[Low Odysseys]

One Western film historian I’ve come across resents the Spag Westerns, he views them as the coffin-nail in traditional Hollywood westerns. I disagree, though I understand where he is coming from. The traditional western couldn’t last forever, no film genre does, unchanged. If it wasn’t hyper-violent, heightened reality genre-bending, it would have been something else…

It is generally accepted that the last Spaghetti Western was made during the late 70s, though Franco Nero became Django one last time as late as 1987 in the bizzare bannana-boat western, Django Strikes Again.

But the style, that lives on.

And the influence as well. I noted in an earlier essay how Clint Eastwood- arguably the first star of the Spag Western movement- was visibly influenced, style-wise, in his own directorial westerns during the 70’s and 80’s. Walter Hill, while an avowed Pecknipah disciple, certainly took some visual cues from the European directors as well as his mentor Bloody Sam, for his break-out western The Long Riders.

In 1987, Spaghetti Western fan (and historian) Alex Cox, who also directed & wrote Sid & Nancy and Repo Man made a sly tribute to the Spag Western with his generally reviled film Straight To Hell. Starring Joe Strummer, The Pogues, Dick Rude, Sy Richardson, Courtney Love, and with truly weird cameos by Dennis Hopper, Elvis Costello, Jim Jarmusch and Grace Jones… the movie was never well received outside of a small group of drooling fanatics, myself included. Sadly, a trailer doesn’t seem to exist on the interwebs for this bizarro spag western (shot in some of the same locations in Almeria as the Leone and Corbucci westerns, Cox is a particularly outspoken Corbucci fan)… but I did find this video for the Pogues cover of the theme song from The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, using footage from the movie and behind the scenes as well…

Comedies have taken cues from the way Leone in particular cut between eyes and mouths and hands during his gunfights, the widening eye, the nervously licked lip, the beads of sweat- we’ve all seen this utilized in sit-coms and the like.

The music, of course, has lived on even more than the films themselves, the scores of Ennio Morricone and Luis Bacalov, among others, are still used today at sporting events, in commercials, and even at the Oscars.

But best of all, a number of foreign filmmakers have fallen in love all over again, and made the idea of the “noodle” western there own… A number of post-Soviet Russian films have been made, usually set along the Mongolian border or in Siberia, that are known as “Easterns”, but are shot in the Spag Western style.

A lot of crap comes out that is influenced by the Spag Western, which is appropriate because a huge amount of Spag Westerns were crap. Milco Mancevski’s Dust gets an A for effort, but fails pretty hard in the execution. Watch the weird Polish trailer.

This year alone we are going to be seeing both an Udon Western, Sukiyaki Western Django from none other than Takashi Miike, and the Dangmyeon Western The Good, The Bad, & The Weird which looks like the most mind-boggling awesome double-feature possible…

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.