[Low Odysseys]

Sergio Leone seemed to really think that he had created the “Spaghetti” Western, a genre as different from the traditional John Ford western as modern slasher films are from Universal’s Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man.

And Leone may be right. He was the first to not just try and regurgitate the “classic” westerns. He took a spin and made it something new, and those that came after him like what they saw.

The Spaghetti Western is, by basic definition, a post-modern movie. The Italians had no comparable time period to the American West. No country, except Mexico, and to a lesser extent Canada, do. The edges of society were pushed in Europe, but much earlier.

Another thing the Spag Western tends to do is exist in a heightened reality. Think about it: all that exists are these blueprints that are earlier filmmakers “takes” on the West. Starting with the singing ‘modern’ cowboys like Roy Rogers who talk to their horses, and sometimes leap from them into the backs of Jeeps while taking on evil rustlers with the help of a kid sidekick- all the way to the more cynical, worldly westerns like Fort Apache or The Searchers… those are your blueprint.

Leone famously took what he loved, and made it his own. But with a cynical Rome/60’s twist. And he created an archetype: the mysterious stranger.

Oh sure, the Duke’s “Ringo” in Ford’s classic Stagecoach was kind of a mystery, a lot of the early westerns had a taciturn man with a troubled past… but you got to know them during the coruse of the film.

When Clint Eastwood first rode his little mule beneath the creaking noose in Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars), he has perhaps two pages of dialogue in the entire film, maybe five. We don’t know where Joe is coming from, or where he’s going. We only know he’s fast enough to gun down four guys before one of them can get a shot off.

Incidentally, his name is Joe. Where the whole “Man With No Name” thing comes from is the fantastically heavy-handed advertisements.

“This short cigar belongs to the man with no name. This poncho belongs to the man with no name. This long gun belongs to the man with no name. In his own way, he is perhaps the most dangerous man alive. Its the first movie of its kind. It won’t be the last!”

It helps that by the time “Dollar” hit American shores, Per Qualche Dollaro in Più was already in the can overseas and ready to come fast on it’s heels.

For a Few Dollars More not only brought back Eastwood (again, known in the US as “the man with no name” in all the advertisements, though his character was somewhat different and now named Manco) but also introduced Lee Van Cleef to the Spag Western, as “Colonel Mortimer”.

The ads went: “The Man with No Name is back! The Man in Black is waiting…” Steve King loved him some Clint Eastwood spag westerns. Them who has read The Gunslinger series can already hear the first sentance of the first book in their heads right now…

1967 was the year that the Spag Western hit the ground running in the US. Not only did we get a double-barrelled blast of “The Man With No Name” but Sergio Corbucci gave us the coffin-dragging Django which was, if possible, even more influencial than the first two films of the so-called “Dollar” trilogy. A friend of mine who is an anime freak went nuts when he discovered that there was a single source of the “guy dragging coffin full of weaponry”, since apparently it’s shown up in countless manga, anime and J-rpg video games…

Django also has a pretty memorable scene where a villain cuts off a man’s ear as the camera moves away (hmm), as well as one of the most lamentably cheesy theme songs ever written…

And then we also had Sergio Sollima’s The Big Gundown, Lee Van Cleef’s first starring role- also the first spag western for the fantastic Tomas Milan. La resa dei conti , as it was known in italy, took it’s title from the title of the Ennio Morricone piece played during the final shootout in For a Few Dollars More, which Leone took as proof positive that the others were “following” his stylistic choices.

It’s funny that he was so offended by the Spag Westerns that built off the mythology he created, since he was doing the same thing…

Regardless of Leone’s irritation, he’d only begun his crafting. While entertaining- and admittedly, the final showdown between Lee Van Cleef and Gian Maria Volonte (the Italian clone of Oliver Reed) is fucking amazing- Leone didn’t reach cinematic immortality until his next two.

Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo, or The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is the slam dunk. Leone’s themes of personal greed, personal honor, and out right savagery ramped up to full throttle. Eli Wallach steals the movie out from under Eastwood and Van Cleef. Leone takes what he loves from his own movie this time- the three way duel, and turns it up to eleven.

At the same time as the whip-crack and nasal singing of the GBU theme song is entrenching itself in a cultural conciousness (even if you’ve never seen the movie, you’ve heard the theme song, more and more Spag Westerns are being crafted. Some of them, like Corbucci’s Il Mercenario or Sollima’s Faccia a Faccia are just as good as Leone’s epic, and both directors continued to bring their a-games for several cycles.

A shitload of craptacular movies did show up- notably the “Sartana” series, which admittedly has some of my favorite titles… “Have a Good Funeral My Friend, Sartana will Pay!” and “If You Meet Sartana, Pray for Your Death!”. Sergio Leone referred to them as “If you Meet Sartana, give the prick a smack in the mouth”.

So yeah, there are always lesser examples within a genre, look at the glut of slasher-type horror films that erupted after Carpenter’s Halloween- or rather don’t, most of them are pretty bad.

Sadly, the Spag Western doesn’t get a lot of respect for the quality in filmmaking, composing and story-telling that the best exhibited. For a lot of people, they are only to be enjoyed by fatuous hipsters who don’t comprehend the actual definition of Irony- and use the music for knee-jerk recognition…

Others just dismiss the sub-genre with a broad-shrug of “Oh, I don’t like Westerns,” which is kind of like dismissing all country music because you don’t like mainstream Nashville, or all horror films because you don’t like slasher movies.

But there is a lot to learn, and a lot to love, in the Spag Western and it’s descendents.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 8:13 am and is filed under Spaghetti Western. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.