Spaghetti Westerns

Thanks to Hannah Patterson, Anne Hudson, Paul Duncan, Alex Coe (for additional research), Isabel Coe, Mum and Dad, Belinda Skinner, René Hogguer, Lionel Woodman, David Weaver, Ion Mills, Ann Jackson, Nicki & John Cosgrove, Tom Betts, Ian Caunce, Andy Hanratty and especially to Clara, all of whom have contributed to the writing of this book.

The storekeeper looked up. Silhouetted in the open doorway stood a man, his face hidden by the lowered brim of his battered Stetson. The stranger paused to take a long drag on the cigar clenched between his teeth, as he slowly raised his head to stare at the proprietor. The storekeeper caught sight of the stranger’s stubbled, sunburnt face and his piercing, cold eyes. Ominously, with the clink of spurs, the figure walked to the counter. Unnerved, a bead of sweat rolled down the storekeeper’s brow as he spluttered, “What… er… what can I get you, sir?” For a moment, the stranger held his gaze in silence. Then he replied in a low, whispering drawl, “Do you have
A Bullet for the General or A Pistol for Ringo?
” The storekeeper looked perplexed. “I’m sorry… We don’t sell guns, sir,” he answered. “This is a DVD shop.”

Spaghetti Westerns – their style has passed into cinematic folklore, their heroes have become superstars and their influential music has become instantly recognisable. Cool gringos and stone-faced bounty hunters shoot Mexican bandits for fistfuls of dollars, in the bleakest of desert landscapes. Striding way over the line normally called self-parody, Italian-made Spaghetti Westerns are the most enduringly popular genre to have emerged from Cinecittà Film Studios in Rome. Through their mannered style, rejection of Hollywood clichés, influential music, sharp editing and pared-down dialogue they are, with the James Bond movies, the brutal model for sixties action cinema. Cinema and TV audiences the world over are familiar with Clint Eastwood’s poncho-clad, cigar-smoking drifter, making his image the enduring symbol of the genre. A man alone (or occasionally in an untrustworthy partnership) facing villains that are irredeemably bad. Eastwood killed with a speed and detachment never seen before on the cinema screen. He was the epitome of cool, a man of few words and even fewer morals, who would sell his gun to the highest bidder in an effort to get rich in a desolate wasteland – where dollars meant everything and life meant nothing.

As directed by visionary Italian director Sergio Leone in the plains of Spain, Eastwood became the ultimate anti-hero and their three films together,
A Fistful of Dollars
(1964),
For a Few Dollars More
(1965) and
The Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
(1966) – dubbed the ‘Dollars Trilogy’ – were hugely successful, making Eastwood the biggest star of his generation and arguably (John Wayne fans would disagree) the most famous movie gunslinger of them all. Leone directed two more Westerns and the runaway success of his movies, in particular the Eastwood films, led to all the other foreign Westerns (between 1961 and 1978 there were 500 made) being universally disregarded as worthless copies. Most of the Italian, German, Spanish and French Westerns made throughout the sixties were rightly labelled junk. But this vast output is now more accessible, due to the films’ availability on video and DVD, so Western fans can at last make up their own minds. Of the numerous Spaghettis made, there are at least 20 films that deserve the kudos of Leone’s movies. And there are plenty that were considerably more appealing and contemporary than John Wayne wandering through Texas telling everyone to vote Republican. Because Eastwood became a star, the films directed by Leone’s cohorts, rivals and, in some cases, friends have been largely ignored in mainstream circles, even though some of their films, particularly the comedy Spaghetti Westerns, went on to make more money than Leone’s films.

The time has come to set things aright.

Westerns were one of the most popular forms of cinema entertainment ever. Even now, TV schedules are packed with all sorts of Westerns. Many excellent examples had been made in the first part of the twentieth century by masterly practitioners like John Ford, Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks, but the vast majority were programme fillers, singing-cowboy vehicles (usually accompanied by a horse as a sidekick) and serial Westerns – fast, action-filled oaters aimed at the matinee audience. But by the fifties the subtext had deepened, with more thought being given even to the low-budget B-Westerns. Subjects like racism, delinquency, McCarthyism and psychology were often injected into the scenarios. But because of the shear volume of B-Westerns being produced, audiences were getting fed up with the same plots and actors cropping up over and over again. After all, they could get that on TV.

The emergence of the TV Western in the mid-fifties was the death knell of the Hollywood Western. The big cinema hits were super-productions like
Ben Hur
(1959) and
El Cid
(1961), giant movies on giant screens, with stars like Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren. If you wanted to see a Western, you tuned in to
Gunsmoke
,
Laramie
or
Rawhide
once a week, to see what Chuck, Hank or Rowdy were up to. Meanwhile, popular Western themes were appearing elsewhere – the prime examples being the films of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. His
Seven Samurai
(1954) was obviously influenced by classic Hollywood Westerns. For poor peasant farmers read poor settlers, for roving bandits read roving Indians and for Seven Samurai read the Seventh Cavalry.
Yojimbo
(1961) and
Sanjuro
(1962) looked even more like Westerns, especially
Yojimbo
with its windswept ghost town and warring gangs. Stylistically, emotionally and technically these intelligent action movies were way ahead of the field. In 1960,
Seven Samurai
became the basis for
The Magnificent Seven
, a hugely successful Western, which made its best box-office returns, not in America, but in Europe.

