Original subtitles

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Spaghetti Western is a term coined by

foreign critics to refer to Italian-made

westerns. Get it? Italy. Spaghetti.

Spaghetti. Spaghetti. Western veteran

Aldo Samrell claimed the term was

invented by Spanish journalist Alfonso

Sanchez. They're also called macaroni

westerns in Japan and Italo westerns in

Germany. In Italy, they called them

western alatitalana or Italian style

westerns. You ever seen an an Italian

western? Huh? They're awful. Spaghetti

westerns were typically Italian

productions as their slightly offensive

name would suggest, but they're more

broadly defined as European westerns

because they were often co-productions

with Spain and occasionally France,

Portugal, Greece, West Germany, the UK,

and Yugoslavia, and sometimes America.

It became something of a minor cultural

phenomenon. Between 1960 and 1978, more

than 600 European westerns were

produced. Spaghetti westerns were a lot

grittier, bloodier, and more surreal

than the traditional American westerns.

They satarized and dethized the western.

American movies like Stage Coach and

High Noon told stories of good versus

evil with very simplistic black and

white ethics. The heroic law men brought

the despicable outlaws to justice. The

noble white gunslingers vanquished the

savage Native Americans. But as much as

America likes to present itself as a

land of hope and dreams, the reality of

the Old West and the reality of

contemporary America from the 60s up to

today is much bleeer than that. American

filmmakers and their Hollywood studios

refused to dig into the darkness that

the rest of the world associates with

their country. So the rest of the world

took up the western genre and did it for

them.

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and

go again.

Italian artists use of the American West

as a backdrop for action and drama dates

all the way back to Jakomao Puchini's

1910 opera The Girl of the West. In

1961, Michael Carreras's British,

Spanish western, Savage Guns,

established Spain as a suitable shooting

location for European westerns. In 1963,

Italian and Spanish filmmakers teamed up

to produce three Euro westerns. Gunfight

at Red Sands, Gunfight at High Noon, and

Implacable Three. But the spaghetti

Western as we know it today wasn't

created until Sergio Leone came along

with his seinal 1964 masterpiece, A

Fistful of Dollars. A Fistful of Dollars

is when Italian westerns stopped being a

cheap imitation of American westerns and

became an art form of their own, a

satirical response to American westerns.

Fistful of Dollars is an unofficial

remake of Akira Kurasawa's iconic

samurai film Yojimbo about a lone hero

who wanders into a town held captive by

two waring gangs and plays the two gangs

against each other to liberate the

town's people. Leone wasn't just

inspired by Yojimbo. A fist full of

dollars is a shot forshot recreation in

some sections. It's so close that

Yojimbo's production company

successfully sued Leone for a chunk of

the profits. Kurissau had been heavily

influenced by the westerns of John Ford

when he made his classic samurai movies.

He brought Ford's simple morality tales

of the American West into feudal Japan.

When Leoni made a fistful of dollars, he

brought Kurasawa's tale of feudal Japan

back to the American West. Clint

Eastwood's man with no name became the

archetypal spaghetti western anti-hero,

a lone gunslinger who drifts into town

to serve justice. He's cool as ice, calm

and collected in the face of imminent

danger. He's a man of few words. He lets

his pistol do the talking. Eastwood

radiates charisma in this role. All he

needs is a cold stare to keep you glued

to the screen. waiting with baited

breath to see what he does next. The man

with no name became a prototypical

protagonist not just for the spaghetti

western but across all genres. His

influence can be seen in Boba Fett,

Solid Snake, Jatarro Kujo, Roland

Dechain, The Ghoul, and The Mandalorian.

A fistful of dollars introduced the

brutality of Leon's vision of the Wild

West. Right off the bat, the movie opens

with a couple of bandits firing their

guns at a little boy as he flees in

terror. Oklahoma. This

ain't any Maricone's fist full of

dollars score instantly set the tone for

spaghetti western music. Maricone's

music brought an oporatic grandiosity to

the proceedings. His sweeping

orchestrations paired perfectly with

Leone's signature sense of scale to

create a really epic feel in a

relatively sparse production. Moricone's

score became the gold standard for the

music in this subgenre.

