Spaghetti Western - Reception

Reception

In the 1960s, critics recognized that the American genres were rapidly changing. The genre most uniquely American, the Western, seemed to be evolving into a new rougher beast. For many critics, Sergio Leone's films were part of the problem. Leone's Dollars Trilogy (1964–1967) was neither the entirety nor the beginning of the "spaghetti Western" cycle in Italy, but for Americans Leone's films represented the true beginning of the Italian invasion of their privileged cultural form. Christopher Frayling, in his noted book on the Italian Western, describes American critical reception of the spaghetti Western cycle as, to "a large extent, confined to a sterile debate about the 'cultural roots' of the American/Hollywood Western." He remarks that few critics dared admit that they were, in fact, "bored with an exhausted Hollywood genre." Pauline Kael, he notes, was willing to acknowledge this critical ennui and thus appreciate how a film such as Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961) "could exploit the conventions of the Western genre, while debunking its morality." Frayling and other film scholars such as Bondanella argue that this revisionism was the key to Leone's success and, to some degree, to that of the spaghetti Western genre as a whole.