Spaghetti Westerns (2 page)

The most important and trendsetting Italian Western was
A Fistful of
Dollars
, made in the spring of 1964. Directed by Sergio Leone and starring American TV actor (then unknown on celluloid) Clint Eastwood, the movie instantly established a new style of Western. Eastwood was sick of the plot constraints of his Western TV series
Rawhide
and Leone was eager to update the Western myth for the James Bond generation. More interestingly, he later claimed that his aim in his early Westerns was to combine the imagery of the silent film with neo-realism. He also wanted to rid the West of all the talky characters and the women (who slowed down the plot), and concentrate on the important stuff, like fast action and money. And the one thing that cinema-released Westerns could still give the public was violence, because TV was under censorship restrictions. Continental cinema had always been a little more adventurous with its action, so when Leone made his first Western, he laced his story with much violent gunplay, fisticuffs and cruel action (with death by shotgun, machete, machinegun and incineration).

In Eastwood, Leone found the perfect hero-figure for his Western fantasies. As ‘The Man With No Name’, Eastwood looked like no other Western hero who had preceded him. He wore a Mexican poncho, permanently smoked cigars, rode a mule, and his ruthless speed with a gun made him the fastest man around. He was the ultimate cool gunfighter, who rode into a town run by two rival gangs and made a killing out of the conflict of interests by hiring himself as a mercenary to each side in turn. The villains were played by Italian, Spanish and West German actors; the supporting cast came from as far afield as Austria and America – a truly cosmopolitan production. To hide this from European audiences, cast and crew often used American-sounding pseudonyms.

The music was written by Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who conceived a strange echoing backdrop to the desolate action – all whip cracks, whistles, electric guitars and trumpet flourishes. If the dialogue in
A Fistful of Dollars
was sparse, Leone intended Morricone’s music to fill in the emotional gaps in a bizarre variation of Robert Browning’s famous quote: “Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.” Judging by the number of lone heroes that followed in Eastwood’s wake, it’s lucky Morricone’s music was around to keep them company.

In
A Fistful of Dollars
, all the Spaghetti-Western ingredients were in place: the sunny locale, the whitewashed village, vicious moustachioed bandits, a señorita in peril and, most importantly, the lone hero, who doesn’t need anyone, and doesn’t live anywhere. Invariably, the hero is warned to leave town and, equally invariably, he ignores the advice and gets involved in the ensuing carnage. In the numerous clones of
A Fistful of Dollars
the hero usually ends up facing the villain and his gang in a deserted, windblown Mexican street. There is an all-consuming silence, periodically interrupted by the crunch of boots and the clink of spurs, as the adversaries square up for the showdown. Long stares and huge close-ups reinforce the static, threatening moment before death, when a bead of sweat or a twitchy trigger-finger take on the significance of a paragraph of dialogue. Then, in a moment, the guns are drawn, bullets fly and the villains lie dead. Flies buzz in for a feast, as the hero spits into the dust, stares at the riddled corpses with contempt and allows himself a sneer of satisfaction.

Nobody did it better than Eastwood but, with the success of
A Fistful of Dollars
, many imitators followed, the most blatant being Tony Anthony’s ‘Stranger’ quartet. Most of the early Spaghettis used the scenario of the lone gunman arriving in a variety of towns (ghost town, boom town, gold town, crooked town) and combating the local hoods – bandits, bankers, cattle rustlers, outlaws or embezzlers – in their own inimitable way. Producers soon realised that every gunman should have a gimmick and that’s when things got really interesting.