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A fistful of dollars established a lot

of the tropes of the spaghetti western,

but it wasn't fully solidified as a

subgenre of its own until two years

later when Sergio Corbuchi, the other

legendary spaghetti western director

named Sergio, made Django.

Jango.

Jango, have you always been alone?

Jango.

Django. Django follows the same basic

Yojimbo story. The hero comes into a

town torn between two feuding factions

and takes it upon himself to

single-handedly end the conflict and

free the locals. But it has a lot more

distinguishing elements that not only

saved Kbuchi from litigation, but also

helped to define the idiosyncratic

perspective of the spaghetti western. We

first see Django dragging a coffin on

his travels, adding another layer of

mystery to the character that gets a

great payoff later on. And his

motivation for taking on the bad guys is

much more personal than the man with no

name or even the Ronin and Yojimbo.

Django goes after the sadistic Major

Jackson because he murdered Django's

lover, Mercedes Zaro. The man with no

name doesn't have any personal

attachments, but Django can't rest until

he avenges the love of his life. Django

is much chattier than the man with no

name. The man with no name might as well

be the man with no mouth. He barely has

anything to say. But Django will engage

in long conversations. He'll speak up if

he sees some wrongdoing. And he always

has a quippy oneliner up his sleeve. But

an even bigger difference is that Django

is more sensitive and emotional than the

man with no name. Unlike the man with no

name, who's basically a gun for hire.

Django wants to retire from his life as

a gunslinger and live in peace. But

before he can do that, he has to avenge

Mercedes. Django forms a bond with a

woman named Maria built on their mutual

experiences with the trauma of violence.

But where they differ is on the need for

revenge. Maria wants Django to just let

it go and run away with her. But Django

can't rest until he has his vengeance.

Luis Bakalov's Django score, including

the iconic title theme, hammered home

the oporatic quality of spaghetti

western music. You could play a maronei

track or a Balov track over any image

and it would instantly make it

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cinematic.

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Django is somehow even more violent than

a fist full of dollars. It's so

relentlessly brutal and bloody that it

makes first full of dollars look tame by

comparison, and Kbuchi was heavily

criticized for it. There's a scene where

Major Jackson cuts off a guy's ear,

which may sound familiar because

Tarantino homaged it in Reservoir Dogs.

But the scene in Django is even more

horrifying than the one in Reservoir

Dogs because after cutting the guy's ear

off, Jackson feeds it to him and forces

him to eat it. This solidified the

spaghetti Western's much rougher,

grizzlier vision of the American West.

Django is also more overtly political

than A Fistful of Dollars. It deals with

America's racial tensions more directly.

Major Jackson is a Confederate. In the

fight against slavery, he was on the

pro-slavery side, and a lot of his most

sickening acts throughout the film are

rooted in the real horrors of history.

Jackson's use of Mexican peons for

target practice is based on white

slavers using indigenous Brazilians for

target practice as late as the 1950s.

Jackson's guys wear red hoods and burn a

wooden cross. They're not explicitly

stated to be the Kuclux Clan, but

Kabuchi is clearly evoking that imagery.

Django's radical political imagery

established Spaghetti Westerns as the

perfect vehicle for European filmmakers

to criticize their jingoistic American

peers by using their favorite toys

against them. At this point, you might

be thinking it was pretty hypocritical

for Italian directors to criticize

America's racial indiscretions. Don't

forget Italy sided with the Nazis in

World War II, but Kbuchi was famously a

hardcore leftist and didn't shy away

from imbuing those views into his films.

