What is a spaghetti Western? ...
Question: What is a spaghetti Western? And how does it differ from a regular Western?
Answer: The short answer is that spaghetti Westerns are Italian productions set in the American West. The longer answer involves a confluence of historical, economic and cultural forces. The popular reimagining of the American West began as the West was still being won, with pulp novels, Wild West shows and touring theater productions. Movies were the next logical step in the process, and their formative years followed so closely on the heels of the conquest of the frontier that real-life legend Wyatt Earp (1848-1929) lived long enough to act as an advisor on early Westerns. American Westerns ranged from simple adventure fables aimed at children to more psychologically and socioeconomically sophisticated stories. But by the early '60s, after more than 40 years of movies and TV shows, American Westerns were running out of steam. European audiences had always loved Western stories; German novelist Karl May's (1842-1912) dozens of Western adventure stories captivated generations of readers. And the prolific Italian movie industry was coming off a fad for muscle-man movies set in ancient Greece and Rome and looking for the next big thing. Sergio Leone's throwaway Per un pugno di dollari (1964) pointed the way: The uncredited remake of Akira Kurasawa's samurai film Yojimbo (1961), set in the American West and starring a lightweight American actor named Clint Eastwood (then the costar of TV's Rawhide), "A Fistful of Dollars" became a huge hit. It was also more casually violent, profane and cynical than traditional American Westerns, attitudes that defined hundreds of subsequent Italian Westerns. "Spaghetti Western" was a derisive term coined by certain dismissive American critics, but the same qualities they so disliked struck many viewers as a breath of fresh air in a stale genre; the term stuck, but lost its pejorative implications. Spaghetti Westerns became increasingly surreal, baroquely violent and explicitly political as the '60s wore on, attitudes that in turn colored the next generation of American Westerns — there would have been no Oscar-winning Unforgiven (1992) without them — and influenced filmmakers as diverse as Sam Peckinpah, John Woo and Quentin Tarantino.
