The ANNOTICO Report

In the US, starting in the 1950's,  cinema-goers turned out for westerns
only to reassure themselves that James Stewart and John Wayne could still
manage to struggle on to a horse. American audiences had become
saddle-sore, bored with a played-out Hollywood genre that had become slow,
pictorially composed and now had about as much relevance to modern life as
the Elizabethan pastoral.

In Italy, the "Western" would have more youthful, stylish heroes, more
action, and a soundtrack that sounded like a mixture Rock n Roll, Surfing
music, and Puccini recorded in a bathroom, rather than lush symphonic music.

An analysis of the underlying interests of the Italian audience is both
thought provoking and amusing.

WHO CAPTURED THE WILD WEST? NOT HOLLYWOOD, WITH IT'S STODGY EPICS,
BUT ITALY WITH IT'S SPICY SPAGHETTI WESTERNS

The London Guardian, UK
By Christopher Frayling
Saturday June 11, 2005

Following the runaway success of A Fistful of Dollars in 1964, Sergio Leone
liked to say: "There was a terrifying gold rush - based on sand rather than
rock." One of his favourite after-dinner stories was about the making of
low-budget Italian westerns in the glory days of the mid- to late 1960s. On
one occasion, apparently, the leading man walked out because he hadn't been
paid, just as they were about to film the final sequence. "Give me half an
hour," the director said. "I'll come up with something." He returned half
an hour later. "You know the old man who cleans the floor of the studio?
Well, put him in a cowboy costume, quick as you can." They changed the
script so the old man drove in a buggy to the Indian camp and said: "My son
couldn't come, so he sent me instead."

It was a time in Italian film history when one actor answered to the
pseudonym of Clint Westwood, and one director called himself John Fordson.
In 1964, about 27 westerns had been produced in Italy: A Fistful of Dollars
- by far the most successful - was number 25. But by the time Leone started
preparing Once Upon a Time in the West , his "arrivederci" to the assembly
line of popular Italian film-making, a staggering 73 other Italian
westerns, or Italian-Spanish co-productions, were either in pre-production
or being filmed. This at a time when the number of Hollywood westerns was
in steady decline, falling between 1950 and 1963 from 150 releases to only
15.

In her review of the Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo , on which A Fistful of
Dollars was unofficially based, critic Pauline Kael pointed out that those
American westerns being produced staked their appeal less on the vitality
of the stories than in the veteran movie actors wheeled out to embody them.
On the whole, cinema-goers turned out for westerns only to reassure
themselves that James Stewart and John Wayne could still manage to struggle
on to a horse. American audiences, Kael added, had become saddle-sore,
bored with a played-out Hollywood genre that had become slow, pictorially
composed and now had about as much relevance to modern life as the
Elizabethan pastoral. She concluded that a film-maker such as Kurosawa,
operating outside the Hollywood myth-factory, was in an excellent position
to extend the visual conventions of the western genre, while debunking its
morality.

This proved nowhere more true than in Italy, where westerns remained as
popular as ever throughout the 1960s. If Hollywood wouldn't produce
westerns, then Cinecittà and other Italian studios would. Southern Italian
audiences went to the cinema more often than any other Europeans -
television had not penetrated yet - and they had notoriously low boredom
thresholds. The Italian version would eventually have more youthful,
stylish heroes, more action, and a soundtrack that sounded like a mixture
of Duane Eddy, the Beach Boys and Puccini recorded in a bathroom, rather
than lush symphonic music from the school of Aaron Copland. It would also
have Italian and Spanish actors hiding under American pseudonyms - not to
fool the Americans, but to reassure the southern Italians.

The novelist Alberto Moravia jokingly suggested that the big success of
these films on the domestic market had something to do with an unconscious
fear on the part of Italian audiences of over-population. The solution?
More and more massacres. Others wrote of the increasingly urban
sophistication of rural Italians: between the late 1950s and the early
1960s, the most popular genre had been "sword and sandal" epics featuring
an assortment of American (or sometimes Italian actors pretending to be
American) body-builders who played characters called Hercules, Goliath or
Samson, sometimes all in the same film. While these muscular heroes sorted
out their problems by demonstrations of superhuman strength, the heroes of
the westerns, who went by the name of Django or Ringo, Joe or the Stranger,
resorted to cunning, guile and sleight of hand.

The new characteristics of the western also included an obsession with
American currency (which, even in inflationary times, seemed a little over
the top). There was an emphasis on Mediterranean machismo and style rather
than American toughness. The hero, whose main ambition was to exploit the
injustices he saw all around him, was identifiable by his stylish clothes,
designer-stubble and smoking preference. There was an energetic and
increasingly brutal action climax every 10 minutes to keep the audience's
attention (director Sergio Corbucci once claimed that an audience in
Calabria opened fire at the screen when they felt short-changed by the
ending of his film The Big Silence ); a "rhetorical" use of the camera,
which lingered on the visual cliches of the Hollywood western; and dusty
Andalucian locations recently made fashionable by Lawrence of Arabia .
Gunfights, or rather gundowns, were usually accompanied by solemn trumpet
laments (like the deguello in Rio Bravo ) or stately boleros on Spanish
guitars held close to the microphone.

These films also tended to have an unreconstructed attitude towards sexual
politics. Actor Franco Nero, who, after Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name ,
played the second most popular hero of the Italian western, Corbucci's
Django (whose name was to be attached to 16 further adventures between 1966
and 1972, most of them having nothing to do with the original) believed
that one of the appeals for Italian men of these cool, self-contained
heroes was "that they would like to go to the boss in the office and be the
hero and say: 'Sir, from today, something's gonna happen,' and then: boom,
boom!"

Moravia concluded an article about Italian westerns in 1967 by asking:
"After all these stories - then what? Just a fistful of dollars? Or is
there more?" Today, when Italian westerns have become DVD staples and the
soundtrack albums, especially the 35 Ennio Morricone western scores, are
acknowledged as major influences on world music, it remains a fair
question. In the intervening years, the Sergio Leone westerns have become
accepted by most critics as important breakthroughs in action cinema: the
modern action hero, not just the ones in the films of Tarantino and
Rodriguez, begins here. These westerns are now seen as part of a late 1960s
form of "cinema cinema" (as Leone called it) - popular movies made by
cinéastes. What Claude Chabrol was to the films of Alfred Hitchcock,
Jean-Pierre Melville to gangster films and Bernardo Bertolucci to film noir
, Leone was to the westerns of John Ford.

Some of the other 446 Italian westerns produced between 1962 and 1976 have
stood the test of time, especially those that were widely exported, such as
Corbucci's films with Nero; Sergio Sollima's political westerns The Big
Gundown and Face to Face ; Enzo Barboni's Trinity comedies with Terence
Hill and Bud Spencer (the Laurel and Hardy of the Italian west); and Tonino
Valerii's elegiac My Name Is Nobody . They are like Sancho Panza to the
out-of-date chivalry of the mid-1960s Hollywood western: noisy,
invigorating carnival films in which over-familiar moments become
unfamiliar. The Italian touches - as well as their relationship with
Hollywood - are the most interesting, unusual and endearing elements. Other
Italian westerns - the bad and the ugly, and those heavy on the bolognaise
- have not weathered so well. But in the end, as Luciano Vincenzoni, the
man who wrote some of Leone's best westerns and others besides, once said
to me: "Those films created jobs for 10,000 people for 10 years."

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/
featurepages/0,4120,1503881,00.html