Per un pugno di dollari: The Origin of the Spaghetti Western

This essay is a slightly edited version of one I submitted in a university-level Italian Cinema course ~7 years ago, which I mention only to prove that I've always been a fucking loser.

If there is an American genre, it is the Western; individualism, gun violence, and extralegal morality, all set on the wild desert frontiers of the late 1800s. It wasn’t just young American boys, however, who came to idolize the lone gunslinger. Some of the most famous Western films of all time were produced not in Hollywood, but by Italians in a small town near Madrid. These so-called spaghetti westerns dominated European and American cinemas alike for more than a decade.

The roots of the Western genre reach as far as the era of silent films of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but these specimens hardly resemble the seminal works of Leone or Corbucci. For approximately fifty years, the heroes were lawmen who neutralized criminals. Protagonists would occasionally stoop to operate outside of the law in order to save the day, but the audience knew from the start who was on the right side of things. Each film ended with the cowboy riding off into the sunset or settling down with a widow and her son. This type of Western still portrayed the untamed nature of the frontier and the struggles of living in it, but morality was explored superficially if at all.

Per un pugno di dollari would, at first, feel very familiar to the avid western fan of 1964. A mysterious stranger without a name (Clint Eastwood) arrives in a dusty, worn-down frontier town to find that the local sheriff is locked in conflict with a band of outlaws. The innkeeper Silvanito explains this in a dark tone uncharacteristic of the genre, telling the stranger that he ought to keep going because the only person to thrive in that town is the coffin-maker.

The stranger cannot simply identify which faction is wrong and exact vigilante justice upon them, because neither side is satisfactorily “good.” Instead he adopts an ambivalent stance irrespective of the conflict at hand. He plays both sides to his advantage, accruing money along the way.

Now the viewer isn’t particularly invested in the outcome of the feud, or the conflict of good-versus-evil, but in the exploits of the nameless protagonist. Watching the quick wit and quicker trigger of the stranger is far more interesting than simply wondering how the good guy is going to defeat the bad guy. Suddenly the values of goodness and badness are irrelevant, and the mysterious stranger is the crowd favorite not because he’s morally right, but because he’s fascinating to watch. He is, in American terms, exceptional.

This is groundbreaking not just for the Western genre but for film in general. Morality had often been explored in Italian cinema during the neorealist movement. Yet while protagonists were circumstantially coerced into illegal and immoral decisions, the audience did not applaud them for it. When watching Per un pugno di dollari, by contrast, one can’t help but cheer when the stranger succeeds, betraying not only the law but the trust bestowed upon him by both factions.

Another major trope of the western genre is that the protagonist ends up with a woman at the end. This appears to be set up when the Rojos’ henchman tells the stranger to stay away from Marisol. He gives her a sly smile, and we soon come to see that the stranger doesn’t really regard anyone’s warnings unless they suit him. Later on, he liberates Marisol, the first action he’s taken to help someone else and not himself. But the two neither embrace nor even suggest romantic interest. Instead, the stranger gives Marisol enough money to leave the town and survive with her son. That’s the last we see of Marisol. Even stranger than a protagonist who exists in a moral gray area is one who exists in a moral gray area and also commits a selfless act with no personal benefit.

All of these thematic divergences may be attributed to the fact that the story did not originate in either Europe or North America. The screenplay of Per un pugno di dollari was based heavily on the film Yojimbo by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa(?). In the same real-world time period when sheriffs and bandits traded fire in the American southwest, masterless samurai called rōnin fulfilled roles in Japanese media as the “lone gunslinger” so central to the western genre. Japanese cinema may inherit some practices from the film traditions in Europe and North America, but lacks the West’s idealism and moral prescriptivism. Influenced by Shinto and Buddhist cultural perspectives, Japanese cinema recognizes both good and evil as “necessary to maintain life as we know it.” (N.A, Insight Guides: Japan (2014: Pg. 195)) Kurosawa’s influence on Sergio Leone included this unflinching approach to the full scope of morality.

Despite introducing unprecedented depth to the Western genre, which hitherto targeted boys and young men, Spaghetti Westerns are still largely about escapism and entertainment. This is in contrast to movements like the aforementioned neorealism, which was intended to make the audience confront uncomfortable truths. While Per un pugno di dollari does share some characteristics with the neorealist movement, such as desolate settings, shooting on location in those settings, and themes of poverty and desperation, the purpose of the film is not to criticize contemporary society or leave the viewer pondering the duality of the human condition.

Leone’s decision to enter the Western genre was, in part, due to the thematic relationship between rōnin and the cowboys of the American west. However Leone’s primary motivation was to seem as American as possible. Italy had recently become a Republic after the long reign of fascism, under which the majority of foreign media was embargoed or heavily censored. As such, the Italian public was hungry for the American films they’d been denied. Leone assumed the American-sounding and hilarious pseudonym Bob Robertson and cast an American actor for the lead role, all in order to sell the movie as an authentic Western.

Whether Italian audiences were successfully hoodwinked or not, the film was a major international success. A generation of Italian cinema rode on Leone’s coattails, until Sergio Corbucci directed Django in 1966, which was also loosely based on Yojimbo. It was the second keystone Spaghetti Western, based on the style established by Leone but pushing the boundaries in new ways. Namely, the violence in Django was unprecedented for a mainstream film in Italy. For example, in one scene, a man’s ear is cut off and fed to him while the surrounding crowd laughs. The studio told Corbucci that he should remove that scene before it was shipped off to theaters. However, the scene was “mistakenly” not removed from some of the copies.

When this oversight was discovered, public outrage followed — from the cities who didn’t receive the controversial scene. Django was at least as popular as Per un pugno di dollari, and spawned at least as many unofficial sequels, but it also proved that directors could deviate from the template Leone had created and still find great success. The Spaghetti Western had become a platform instead of an isolated phenomenon.

And this platform was well-used. Major political events like the Vietnam War and socialist uprisings around the world had spurred a wave in activism among young people that turned the lonesome cowboy trope into something less desirable. These movements were based on collectivism, valuing the cause over the individual, and Westerns changed to reflect these values. Instead of focusing on the exploits of one anti-hero, they were thinly veiled metaphors for things like American intervention in Central and South America, and these films adapted the tropes inherited from Leone and Corbucci.

While it was not the first or the last Spaghetti Western, Per un pugno di dollari both revolutionized the genre and continues to serve as its basis today. Its morally ambiguous protagonist, Machiavellian schemes and wild west aesthetic truly established it as the definitive Western film.