1862, the American frontier: A ruggedly handsome man in a poncho and Cattleman cowboy hat slowly enters a cobble-stoned circle, surrounded by tilted gravestones, immersed in the dusty wild west. He is followed by two other men, who eye each other suspiciously. Two hundred thousand dollars in gold lay hidden under one of the gravestones around them. Only one of them knows the exact location. They’ve journeyed far to reach here, fighting battles and slinging guns through the chaos of the American Civil War. One of them will get hold of the treasure; the other two will have to die. We know that. They know that too. Slowly, they distance themselves from one another, their handguns ready. Standing still, they wait for the next move. A jaunty, suspenseful, trumpet tune builds. A crow caws in the distance. The tension is palpable. And then, all of a sudden: BANG! One shot, only one, hits the target… 

The finale of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)–with its closeup cinematography, score, and setting–is one of the most memorable scenes not just of the so-called Spaghetti Western genre, but of the history of cinema. A worldwide sensation in the 1960s, the legacy of Spaghetti Westerns can be attributed to one man from Rome: Sergio Leone.  

The son of a film director and a silent movie actress, Leone grew up at Cinecittà and, at the age of 20, started to work as a technical assistant in several sword-and-sandals (historical and mythological epics set in Greco-Roman antiquity), including the much celebrated American productions Quo Vadis (1951) and Ben Hur (1959). 

Toward the end of the 1950s, when Leone realized that historical epics had become trite and were falling out of favor with the public, he turned to his passion for Western films (popular in Italy during the postwar period, when American culture had peak influence)–unexplored cinematic territory in Italy at the time. The sword-and-sandals subgenre had seen Americans reenacting Ancient Rome at Cinecittà, but as Leone started to appropriate the far west, roles were reversed and Italians began to recreate the American frontier of the 19th century in those very same studios–and in the dry landscapes most similar to the American desert: southern Italy, Spain and Yugoslavia. 

But the imitation of America went way beyond location choice: Italian Westerns meant to confuse buyers in the film industry, passing low-cost Italian productions off as American ones (making their products more palatable to the U.S.-dominated industry). Names of Italian actors and directors were anglicized in the film credits: Sergio Leone was often credited as “Bob Robertson”, actor Giuliano Gemma as “Montgomery Wood”. But the trick didn’t last for long. Not too courteously, the films were condescendingly nicknamed “Spaghetti Westerns” by film critics to reveal their true origins.   

Besides the commercial strategy of emulating the American system to infiltrate it, Spaghetti Westerns’ cultural references–their very roots–run deep in other genres. The films largely re-adapt story lines from peplums as well as take inspiration from Japanese samurai dramas–very similar in both adventurous plots and the toxic masculinity of the characters. The man of few words and peculiar ethics, always ready to pull the trigger, never to miss a shot, is a trope of this genre. As John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960) is based on Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Seven Samurai (1954), Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) closely mirrors Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961). Too closely perhaps. Before the film got distributed in the United States, Kurosawa’s production company sued Leone for plagiarism, starting a trial that lasted for almost 10 years. In the end, the Japanese director was compensated with the distribution rights of Leone’s film in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan and made a considerable amount of money. 

A Fistful of Dollars, the first movie of Leone’s so-called Dollars Trilogy–the latter two of which are For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)–set off the fame of the director as a pioneer of Spaghetti Western. The trilogy features “the man with no name”, a mysterious character in patterned poncho and brown hat played by Clint Eastwood, who was completely unknown to the public at the time–probably for a reason. Talking about the casting for A Fistful of Dollars, Leone once recalled: “I needed a mask more than an actor, and Eastwood at that time only had two expressions: with a hat and without a hat.” Hat or not, within the few years of the 60s that saw the maximum popularity of the genre, Eastwood was able to make a name for himself as a capable actor and became the archetypal antihero of an entire generation of kids.

A Fistful of Dollars was a huge box office success. Leone’s distinct visual style of extreme close-ups and emphatic pauses proved to be incredibly popular, and Spaghetti Westerns very quickly acquired their own identity and aesthetic autonomy. The new films complicated the psychology of traditional Western characters, breaking off from the simplistic rhetoric of their American counterparts. In Spaghetti Westerns, even the “good ones” are ruthless, morally-questionable protagonists who pit people against each other for personal advantage. 

But I would argue that the genre’s most original contribution to the history of cinema doesn’t come from cinematography nor from screenwriting. It comes from music. And from the genius of one single composer: Ennio Morricone. 

By the time Morricone was invited to work on the soundtrack of A Fistful of Dollars, he was already arranging and writing music for some of the most fashionable singers of the time, including Paul Anka, Mina and Gianni Morandi. Morricone mixed highbrow and lowbrow culture in milestones of pop music like Edoardo Vianello’s “Pinne, Fucili ed Occhiali”, Gino Paoli’s “Sapore di Sale” and Mina’s “Se Telefonando”. The partnership with Leone granted Morricone carte blanche, and the composer invented a completely new language that went from Bach to atonality and experimental music. It’s for Spaghetti Westerns that Morricone came up with some of his most original arrangements and effects: hypnotic whistles, frantic guitars, vocalisms, epic choirs, the sound of whip lashes, anvils, bells and those unmistakable flutters on the trumpet!

And then, as quickly as they had become popular, Spaghetti Westerns faded away. The unprecedented years of the Italian economic miracle were losing ground to general turmoil, the protests of 1968 and dark years marked by terrorist attacks. The playful style of those movies no longer met the needs of a rapidly-changing society for which pure entertainment wasn’t enough anymore. But before the genre dried up altogether, some directors were able to add content to the changing mood of the time. Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966), which originated over 30 sequels, and The Great Silence (1968), entirely shot in snow in the Dolomites, complicated the Spaghetti Western genre with extremely violent films with dark political allegories.  

Indeed, Leone’s Once Upon a Time in The West (1968), which is considered Spaghetti Western’s grand finale, could be read as an allegory too. The film brought the genre to an unprecedented epic scale, after which it probably became difficult to add anything original to its themes. Leone must have been fully aware. The film’s last sequence shows dozens of men taming the American west’s inhospitable landscape by building a railway. Accompanied by Morricone’s intensely melancholic music, the dangerous world of outlaws populated by “men with no names” gets regulated and defeated by modernity: “the Wild West” turns simply into “the West”.