Spaghetti Western

Spaghetti Western is a nickname for a broad sub-genre of Western films that emerged in the mid-1960s in the wake of Sergio Leone's film-making style and international box-office success. It was used by critics in USA and other countries because most of these Westerns were produced and directed by Italians. In the beginning the term was used in a derogatory sense, but over time it has become accepted as descriptive. The denomination for these films in Italy is western all'italiana (Italian-Style Western). Italo-Western is also used, especially in Germany. The term Eurowesterns may be used to also include Western movies that were produced in Europe but not called Spaghetti Westerns, like the West German Winnetou films or Ostern Westerns. The majority of the films were international co-productions between Italy, Spain, and sometimes France, Germany, Yugoslavia, and the United States.

These movies were originally released in Italian, but as most of the films featured multilingual casts and sound was post-synched, most "western all'italiana" do not have an official dominant language. The typical Spaghetti Western team was made up of an Italian director, Italo-Spanish technical staff, and a cast of Italian, Spanish, German and American actors, sometimes a fading Hollywood star and sometimes a rising one like the young Clint Eastwood in three of Sergio Leone's films.

Over six hundred European Westerns were made between 1960 and 1980. The best-known Spaghetti westerns were directed by Sergio Leone and scored by Ennio Morricone: the "Dollars Trilogy" (A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). These are consistently found on top of or among the best rated Westerns in general.

Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars and the following films in his Dollars trilogy created the Spaghetti Western as a novel kind of Western. In this seminal film the hero enters a town that is ruled by two outlaw gangs and ordinary social relations are non-existent. He betrays and plays the gangs against one another in order to make money. Then he uses his cunning and inordinate weapons skill to assist a family threatened by both gangs. He is disclosed and severely beaten, but in the end he again uses cunning and inordinate weapons skills to defeat the remaining gang. The interaction in this story between a mode of cunning and irony (the tricks, deceits, unexpected actions and sarcasms of the hero) on the one hand, and a mode of pathos (terror and brutality against defenceless people and against the hero after he has been revealed) on the other, was aspired to and sometimes attained by the imitations that soon flooded the cinemas. Just as seminal and imitated was Ennio Morricone's music that expresses a similar duality between quirky and unusual sounds and instruments on the one hand and sacral dramatizing for the big confrontation scenes, on the other.

Especially the mode of the pathetic received a big boost with Sergio Corbucci's very influential Django. However in the following years the mode of cunning and irony became more prominent, not least under influence of Leone's next two Westerns, with their emphasis on unstable partnerships. In the last phase of the Spaghetti Western, with the Trinity films, the Leone legacy had been transformed almost beyond recognition, as (low) comedy reigned and terror and deadly violence gave way to harmless brawling.

Leone's films and other "core" Spaghetti Westerns are often described as having eschewed, critizised or even "demythologized" many of the conventions of traditional US Westerns. This was partly intentional and partly the context of a different cultural background.