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PREFACE

When I was a kid, I used to make believe I was Jack Beauregard.ı Perhaps it was my inherent immunity to bad dubbing, from a childhood spent watching poorly synchronised European adventures like Michel Strogoff and The Flashing Blade during the school holidays. Or maybe it was watching late-night TV showings of For a Few Dollars More and Sabata, or even listening to my parents’ crackly 45rpm single ofHugo Montenegro’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Whatever the reason, I’ve been interested in westerns, and especially Italian ‘spaghetti’ westerns, for nearly as long as I can remember.

The term ‘spaghetti western’ was a derisive label applied by American critics to describe westerns made in Italy and Spain between 1963 and 1977. The most famous spaghetti westerns (ofthe 500-plus made) are Sergio Leone’s amoral, trend-setting ‘Dollars Trilogy’ – A Fistful ofDollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) – which made an icon ofClint Eastwood’s ponchoclad gunfighter, ‘the man with no name’, and brought international recognition to composer Ennio Morricone. The spaghetti western is a cinema ofcontradictions, with abstract cartoon title sequences and black humour contrasting with striking religious imagery, blood-drenched violence and echoing, ethereal music.

The 20 spaghetti westerns I have selected to be the focus ofthis book were made between 1964 and 1973, and encompass the genre’s many differing forms. A Fistful ofDollars is the first internationally successful spaghetti western; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the most successful ofall time. Enzo Barboni’s They Call Me Trinity, Sergio Corbucci’s A Professional Gun and Leone’s For a Few Dollars More were hugely popular worldwide. Also discussed are important films by three key directors: Sergio Corbucci (Django, Navajo Joe, The Hellbenders and The Big Silence); Sergio Sollima (The Big Gundown and Face to Face) and Duccio Tessari (A Pistol for Ringo and The Return ofRingo). More offbeat contributions include Gianfranco Parolini’s acrobatic western Sabata; Damiano Damiani’s political spaghetti A Bullet for the General; Carlo Lizzani’s Hollywood-inspired The Hills Run Red; Giulio Questi’s controversial DjangoKill; two tales ofItalian-style revenge (Giulio Petroni’s Death Rides a Horse and Tonino Valerii’s Day ofAnger); and Valerii’s My Name is Nobody, a reverential epilogue to the genre. All ofthese films are worthy contenders for any spaghetti western ‘Top Ten’. They are also representative ofthe scenarios and themes the genre explored, from revenge, companionship and progress, to justice, greed and betrayal.

1 Jack Beauregard is the renowned western gunfighter in Tonino Valerii’s My Name is Nobody (1973), a spaghetti western examining the relationship between cinema heroes and fandom.

Each film is analysed in detail, with biographies and filmographies ofthe key personnel, accounts ofthe films’ making (including details ofsets and locations), their reception at the box office and influence on the genre. There are notes on the historical frontier period, with comparisons between how the Italians depicted the west and how it really was. There are also extensive notes on the musical scores (often composed by the prolific Ennio Morricone), full cast lists and a selection of stills, poster artwork, lobby cards and LP covers, many ofwhich have never before been published.

In examining the films’ cinematic sources, I’ve incorporated many ofthe finest, and most influential, Hollywood westerns – High Noon, Shane, The Man from Laramie, The Last Wagon, The Searchers, Forty Guns, Day ofthe Outlaw, Rio Bravo, The Magnificent Seven and The Wild Bunch. But spaghetti westerns had a myriad ofnon-western influences, and many other popular genre films are included here: Japanese samurai movies (Yojimbo), European Horrors (Black Sunday, The Awful Dr Orloff, Mill ofthe Stone Women and Black Sabbath) and muscleman epics (Hercules in the Haunted World and Goliath and the Vampires); even Italian spy capers, swashbucklers, pirate adventures and German ‘cowboy and Indian’ movies.

There are also notes on many other European westerns, made by Britain, France, Germany, Spain and, ofcourse, Italy. These include early films like The Savage Guns, Zorro the Avenger, Winnetou the Warrior and Buffalo Bill, Hero ofthe Far West, well-known Italian westerns like Once Upon a Time in the West, A Stranger in Town, Sartana and Compañeros, and the inevitable parodies: For a Few Dollars Less (1966), Il Bello, Il Brutto, Il Cretino (1967, ‘The Handsome, the Ugly, the Cretinous’) and the unforgettable musical spaghetti western Rita ofthe West (1967). By way of avoiding such surprises, I have also asked Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, Alex Cox and Tom Betts, three genre aficionados, to list their own ‘Top Ten’ spaghetti westerns, in an effort to distinguish the good films from the bad and the ugly.

SUNDOWNER: AN INTRODUCTION TO EUROPEAN WESTERNS

In the late fifties and early sixties Rome was second only to Hollywood as the international film capital ofthe world. Many Hollywood productions were filmed there, including Helen ofTroy (1955) and Ben Hur (1959). Others epics, like El Cid (1961), King ofKings (1961) and Lawrence ofArabia (1962), were shot in Spain, because production and labour costs were much cheaper than in Hollywood. Alongside these American-financed epics, the Italians made historical spectaculars in their own inimitable style. Their ‘Sword and Sandal’ muscleman craze saw pneumatic heroes like Hercules, Maciste and Goliath steamrollering through outlandish mythical adventures. Though occasionally juvenile, these fantastical escapades were big box office, even in the States, where they became popular on drive-in double-bills. Papier-mâché boulders, rickety sets, rubber spears and cardboard acting defined the genre, but there were some notable exceptions: Mario Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World (1961), Vittorio Cottafavi’s Goliath and the Dragon (1960) and Hercules Conquers Atlantis (1961), Sergio Corbucci’s Goliath and the Vampires (1961) and Romulus and Remus (1961), Giorgio Ferroni’s Hercules Against Moloch (1963), Nick Nostro’s Spartacus and the Ten Gladiators (1964) and Duccio Tessari’s Sons of Thunder (1962).

Pietro Francisci’s Hercules (1958) and Hercules Unchained (1959), starring Steve Reeves, were the first muscleman films to become successful in the UK and US, largely due to Joseph E. Levine’s advertising campaign; they were among the first films to be advertised on TV. But by 1963 this phoney Roman Empire, which had been the cornerstone ofthe Italian film industry at Rome’s Cinecitta Studios, was beginning to crumble. When some ofthe most expensive productions (in particular Robert Aldrich’s biblical epic The Last Days ofSodom and Gomorrah and Luchino Visconti’s adaptation ofGiuseppe Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard ) bombed spectacularly internationally, the American financiers pulled out, the money dried up, and the Italians were left with a selection ofvast ancient monuments and a surplus oftogas.

In an effort to find the next craze, opportunistic Italian film-makers tried every conceivable genre. They made contemporary thrillers (The Evil Eye, Blood and Black Lace); Gothic horrors (Black Sunday, Castle ofBlood, The Terror ofDr Hitchcock, Kill Baby Kill); science fiction (Battle ofthe Worlds); ancient court intrigues and love stories (Sign ofthe Gladiator, The Trojan War); Tartar adventures (Ursus and the Tartar Princess); Viking sagas (Erik the Conqueror); swashbucklers (Seven Seas to Calais, Sandokan the Great); El Cid rip-offs (The Castillian and Son ofEl Cid); genie and flying-carpet Arabian adventures (The Golden Arrow); Mondo shockumentaries (Mondo Cane) and pirate films (Queen ofthe Pirates). To make things

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