eastwood's performance as the man with no name—an unshaven, sarcastic, insolent Western antihero with personal goals in mind, and with distinct visuals to boot—the squint, the cigarillo, the poncho, etc.
Whoever the hero was, he would join an outlaw gang to further his own secret agenda, as in A Pistol for Ringo, Blood for a Silver Dollar, Vengeance Is a Dish Served Cold, Renegade Riders, and others, while Beyond the Law has a bandit infiltrate society and become a sheriff.
There would be a flamboyant Mexican bandit (Gian Maria Volonté from A Fistful of Dollars, otherwise Tomas Milian, or most often Fernando Sancho) and a grumpy old man, often an undertaker, to serve as sidekick for the hero.
For the love interest, ranchers' daughters, schoolmarms and barroom maidens were overshadowed by young Latin women desired by dangerous men, for which actresses, such as Nicoletta Machiavelli or Rosalba Neri, carried on Marianne Koch's role of Marisol in the Leone film.
[30] In Johnny Oro, a traditional Western sheriff and a mixed-race bounty killer are forced into an uneasy alliance when Mexican bandits and Native Americans assault the town.
[32] The theme of age in For a Few Dollars More, in which the younger bounty killer learns valuable lessons from his more experienced colleague and eventually becomes his equal, is taken up in Day of Anger and Death Rides a Horse.
[35] Sabata and If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death, directed by Gianfranco Parolini, introduce into similar betrayal environments a type of hero molded on the Mortimer character from For a Few Dollars More, only without any vengeance motive and with more outrageous trick weapons.
[37] Although his character is not named Django, Franco Nero brings a similar ambience to Texas, Adios and Massacre Time, in which the hero must confront surprising and dangerous family relations.
Giuliano Gemma starred in a series of successful films carrying this theme—Adiós gringo, For a Few Extra Dollars, Long Days of Vengeance, Wanted and, to some extent, Blood for a Silver Dollar—in which his character is most often called "Gary".
The main characters were played by Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, who had already cooperated as a pair of heroes in three earlier spaghetti Westerns, God Forgives...
[43] The music for the two Trinity Westerns (composed by Franco Micalizzi and Guido & Maurizio De Angelis, respectively) also reflected the change to a lighter and more sentimental mood.
A spaghetti Western old hand, Franco Nero, also worked in this subgenre with Cipolla Colt, and Tomas Milian plays an outrageous "quick" bounty hunter modeled on Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp in Sometimes Life Is Hard, Eh Providence?
Belated attempts to revive the genre included the comedy film Buddy Goes West and a Spanish-American coproduction, Comin' at Ya!, which was shot in 3D, and Django Strikes Again.
Other "cult" items are Cesare Canevari's Matalo!, Tony Anthony's Blindman, and Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent's Cut-Throats Nine (the latter among gore film audiences).
The few spaghetti Westerns containing historical characters such as Buffalo Bill, Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid, etc., appear mainly before A Fistful of Dollars had put its mark on the genre.
The only fairly successful spaghetti Western with a Native American main character (played by Burt Reynolds in his only European Western outing) is Sergio Corbucci's Navajo Joe, in which the (supposedly) Navajo village is wiped out by bandits during the first minutes, and the avenger hero spends the rest of the film dealing mostly with Anglos and Mexicans until the final showdown at a Native American burial ground.
In non-singing roles were Ringo Starr as a villain in Blindman and French rock 'n' roll veteran Johnny Hallyday as the gunfighter and avenger hero in Sergio Corbucci's The Specialists.
Kurosawa sued Sergio Leone for plagiarism, and was compensated with the exclusive distribution rights to the movie in Japan, where its hero, Clint Eastwood, was already a huge star due to the popularity of the TV series, Rawhide.
When Asian martial arts films started to draw crowds in European cinema houses, the producers of spaghetti Westerns tried to hang on, this time not by adapting storylines, but rather by directly including martial arts in the films, performed by Eastern actors—for example, Chen Lee in My Name Is Shanghai Joe, or Lo Lieh teaming up with Lee Van Cleef in The Stranger and the Gunfighter.
The movie concerns the assassination of an American president in Dallas, Texas, by a group of Southern white supremacists who frame an innocent African-American.
Frayling noted that Pauline Kael was willing to acknowledge this critical ennui, and thus appreciate how a film like Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo "could exploit the conventions of the Western genre, while debunking its morality".
[58] American heavy metal band Metallica has used a Ennio Morricone's composition, "The Ecstasy of Gold", from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, to open several of their concerts.
