Zapata Western - Other Political Westerns

Other Political Westerns

Not all political Spaghetti Westerns came from the Zapata mould, however. Three of the most popular - Sollima's Face to Face (1967), Tonino Valerii's The Price of Power (1969), and Enzo G. Castellari's Keoma (1975) - are different types of films, though all of them follow the general outline of the storyline. Face To Face concerns an American history professor (Gian Maria Volonte), dying of tuberculosis, who moves west and becomes fascinated in the outlaw way of life, eventually joining and taking over an outlaw gang led by Tomas Milan, and driving it to destruction. The movie made overt fascist parallels, but took place in the Arizona desert in the 1860s and contained no definite references to contemporary events such as Vietnam. The Price of Power, starring Giuliano Gemma, Van Johnson, Fernando Rey and José Suárez, was an interesting Western take on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, replacing JFK with James Garfield in 1881 Dallas (the fact that Garfield was assassinated in Washington makes little difference to the allegorical storyline). Keoma, with Franco Nero and Woody Strode, dealt largely with issues of civil rights and discrimination, and played as a sort of commentary on the American Civil Rights Movement of the early-to-mid '60s.

Other Spaghetti westerns, namely, Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), contained more subtle political elements which were not the driving part of the main story. Though most Spaghettis had at least some degree of politics to be found in them, the majority of them were not, by nature, political Westerns.