The Birth of the Spaghetti Western

Although it wasn't the first Italian Western, Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars" was the film which introduced many of the conventions of the genre that would become known as the Spaghetti Western. The films which preceded it had been straight transpositions of the American style ; Leone's film broke with this tradition and the result is something which still has the exciting sense of a filmmaker discovering a whole new way of doing things. Over the course of his 'Dollars Trilogy' - comprising "A Fistful of Dollars,""For a Few Dollars More" and  "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," Leone and his collaborators created a sub-genre which went on to spawn countless imitations - both in Italy and elsewhere - and which had such an impact on the Western genre itself that the American films which followed it were never quite the same. That's a pretty damned impressive for an Italian film made in Spanish locations starring an American television actor for the equivalent of $200,000 during the spring of 1964.

The film is a loose remake of Akira Kurosawa's "Yojimbo" which is loosely based on Dashiell Hammett's novel "Red Harvest." Leone was fascinated by the cynical, shabby hero who seemed so removed from the American Western heroes portrayed by John Wayne, Randolph Scott, and Alan Ladd. There are so many important facets to Leone's first Western but I want to focus on the central figure of the film. What the audience sees is the traditionally heroic central character turned into something quite different. Clint Eastwood, who was playing Rowdy Yates on "Rawhide" and was contractually forbidden from appearing in American films during the show's hiatus could have easily played an upstanding, righteous man beset by evil men. But Leone wanted to do something different. In place of the usual Western hero - perhaps best represented by Alan Ladd in "Shane" or John Wayne in "Rio Bravo" - we have a morally ambivalent figure whose motives are considerably less pure than his counterparts. The Man With No Name watches cruelty without acting to stop it, shoots first without asking questions and brings down instant judgment upon anyone who tries him. If we find him heroic, it's mostly because he's more likeable than the incredibly unpleasant bad guys. The audience is expected to direct whatever sympathy towards Eastwood. After all, he's tough, a great shot, dependable and dryly funny, dispensing occasional quips such as the famous "Four coffins" gag towards the start. In this sense, as Christopher Frayling has pointed out, he's the model for the modern action hero; he can kill as many people as he wants because, ultimately, he's the only thing standing between us and complete moral anarchy. Later directors of Spaghetti westerns would push the audience over into the abyss in films like the spectacularly bleak, surreal cartoon violence of the Django series. However, Leone's use of the hero isn't the revolutionary break from convention as many critics have claimed it to be. The American Western was going in a more mature direction during the 1950s, there's a definite feeling that the hero figure was being gradually deconstructed in Anthony Mann's trilogy of Westerns starring Jimmy Stewart the hero is pushed away from the cliches into new psychological territory, making him increasingly dark, selfish and haunted by past sins. John Ford did something similar with John Wayne in "The Searchers"  and  Paul Newman's playing of Billy The Kid as a juvenile delinquent sadist in Arthur Penn's "The Left Handed Gun" points forward to the creation of a hero who is only removed from the villain by a few bullet holes. Moral ambiguity is everywhere in Leone's universe but it's also omnipresent in the work of Anthony Mann and Samuel Fuller. Indeed, you could hardly call John Ford's 1962 "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" a simple old-fashioned cowboy picture.

The next significant innovation is linked to the first and that's the use of violence. In American films, there was a rule imposed by the Production Code that you couldn't see a gun fired and a man fall down dead in the same frame. Leone throws this away in "A Fistful of Dollars", establishing the classic moments of the gun looming in the foreground and the men blown away in the background. Although the film isn't particularly explicit by his later standards, there's a brutality that very unlike anything in mainstream American film at the time. The gleeful sadism of the bad guys - laughing as they beat Eastwood - must have been profoundly shocking to those audiences whose idea of evil was Jack Palance in a black shirt.

Ennio Morricone's music, combining a vocal chorus with Fender Stratocaster guitar and orchestra, remains iconic and completely subverts stately epic conventions of Western scores by Elmer Bernstein and Alfred Newman. Future Westerns would imitate the score but never equal it.

"A Fistful of Dollars" remains, forty years on, cracking good entertainment. Leone's later films are more complex and ambiguous - there's nothing here to match the moral shadings of Colonel Mortimer or Cheyenne - but if it's a excellent piece of action film-making.