Django's revenge story builds to a

beautifully poetic ending. It's one of

my favorite climactic sequences in a

movie ever. It brings everything

together in the most [ __ ] up way

imaginable. Jackson's men have stamped

on Django's hands and broken all his

fingers, so he's physically unable to

hold his own revolver and exact revenge

the oldfashioned way. So, he uses his

teeth to take the trigger guard off his

gun and rests the trigger on Mercedes's

gravestone. When Jackson shows up,

Django uses his broken, bloodied hands

to mash the trigger against his dead

lover's headstone to fill him full of

lead. So, in a way, Mercedes helps

Django avenge her. As Django uses his

broken fingers and his lover's grave to

fire his gun, the consequences of

Jackson's actions come together to kill

him. When Jackson is dead and Mercedes

has been avenged, Django can finally

hang up his pistol, leave his life of

violence behind, and enjoy a peaceful

existence. He hangs up his pistol quite

literally by leaving it dangling from

Mercedes's grave, then walks over the

horizon to a new beginning. And with

that perfect final image, The Spaghetti

Western was solidified as a subgenre of

its own and a revolutionary film

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movement.

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Django and a fist full of dollars were

so successful and so formative that they

both launched franchises that went in

completely different directions. Django

became the spaghetti western equivalent

of James Bond or Batman. Every filmmaker

in Italy took a crack at their own

Django adventure and every suitable

Italian actor gave their own take on the

role. There was only ever one official

sequel with Franco Nero reprising his

role. Django strikes again in 1987, but

more than 30 unofficial Django movies

were produced with different actors

playing the part. Tarantino paid tribute

to this tradition when he named his own

love six spaghetti western hero after

Django. The D is silent. I know. Leone

was more directly involved in the

franchise expansion of his seminal

spaghetti western. After a fistful of

dollars, Leone reunited with Eastwood

and Moricone for two sequels for a few

dollars more and the good, the bad, and

the ugly, comprising what is now known

as the dollars trilogy. But it's not a

trilogy in the same way as the Godfather

trilogy or the Matrix trilogy or any

other trilogy that tells one big story

in three parts. The only thing that

connects the dollar sequels is Eastwood

playing the same character who has a new

alias in each film and Leone bringing

the same Gonzo oporatic brutality to

traditional western stories. They're all

standalone westerns with no links to

each other's plot. It's not even 100%

clear what their true chronological

order is, but they're all bonafide

masterpieces in their own way. The

Dollar Trilogy is one of the greatest

trilogies in cinema history. It pulls

off a feat that only Toy Story, Lord of

the Rings, and arguably the Before

Trilogy have pulled off. It started out

with a perfect movie. Then each sequel

got bigger and bolder and somehow even

better, building to a flawless finale.

for a few dollars more gave the man with

no name a jaw. It made him a bounty

hunter which became a part of the

archetype. It also completely changed

the dynamic. Fistful of dollars had

introduced the man with no name as a

lone wolf who doesn't play well with

others. But in the sequel, he

reluctantly teams up with a fellow

bounty hunter when they both go after a

gang that neither of them could take

alone. It's essentially a buddy story

and Eastwood is perfectly paired with

Lee Van Clee as another gruff

gunslinging badass. Do you know what you

are?

Just the day you son of a

The good, the bad, and the ugly is a big

bombastic epic set during the Civil War.

This time, The Man with No Name is just

one of three protagonists. The good

opposite The Bad and the Ugly, who are

all racing to be the first to reach a

fortune in Confederate gold buried in a

grave plot. The good, the bad, and the

ugly has the widest scope of the

trilogy, telling a sprawling

multi-perspective narrative across three

hours, but it also has the tightest film

making. It's interesting to watch Leone

evolve as a director over the course of

the trilogy. He was a master craftsman

and a visionary from the beginning. He

had a great eye for framing that could

bring a real sense of scale and

cinematic ferocity to something as

simple as a showdown on a dusty road

just from where he chose to put the

camera. But over the course of the

trilogy, he refined his style. By the

time he got to the good, the bad, and

the ugly, he had it down to a fine art.

