It’s taken a long, long time for me to finally realize that I enjoy a good Western, and, frankly, I blame “Star Wars.” When I was a kid, my world was one of people flying around the galaxy in starships and getting involved in laser battles…and when you’re a kid, you just can’t wrap your head around what the hell your dad’s talking about when he tries to explain how what you’re watching is just a hi-tech version of the cowboys he watched when he was a kid.
Yeah, okay, now I get it: my starships were his horses, my laser blasters were his six-shooters, and so on. But back then, I was just, like, “Okay, whatever, dad: that stuff is in black and white, and that means it’s old.” And to his credit, he was never one of those dads who’d try to assure me that if I’d really enjoy Westerns if I’d just sit down and give them a try…which is a little ironic, given that that’s pretty much my stock maneuver when I’m trying to sway people to check out unheralded stuff. But, y’know, if he’d force-fed me the stuff, I would’ve probably walked away never wanting to see another Western ever again, whereas having found them of my own accord at a time when I was actually able to appreciate them, I’m now finding that I really dig them.
Ironically, though, I think I probably would’ve found myself delving into Westerns several years earlier if I’d paid more attention to the stuff my uncle Charlie – my mom’s brother – was talking up when I was a kid. While Charlie and my dad were both of the same generation, with Charlie actually being a few years older, I distinctly remember that my uncle was a big fan of Clint Eastwood’s Westerns as well. These were the so-called “Spaghetti Westerns,” and they sounded vaguely intriguing even back in my youth… possibly just because I always thought my uncle Charlie was really cool, but, even so, the memory has stuck with me for all these years.
My dad, however, had always been a card-carrying member of the John Wayne / Gene Autry style of Western, and in the world of Westerns, that’s the equivalent of…well, I’m not sure in this case who would be Elvis and who would be The Beatles, but whatever the case, my dad’s allegiance to the kinder, gentler, and less graphic Western was clear. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with this, especially since I’ve yet to see a John Wayne / John Ford collaboration that I didn’t enjoy, but after watching “The Spaghetti West,” an IFC original documentary on the genre, I can only say this:
Man, I have been missing out!
For years, I’d always thought that the term “Spaghetti Western” was intended as a disparaging term, to imply that the films that fell under this banner were nothing more than sub-par foreign rip-offs of the far superior American films which had inspired them. (U.S.A.! U.S.A.!) Gradually, though, I began to learn a little bit more about the genre, saw that these films were starring highly-respected actors like Eastwood, Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, and Jack Palance, and began to realize that maybe I hadn’t been reading this thing quite right. If you enjoy Westerns but you’ve also spent time in this confused camp (and please say if you have, because I don’t want to believe I’m the only one who thought this), then “The Spaghetti West” will serve as a grand illumination for you.
In addition to exploring the work of the legendary Sergio Leone, who all but invented the genre with “A Fistful of Dollars” (and its subsequent sequels, “For A Few Dollars More” and “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”), the documentary explores other key figures in the movement, including Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Sollima. That’s right: they’re the Three Sergios, and if you included nothing but their films, you’d still have a pretty damned effective look at the best of the Spaghetti Westerns. Corbucci proved to be a tremendous influence on Quentin Tarantino, if only for a particularly notorious scene in Corbucci’s “Django,” where this poor bastard gets his ear cut off. (When Tarantino saw the film for the first time, I wonder if his fellow theatergoers were distracted by the lightbulb that must’ve immediately appeared above his head.) We get a good exploration of the three ages of the Spaghetti Western: the straight films which originated the genre, the political-themed versions which came about as things began to get too predictable (a.k.a. the Zapata Westerns), and the comedy or parody takes on the genre – like, say, the “Trinity,” starring Terrence Hill – which prove so inevitable when a genre becomes embraced by the mainstream. Leone, it should be noted, hated the third age (he didn’t think they were funny), but he still ended up providing a post-script to the movement as a whole with “My Name Is Nobody,” which teamed Hill with Henry Fonda and served the final Western of Fonda’s career.
Even those who are well versed in the world of Spaghetti Westerns will love this documentary, which interviews many of the major players, all the way up to Eastwood himself, including several of the directors and actors, as well as Leone’s go-to guy for music, Ennio Morricone. Don’t be surprised if you walk away from this thing with a checklist of new movies for your Netflix queue.
Unfortunately, there’s no trailer for “The Spaghetti West” available, so, in lieu of that, I present the trailer for the film that left me the most curious: Sergio Corbucci’s “Django.” Damn, screw renting; I may just have to buy this thing outright…
Post-Script: I called my dad and told him about having just finished watching this documentary, and his exact quote – following a laugh – was, “Well, I don’t think you’ve just gotten finished watching anything that I care much about!” I mentioned to him how I’d remembered how Charlie had been a fan of some of the Spaghetti Westerns, and he backed me up on that, but then he admitted that half the reason that he’d never liked Spaghetti Westerns himself lay in his rail fandom. (Translated, that means he’s a retired railroad man who’s loved trains all his life.) “I’d see the trains in those movies that were so clearly Italian, with their big ol’ cowcatchers, but they’d’ve painted ‘Santa Fe’ on them or whatever, and I’d just be, like, ‘Give me a break.'” He added, though, that the dubbing from Italian into English always drove him up the wall, too. “I don’t think I ever saw one where they didn’t seem to be at least a syllable behind!” I hereby declare these both to be highly valid reasons.