Curiously, with fewer real Westerns being released, countries that liked Westerns, but weren’t getting any decent ones, decided to manufacture their own. Rising production costs were one of the deciding factors in reducing the number of American Westerns produced, but costs in Europe were considerably less. Spain was an exceptionally cheap location for making exotic, desert-set action movies. In the late fifties and early sixties the Spanish and British started making Westerns in the sun-scorched landscape of Almeria, Southern Spain. The Americans soon followed suit. It was an irony that it was cheaper to make Westerns in this ersatz West than it was to film them in the real thing.

Even weirder was when the West Germans joined in, using Yugoslavia as the American frontier. German author Karl May was long dead when director Harald Reinl decided to film May’s ‘Winnetou’ stories in 1962. The series concerned the adventures of a buckskinned adventurer, Old Shatterhand (Lex Barker), and his Tonto-like sidekick, Apache chief Winnetou (Pierre Brice). The series began with the action-packed
The Treasure of Silver
Lake, with Herbert Lom (from the Inspector Clouseau films) as the villain. Making a killing in Europe, the sequel
Winnetou the Warrior
(1963) was even more successful. Other notable examples included
Last of
the Renegades
(1964), with Klaus Kinski as a baddie in a coonskin hat, and
Among Vultures
(1964), with English actor Stewart Granger playing effete Old Surehand. The action sequences were impressively staged and remain the most memorable aspects of the series – from massed attacks on forts, towns and Indian villages, burning oil wells and wagon-train massacres, to more unusual action spots like bear wrestling and trains driven through saloons. Martin Böttcher’s music was suitably epic (with a resonance that sounded like it was recorded in an echo chamber) and the films revitalised hackneyed Western plots – something that Hollywood had presumed impossible in the early sixties.

The Italian film industry in the late fifties, throughout the sixties and into the early seventies was the most magical and exciting film factory in the world, if only for the sheer volume and diversity of its product that swamped cinemas across the globe. Based at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, the studio dabbled in every popular genre and added its own peculiar edge to imported ideas. Every few years a new fad would catch the public’s attention and clean up at the box office until interest waned.

The first Italian genre to transcend domestic success was the muscleman epics in the late fifties. Starring American and British ex-bodybuilders and lifeguards like Steve Reeves, Reg Park and Gordon Scott as mythical strongmen named Hercules and Goliath, these way-out fantasies were amazingly popular in Europe. The best of these movies are highly camp adventures with ridiculous special effects, monsters of the ‘man-in-a-suit’ variety and wooden acting. But they were a breath of fresh air when compared to Hollywood’s straight-faced treatment of similar subjects. During the muscleman fad (which ran from 1958 until 1966), several other popular film series came and went. These included pirate escapades, Viking sagas, period swashbucklers, sexy shockumentaries and sci-fi films. Moreover, genre cross-pollination occasionally produced bizarre results – sci-fi horror movies, swashbuckling musclemen and Viking horrors. And all of these myriad genres were then sent up by the bumbling slapstick comedians of the day – Franchi and Ingrassia, and Totò.

But, in the sixties, three subjects dominated Italian production – horror, spies and Westerns. The Italian horror cycle, started by Mario Bava’s
Mask of Satan
(1960), which starred Barbara Steele, brought new life to the undead. Bava and company produced some truly imaginative, darkly twisted, period Gothic horrors – exquisite, stylish movies that used swathes of gaudy colours or the menacing shadows of black and white to startling effect. British actress Steele became the star of the genre. This series anticipated the
giallo
thriller cycle in the seventies. The Italian spy movies were copies of the Bond movies, detailing outlandish international espionage, global villainy and flashy gadgets. Exotic locations, from snowbound Austria to sweltering Egypt, were cheaply created via stock footage.

The most financially successful, innovative and influential of these crazes was the Italian ‘Spaghetti’ Western, also referred to as the ‘macaroni’, ‘pizza’, ‘pasta’ or ‘paella’ Western (‘paella’ for the Spanish involvement). Italians called them
Westerns all
’
Italiana
(Italian-Style Westerns), but to aficionados these days they’re more often called Euro-Westerns (including as they do Italian, British, Spanish, French and German productions).

When the musclemen lost their strength at the box office and the American production companies pulled out of Italy (after a series of big-budget financial disasters), the search was on for a new genre to hijack. With the series of Westerns being made in Spain by the Spanish, French and British, and the runaway success of the German
Winnetou
films, the Italian movie industry began to experiment with Westerns of their own. Initially they invested in the
Winnetou
series in co-production deals, but they soon realised that Spanish participation would make more sense location-wise, crew-wise and extra-wise. Early Italian examples of the Western followed the
Winnetou
movies with the Cavalry-and-Indians scenario, epitomised by
Buffalo Bill – Hero of the Far West
(1964). But soon the genre changed tack and the Spanish desert became the American South-west of Arizona, Texas and New Mexico. And instead of war paint and feathers, extras found themselves donning sombreros, bandoleers and some heavy hardware.