He juxtaposed wide shots with extreme

close-ups to create an interesting

visual tension. He used sweeping long

takes and complicated blocking to give

his minimalist film making a maximalist

feel and create a kind of pure cinema.

Leon's movies had dialogue, but he

constructed them like silent films. His

careful sequencing of images and the

look in his actor's eyes said more than

a thousand words could.

Although they're closely associated with

Italy, the majority of Spaghetti

Westerns were shot in Spain, most

commonly in the southeastern province of

Almria. A lot of the sets are still

there today, being used as tourist

attractions. The production process of

Spaghetti Westerns was a mess. They were

filmed on low budgets and they often had

multilingual casts who each shot their

scenes in their own native tongue and

then post-Sync their dialogue. But the

movies themselves, the stories, the

themes, the characters, the visuals hold

up a lot better than most of the

professionally produced but

stylistically stale American westerns of

the 50s and

60s. [ __ ]

yeah. To save the [ __ ]

day, [ __ ] yeah. Spaghetti westerns

reflected the ugliness of American

history in brutal and uncompromising

ways. American westerns often shied away

from the darkness of US history and

whitewashed the past. They used the

Civil War as a plot device, but ignored

the horrors that started it. They

blindly depicted native people as

violent savages who gave the white

settlers no choice but to slaughter them

for the greater good. But Spaghetti

Westerns assued the [ __ ] and

addressed the horrors of American

history headon. In the Hellbenders,

Joseph Cotton wants to restart the

Confederacy. They think the war is over

because Lee surrendered.

They weren't counting on me or any of

us, Helvin. The Union may have won the

war, but the racism and white supremacy

sadly never went away. The good, the

bad, and the ugly ingeniously mocks the

Civil War, and the absurdity and

futility of war in general. The

characters don't take sides. They're

only on the battlefield because the gold

they want to steal is on the other side

of it. That's what it's all about,

money. Whether they're defending the

cheap labor of slavery or invading Iraq

for its lucrative oil supply, American

soldiers are almost always fighting for

the ruling class to make a quick buck.

One of my absolute favorite spaghetti

westerns is Kbuchi's Navajo Joe.

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Where most Hollywood westerns either

ignored it or whitewashed it, Navajo Joe

addressed the slaughter of Native

Americans directly. Kbuchi uses movie

magic to write the wrongs of history in

gruesomely satisfying fashion. It was a

big influence on the antibbellum era

revenge fantasies of Django Unchained.

Navajo Joe opens with a Native American

tribe being massacred by a band of scalp

hunters. The sole survivor, the titula

Joe, sets out to exact revenge and picks

off these despicable killers one by one.

Like Alpuccino's casting as a Cuban

immigrant in Scarface, Bert Reynolds's

casting as a Native American warrior

would not fly today. The darkening of

his skin makes it particularly

uncomfortable. But while Reynolds's

casting has aged like lumpy milk, the

film's historical revisionism has aged

like a fine wine. At a time when

American westerns were still vilifying

natives and glorifying their white

oppressors, Navajo Joe ruthlessly

planted itself on the right side of

history. An Indian sheriff. The only

ones elected in this country are

Americans.

My father was born here in the

mountains. His father before him and his

father before him and his father before

him. Where was your father born? What is

that to do with it? The wave of

spaghetti westerns gave Hollywood stars

a chance to play drastically against ty

at a time when Hollywood wanted its

movie stars to maintain a very rigid

on-screen image. Jack Palance got to

play a really campy role in The

Mercenary. No American movie would have

had Palance gleefully strip naked and

give the hero an

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Eiffel. Henry Fondo was the Tom Hanks of

his day. A wholesome, goodnatured,

all-American sweetheart. But in Once

Upon a Time in the West, Leone cast him

as a sadistic villain. In his first

scene, Fond as Frank murders three

children, and he only gets more evil

from there. Fond relishes the

opportunity to ditch his carefully

cultivated Hollywood persona and play an

unabashedly mean

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[ __ ] Kbuchi's The Great Silence