The other important hero of this early part of the Spaghetti boom was Ringo, as played by Italian actor Giuliano Gemma. In contrast to Eastwood’s taciturn drifter, Ringo was altogether more talkative. Also, director Duccio Tessari wasn’t keen to emulate the style of
A
Fistful of Dollars
, even though he had contributed to Leone’s script. Instead, he attempted a purer homage to the Hollywood masters and also to the series Westerns of the forties. His first attempt at this resulted in
A Pistol for Ringo
(1965), a tension-filled, well-plotted Western that was a world away from Leone’s vision of the West as wasteland. Tessari adapted the classic siege scenario (a gang of bandits hide out at a ranch after a bungled robbery and take an innocent family prisoner) and then had clean-cut, wisecracking gunman Ringo infiltrate the ranch and save the hostages. The success of this movie led to an immediate sequel,
The Return of Ringo
(1965) – a Westernised version of Homer’s
The Odyssey
– which was darker and more complex than the first movie. With these films, Gemma became a popular hero, though he had already experimented with the Ringo persona in
One Silver Dollar
the previous year. These lyrical entries weren’t as violent as Leone’s Westerns and harked back to Hollywood for inspiration –
The Return of Ringo
included references to Howard Hawks, John Ford and John Sturges. Moreover, the soundtrack often featured a crooning ballad, further reinforcing the films’ Hollywood origins.

While Ringo extolled the virtues of honour and trust, and everyone else tried to remake
A Fistful of Dollars
, Leone’s next Western expanded the lone-gunman formula. Via
For a Few Dollars More
, the next cycle to emerge was based on the reasoning – double the heroes, double the action. Hopefully that also meant doubling the audience. For Leone, who had removed women from his West altogether, the only way to get any kind of relationships into his films was to give his hero a sidekick. In this sequel he teamed Eastwood with Lee Van Cleef (a supporting player in fifties Westerns) as Colonel Mortimer, an aged, black-clad, professional bounty hunter. This teaming was one of the most influential moments in the genre. Even in the seventies, directors were still making movies about the ‘old man’ joining forces with a ‘boy’, the generation gap (a sense of the ‘good old days’) adding to the relationship. Van Cleef based much of his career on this schema. He was teamed with a younger man in many of his Westerns, including
Death Rides a Horse
(1967) and
Day of Anger
(1967).

One of the strangest aspects of Spaghetti Westerns is that actors are yoked together in an endless mix-and-match effort to get bigger audiences. If a duo worked well together, there was the guarantee of sequels and spin-offs. A mixture of actors also gave the producers a range of options when publicising the film. To take one example: when
Day of Anger
(starring Van Cleef and Gemma) was released in the UK, Van Cleef was the star, but in Spain and Italy Gemma was top-billed. Over the years bounty hunters teamed up to catch outlaws, outlaws teamed up to kill bounty hunters, Indians helped white men, etc… As the genre rolled on, the groups of heroes grew, trading on the success of
The Magnificent Seven
. Often a group of experts would get together for a special job (steal a train, get revenge on a bandit), each member characterised by his particular skill – knife throwing, dynamite, strength, brains – and each would get an opportunity to make their skill count, as in
Kill
Them
All and Come Back Alone
(1968) and
The Five Man Army
(1969).

The subplot of
For a Few Dollars More
featured Van Cleef’s Colonel tracking down his sister’s killer. Throughout the film, this motive is concealed from the audience – only a flashback at the end and a brief line of dialogue reveal that the bandit El Indio was responsible for her death. Revenge was by far the most popular motive for the heroes of Italian Westerns. Vengeance was often integrated into other scenarios (the lone-gunman scenario, a political outline) and involved the hero searching for whoever killed his wife/mother/father/ sister/brother/son/daughter/friend/business partner/entire family/ entire tribe or entire hometown – delete where applicable. Other revenge scenarios based themselves on crippling injuries incurred by the hero years before, like the marksman shot in both hands and unable to hold a pistol in
Bandidos
(1967).

The best revenge Spaghettis, in addition to
For a Few Dollars
More
, are Carlo Lizzani’s
The Hills Run Red
(1966), an update of Anthony Mann’s psychotic Westerns made with James Stewart,
Django
(1966; mud-strewn, Civil War revenge),
Navajo Joe
(1966; racist vengeance),
Death Rides a Horse
(1967; family revenge) and
Once Upon a Time in the West
(1968; brotherly revenge), though dozens of variations were released.

