Tour of Italy: Spaghetti Westerns

Den of Cin

Devin & James are back in the saddle for another roundup of Italian flicks. A sampling of the cultiest of all cult genres, the SPAGHETTI WESTERNS! When Clint Eastwood rode through Spain and called it Mexico in 1964's Fistful of Dollars, it started a legit European phenomenon that would produce over 600 titles in barely over ten years! Whereas the American Westerns often whitewashed and mythologized its own westward history, the idea of the good guys always wearing white was losing steam by the 1960s, and the Italians had no sentimentality toward the Earp or James clans as historical figures. The Italian Western hero was the epitome of the anti-hero. Not so much straddling the line between good and bad, but rather stomping on it with their spurred boots. The settings may have been North American, but the politics were purely Italian. We start our discussion with the G.O.A.T., the transformative masterpiece that is Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. We then move on to the sub-sub-genre of the Zapata Westerns (set within the Mexican Revolution) with Damiano Damiani's criminally underappreciated A BULLET FOR THE GENERAL. Then we lighten the mood a bit with a couple of Westerns that border on comedies while still being bloody and wild. The master Sergio Corbucci (so much more than "The Other Sergio") takes us on a wild ride across the border and back in COMPANEROS, and we finish up with the first film in Gianfranco Parolini's super-stylized hero-in-black series, SABATA! We've wrangled all your favorite Spaghetti West heroes: Nero, Milian, Van Cleef, Bronson, Fonda, Volonte, Kinski, and so many more. But when you hear the harmonica or banjo begin playing, you better run!