Spaghetti Westerns Read online

  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).

  ‘DIDN’T YOU KILL MY BROTHER?’ – TALES OF REVENGE

  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.

  GET A COFFIN READY – ENTER DJANGO AND THE GRAVEDIGGERS

  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.

  VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN! – SPAGHETTIS WITH A CONSCIENCE

  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.

  EPIC LANDSCAPES – BIG-BUDGET SPAGHETTIS

  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.

  SEESAWS AND QUICK-DRAWS – CIRCUS WESTERNS

  With more Spaghettis being made, the competition became tougher. There were epileptic gunmen, one-armed gunmen, gunslinger-priests, gunslinger-florists, amnesiac gunmen, albino gunmen, blind gunmen, deaf gunmen and mute gunmen, armed with everything from knives to Gatling guns. There were horror Westerns, thriller Westerns and musical Westerns, the latter exemplified by Little Rita of the West (1967), which starts as a straightforward Spaghetti until an appalling Eurovision song blasts out of nowhere and the cast start singing and dancing.

  By far the most popular of these offbeat diversions were the acrobatic Westerns directed by Gianfranco Parolini, who managed to lever acrobats and stunts into his scenarios, whatever the genre. His best Westerns, starring Lee Van Cleef as the black-clad, ex-Confederate major named Sabata, incorporated many gadgets into the action – gimmicky weapons, magnetic cigars, seesaws (to gain access to a bank) – making their action set pieces extraordinarily imaginative. The first one, Sabata (1969), was the best, though there were many other examples, including several actually set in a travelling circus, like Boot Hill (1969) and The Return of Sabata (1971). The formula was
updated in the seventies to incorporate kung-fu action into the mix, in East-meets-Westerns such as Blood Money (1973).

  PASTA JOKE – COMIC SPAGHETTIS

  By 1970, the violence in Italian Westerns had escalated dramatically and just about every single Western avenue had been explored. With audiences tiring of such savagery, there seemed nowhere for the Spaghetti Westerns to go. Then, in 1967, an enterprising director named Giuseppe Colizzi had teamed a handsome, blond leading man named ‘Terence Hill’ (real name Mario Girotti) with hulking, Bluto-like ‘Bud Spencer’ (or Carlo Pedersoli) as the heroes in God Forgives – I Don’t, which spawned two sequels (Ace High [1968] and Boot Hill [1969]).

  Enzo Barboni, an ex-cameraman, was looking to move into directing and hired the duo to star in his second directorial effort. Entitled They Call Me Trinity (1970), the film cast Hill and Spencer as unlikely brothers, Trinity and Bambino, in a light-hearted, clever parody of The Magnificent Seven and Westerns by Leone and Sollima. A runaway success at the box office, it led to an even more successful sequel Trinity is Still My Name (1971) that out-grossed Leone’s ‘Dollars’ movies. The films lampooned Western myths, including slapstick fist fights, speeded-up gunfights, drunken monks, sexy Mormon girls and farting babies in an uproarious send-up of the genre. As to be expected, there was the usual slew of imitators (which did wonders for the Italian breakaway furniture trade), but as the humour got cruder and more laboured, the comedy cycle spluttered, prompting Hill and Spencer to adapt their ‘Trinity’ double act in contemporary settings in a series of clodhopping comedies, which nevertheless cemented their superstardom in Europe.

  SUNDOWNER

  By the early seventies, the Italian Western had run its course. The most popular Italian films of the period were the gialli (supernatural chillers and slasher movies pioneered by Dario Argento) and ultraviolent thrillers, continental versions of lone-cop scenarios like The French Connection (1971) and Dirty Harry (1971).

  The last great Spaghetti Westerns bore little resemblance to the ‘Dollars’ films that had popularised the genre. In 1973 Tonino Valerii directed My Name is Nobody, an analysis of the relationship between Hollywood Westerns (epitomised in the film by Henry Fonda’s ageing shootist) and their rougher Spaghetti cousins (represented by Terence Hill, who affords Fonda heroic status). The film even mocked Sam Peckinpah’s take on the Western, with a host of in-jokes. The last gasps of the genre were the mystical, misty ‘twilight’ Spaghettis like Keoma (1976), films that adopted a primitive, elemental approach to Westerns and addressed such subjects as racism with an incisiveness rarely seen in the genre. This wasn’t enough to save the cycle and, though there have been Spaghetti Westerns made since, with many American Westerns ripping off the Italian style, the heyday had passed.

  ROGUES GALLERY

  Clint Eastwood remains the best-known hero of the Spaghetti Western, followed closely by Lee Van Cleef. This pair epitomised everything that the Italian West had come to symbolise – cool gunmen, stylish clothes, taciturn manner and the ability to kill half a dozen bandits without blinking an eye. But the Italian Western craze created a whole wagonload of stars, as actors of all nationalities flocked to Cinecittà to get a piece of the gunslinger action. Luminaries such as Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten and James Mason appeared in films that they hoped would never be released in their native countries, while everyone from William Shatner and Burt Reynolds to Henry Fonda and James Garner travelled to Spain to try their hands at Spaghettis. The Italian-style Western also made stars of many fifties Hollywood B-Western villains, like Lee Van Cleef, Jack Palance and Henry Silva. It revitalised the careers of actors on the wane, including Cameron Mitchell, Dan Duryea, John Ireland and Farley Granger, though their turns were often as plausible as Terry-Thomas playing a Mexican bandit. But the rejection of Hollywood stereotypes appealed to actors who had been shot at for years by bland heroes, and Van Cleef and Palance in particular were pleased to offer a different side to the story.