Sergio Corbucci made
Django
(1966) as an attempt to create the ultimate anti-hero. Even though the plot was a retread of
A Fistful of
Dollars
, he wanted his West to be the antithesis of Leone’s – no sunshine, no sand, just mud, rain and blood. The protagonists were dressed in rags, the town looked like a ruin and the hero was crippled before the final shootout. Franco Nero played Django and became an international star, but it was the distinctive clothes and props that audiences remembered. Django is dressed in a long Union coat, black clothes, fingerless gloves and a scarf, like an army gravedigger. Behind him he drags a coffin through the mud. Inside the box is his weapon of choice – a belt-feed machinegun.

With the film’s astonishing success came the inevitable imitators, most of which simply used the Django name (like 1967’s
Django Kill
) and had nothing to do with the original. The two Django movies really worth looking out for are
Django Get a Coffin Ready
(1968) and
Django the Bastard
(1969), both of which are remarkably close to Corbucci’s movie. In 1968, Sartana appeared on the scene. A more suave version of Django, he kick-started a series of his own which ran into the early seventies. Sartana referred to himself as a pallbearer, while Django was a gravedigger, though both were equally lethal. The Sartana cycle was more consistent, with the hero’s character remaining constant for the series and actor Gianni Garko playing him in most entries.

From 1966, the more astute Italian producers and directors realised that they could make a political statement at the same time as a few million lire if they infused their Westerns with a little ideology. The first to try this was Damiano Damiani with
A Bullet for the General
(1966), his tale of greed and betrayal set during the Mexican Revolution. Relatively few serious political Spaghettis followed, however, because the accent shifted to send-up. Influenced by Brigitte Bardot’s musical comedy
Viva Maria
(1965), Corbucci made the best of the less-than-serious political movies –
A Professional
Gun
(1968). Sergio Sollima also made a significant contribution to the genre, but set his Westerns –
The Big Gundown
and
Face to Face
(both 1967) – in the American Southwest. His political figures were lawmen, Mexican bandits, college professors and railroad magnates, and this often led to clashes between culture and ignorance, honesty and lies. Both the serious and not-so-serious films frequently featured relationships between Mexican peasants and foreigners, usually European mercenaries, but in some of the more offbeat examples the peasant is teamed with an English doctor, a Dutch oil explorer, a Russian prince and an Italian Shakespearean actor! The relationship between the two men was supposed to echo the relationship between the capitalist powers and the relative poverty of the Third World, though often the films were simply an excuse for a lot of over-the-top action.

As Spaghettis became extremely successful, the need for co-production deals faded. Many of the big-budget Spaghettis after 1966 were solely Italian productions. Others, like Leone’s
The
Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
, were part-financed by United Artists. Even before
A Fistful of Dollars
and
For a Few Dollars More
had been released in the States, United Artists had bought the rights to the ‘Dollars’ films and, with these and the Bond movies, they cleaned up as the most astute US studio of the sixties. In 1968 (the year
The Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
was released stateside), UA made over $20 million in profit – an all-time high.

The Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
provided a memorable backdrop to the familiar story, with its recreation of the American Civil War. Leone then made
Once Upon a Time in the West
, part-financed by Paramount Studios, and cast Henry Fonda, Jason Robards and Claudia Cardinale.
Once Upon a Time
didn’t bear any resemblance to the cheap shoot-‘em-ups cartwheeling off the Cinecittà conveyor belt, but looked rather like the epic Hollywood Westerns of Ford, De Mille and Wyler. Leone was able to include scenes of the railroad moving West towards the Pacific, a thriving boom town and even location footage shot in Monument Valley, Ford’s favourite location. The increased Italian budgets also enabled Corbucci to convincingly recreate the Mexican Revolution in
A Professional Gun
and
Compañeros
(1970), Tonino Valerii to depict post-Civil War Dallas in
The Price of Power
(1969) and Leone to hire big-name stars Rod Steiger and James Coburn for his last Western,
Duck You Sucker
(1971). The cycle came full circle when British and American filmmakers arrived in Spain in the late sixties to make their own blockbuster variations of Spaghetti Westerns, starring superstars like Robert Mitchum, Sean Connery and Oliver Reed, which were generally inferior to the genuine article.