is one of the bleakest movies I've ever

seen. John Louie Tronant stars as a mute

gunfighter named Silence who's called

upon to save the town of Snow Hill,

Utah. When the governor changes

legislation to label the poor residents

of Snow Hill as outlaws, a band of

bounty hunters ride in to freely execute

everyone in town. The only thing that

stands between the defenseless towns

people and the cold-blooded killers who

can legally wipe them all out is

silence. This movie is a prime example

of pathetic fallacy. Not only do the

snowy landscapes photograph beautifully,

the harsh wintry surroundings go

handinhand with the story's grim themes,

Kbuchi uses cold, unforgiving

environments to highlight his cold,

unforgiving characters. The Great

Silence is a true subversion of the

usual good triumphs over evil formula of

American westerns. In a traditional

western, the premise of a gunslinger

protecting a defenseless town from evil

would culminate in an armed standoff

whereby the hero defeats the villains,

peace is restored, and he rides off into

the sunset. However, the great Silence

is anything but a traditional western.

Silence is hopelessly outmatched by the

villainous Loco and his gang. When he's

invited to the middle of town for a

climactic gunfight, he's barely able to

stand up because he's been so

sadistically brutalized by these bounty

hunters. Kbuchi spends the whole movie

putting Silence through the ringer and

establishing Loco as a truly hateable

villain whose gruesome demise is highly

anticipated. You really want to see

Silence kill Loco and his team of bounty

hunters and save the town. But that's

not how it goes down at all. Even the

most subversive westerns like Kbuchi's

own Django end with the good guy killing

the bad guys. But at the end of the

great silence, silence is gunned down

very unceremoniously by Lok. He doesn't

even get a chance to draw his

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weapon.

His girlfriend Pauline rushes in to

finish the deed, but Loco shoots her

too. You devil.

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Then, as the villagers are desperately

begging for their lives, the bounty

hunters murder them all in cold blood.

It's a massacre.

The bad guys ride out of town, leaving a

pile of bodies in their wake, and the

credits roll. It's one of the grimmst,

most unsettling endings of a movie I've

ever seen. The first time I saw it, I

couldn't believe how unabashedly

depressing it was. I was speechless for

like a full hour. I was as heartbroken

over the death of silence as I was

impressed by Kbuchi's balls. This kind

of ending can go horribly wrong. It's

usually a massive disappointment. If a

movie has built up to a hero facing off

against a villain, then the villain

killing the hero as soon as they show up

before the hero even has a chance to put

up a fight could leave audiences feeling

cheated. But Kbuchi used this technique

masterfully in The Great Silence. The

alternate endings requested by the

producers exemplify how perfect Kbuchi's

soul crushing finale is. There's a happy

ending in which silence saves the day

and an ambiguous ending that suggests

Loco has a lastminute change of heart.

Both of these endings feel incredibly

disingenuous to the bleakness of

Kbuchi's vision. This material called

for a miserable ending to Silence's

story, and the fact that Kbuchi dared to

cross that threshold and wallow in the

misery without a single glimmer of hope

makes The Great Silence the perfect

anti-Western. It deconstructs the

western myth to present a more morally

complex and historically accurate

portrait of life on the frontier. It

wasn't a romantic time. It was a lawless

hellscape. There are no gunslinging

heroes coming to save you from the bad

guys. The bad guys are unchecked,

unrestrained, and unstoppable. It's

[ __ ] depressing, but that's life.

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That's life. That's life. That's what

all the people say.

The Spaghetti Western craze reached its

peak in 1968. In 1968, Spaghetti

Westerns made up a third of all Italian

film productions. And in 1969, it fell

to just onetenth. The dream was over.

Leone's 1968 Magnum Opus, Once Upon a

Time in the West, served as a fitting

swan song for the spaghetti western.