  Most of all, the Italian Westerns created a slew of new, cosmopolitan stars whose looks, whether good, bad or ugly, lent themselves to these macabre tales. Actors like Franco Nero (the original Django), pretty boy Giuliano Gemma (angel-faced Ringo), Terence Hill (dusty-but-charming Trinity), Cuban Che Guevara lookalike Tomas Milian, German gargoyle Klaus Kinski and Spaniard Fernando Sancho (who made a living as a swaggering moustachioed Mexican bandido) became massive stars, especially in Europe, the Far East and the Third World. Everywhere, in fact, except Britain and the States, though Kinski did eventually break through to critical acclaim outside Europe when he started working for Werner Herzog on Aguirre Wrath of God (1973).

  Interestingly, actors who made their names in Spaghettis and later moved on to pastures new periodically referred to their Western roots, no matter how clumsy the context – like Eastwood facing a Tiger tank in a Spaghetti-Western duel during the World War Two adventure Kelly’s Heroes (1970) and Terence Hill in a showdown pastiche on motorbikes in Watch Out, We’re Mad! (1973).

  MUSIC MAESTRO

  Outside of Clint Eastwood’s stubble and blanket, Lee Van Cleef’s grim face and the stylised gunfights, it is the musical scores accompanying Spaghetti Westerns that are the most memorable aspect of the genre. They captured the mood of the Spaghetti West perfectly, as well as being extremely influential in popular culture, extending beyond Westerns and into pop music and advertising.

  The most important musical figure of the period was Ennio Morricone, a classically trained composer and an old school friend of Leone’s. Born on 10 November 1928, Morricone attended the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome, studying composition, musical direction, choral work and trumpet (his father played the instrument in cabaret). But while Morricone studied he also played his trumpet in nightclubs (sometimes subbing for his father) and began honing his composition and arranging skills on standards of the day. Upon graduation he decided to move into the lucrative record industry, arranging pop records for popular artists like Mario Lanza and Paul Anka, before eventually expanding his repertoire to composing and arranging for radio, TV and theatre. His distinctive pop style can be heard to best advantage on Mina’s 1966 hit ‘Se Telefonando’ (co-written by Morricone for an Italian TV show), which sounds like a cross between a Burt Bacharach ballad, Phil Spector’s ‘Wall Of Sound’ and the epic quality found in Morricone’s Western scores. His popularity in the pop industry (and the tag ‘the father of modern arrangement’) inevitably led to film work in the early sixties and brought him into contact with Leone, who was preparing A Fistful of Dollars. Morricone had already scored a Spaghetti Western in 1963 (Gunfight in the Red Sands) and was signed to work on another called Bullets Don’t Argue (1964). Both movies had used the same Spanish locations as A Fistful of Dollars, but that was where any similarity ended.

  Although Leone was unimpressed by Morricone’s early Western scores, the composer was nevertheless hired to concoct a musical soundtrack for A Fistful of Dollars. Initial pieces proffered by him were vetoed by Leone, until Morricone played him an unusual arrangement of ‘Pastures of Plenty’, a Woody Guthrie song re-voiced by Peter Tevis. Leone liked it and decided to use the piece (minus the vocals) with a whistler replacing Tevis. Employing Alessandro Alessandroni to whistle and play guitar, an orchestra and Alessandroni’s choir, ‘I Cantori Moderni’ (‘The Modern Singers’), Morricone produced the most amazing theme tune. With its whiplashes, bells, electric guitar (very similar to Hank Marvin’s Shadows-style tremolo) and an eerie whistled melody, the piece instantly evoked a Western setting. It was also refreshingly simple and highly catchy – almost like a pop single. In fact, many of Morricone’s subsequent singles and albums were hugely successful in Italy, while a cover version of his theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by Hugo Montenegro topped the UK charts in 1968. It is interesting that the two most innovative film composers for action films in the sixties, Morricone and the Bond films’ John Barry, both made their names with distinctive arrangements of other people’s work. Barry created
the famous ‘James Bond Theme’ by reworking Monty Norman’s original composition and augmented it with his own ‘Bees Knees’ instrumental. It seems that just about every aspect of A Fistful of Dollars had a source elsewhere. But when these myriad influences converged (Eastwood’s image, Leone’s artistry, Morricone’s musicianship), they created startling effects.

  With the success of the A Fistful of Dollars score, Morricone soon became synonymous with Italian-style Westerns and his music became a major contributing factor to their popularity. The following year he worked for Leone on For a Few Dollars More, creating an even better backdrop to the action, whilst also scoring Tessari’s ‘Ringo’ films, with compositions that echoed his work in the pop industry. The title songs of both the ‘Ringo’ movies were voiced in English (even in the Italian print) by Maurizio Graf. But between 1966 and 1969 Morricone was incredibly prolific and wrote for many of the most financially successful Spaghettis of the day. Sometimes (as in the case of A Bullet for the General and Fort Yuma Gold [1966]) he worked in collaboration with other composers. Sometimes he used pseudonyms to conceal his prodigious output. On A Fistful of Dollars Morricone called himself ‘Dan Savio’ to fall in line with the rest of the production, but on The Hills Run Red, Navajo Joe and The Hellbenders (1967) he worked as ‘Leo Nichols’. Many of Morricone’s scores were conducted by his assistant Bruno Nicolai, who also moved into composing in the mid-sixties. Morricone worked fruitfully with Tessari, Sollima (The Big Gundown and Face To Face) and Corbucci (Navajo Joe, The Big Silence [1967] and A Professional Gun), but with much less recognition. When these films were released outside Europe (in the late sixties and early seventies), they were immediately labelled copies of Leone’s movies. This assumption was further compounded by the similarity of Morricone’s music in each film, which often sounded very ‘Dollar-esque’.