Frankly, it could have been a suitable

swan song for the western altogether. It

certainly was for the genre's golden

age.

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Once Upon a Time in the West was

intended to mark Leon's retirement from

making westerns. He would eventually

return to the genre to direct Duck You

Sucker, a timely tale that used the

Mexican Revolution to comment on the May

68 riots and dromanticized the concept

of revolution and political upheaval.

But he was eager to make Once Upon a

Time in America. So Once Upon a Time in

the West was supposed to be his final

western. So he crammed in everything he

had left to say about the American West,

everything he could possibly want to do

with a western that he hadn't done yet.

He recruited a ragtag group of his

filmmaker friends, including Bernardo

Bertoluchcci and Jallow legend Dario

Arento, to come up with a story that

combined all their favorite moments from

classic western movies. It's a love

letter to the western genre. Unlike the

shoestring spaghetti westerns that came

before it, Once Upon a Time in the West

was produced by Paramount with a proper

studio movie budget. We get to see what

a spaghetti western with the resources

of an American western looks like. It's

a marriage of those two styles. It has

the grit and brutality of a spaghetti

western with the grand scale of an

American western. Leone even went to

John Ford's favorite filming location,

Monument Valley, to shoot Jill's Journey

to Sweetwater. This movie sees Leone at

the height of his film making powers.

The iconic opening sequence is one of

the finest pieces of cinema ever

produced. It starts off with a simple

setup. Three guys wait at a train

station for a train to arrive with the

guy they're there to kill. Throughout

this scene, Leone masterfully ratchets

up the tension. No one says a word, and

yet from their body language and from

the sequencing of shots, you know

exactly what's going on. Someone's going

to

die. After that nailbiting opener, the

movie that follows is somberly paced,

defined by slow, quiet scenes

occasionally broken up by quick bursts

of violence. Leone is more interested in

the buildup to violence and the

aftermath and consequences of violence

than the violence itself. Once Upon a

Time in the West has much more of a

sobering sense of realism than the

average spaghetti western, which made it

the perfect coder for the age of the

spaghetti western. Leone deconstructed

the

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deconstruction. As spaghetti westerns

became more and more popular and

traditional American westerns fell out

of fashion, Hollywood would eventually

catch on and start producing its own

darkly subversive westerns in the

late60s and early '7s. It was around

this time that the Vietnam War and the

Watergate scandal had Americans feeling

nice and cynical about their own

government. So, a movie like Rio Bravo

wouldn't fly anymore. American

filmmakers channeled their

disillusionment into a new wave of

westerns that upended all the

established tropes. George Roy Hills,

Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid

abandoned two key tenants of American

westerns. Instead of following the

lawmen tracking down bank robbers, it

followed the bank robbers themselves.

And instead of standing strong in the

face of danger, Butch and Sundance run

away. Robert Ultman's Mabe and Mrs.

Miller revolves around a guy who claims

to be a notorious gunfighter, but in

reality is just a smoothtalking coward

who sneaks around and shoots people in

the back when push comes to shove. Sam

Peek and Par's The Wild Bunch is the

closest Hollywood came to making its own

homegrown spaghetti western. It's a

rough, mean, pessimistic, delightfully

bloody tale of outlaws refusing to adapt

with the times. A lot of the most

acclaimed American westerns from the

years since the genre's heyday ended,

from Eastwood's Unforgiven to

Tarantino's Django Unchained, have been

heavily inspired by the work of the

Sergios. What began as Italian

imitations of American westerns became

so influential that their style and

their themes and their bleak outlook

eventually made their way back into

American westerns.

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So, there you have an oral history of

spaghetti westerns. This weird little

subg genre is one of the great loves of

my life. So, I hope you've learned

something and I hope that if you haven't

seen some of the movies I've discussed,

you'll consider checking them out.

[Music]

Thanks for watching, guys. I hope you

like the video. Remember to like and

subscribe and click on the little bell.

And also, seize the day and call your

mom and be kind to yourself.

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