Back With a Vengeance

Tuesday, November 12, 1996

The American Cinematheque’s new film series allow ‘Spaghetti
Western’ classics to fend for themselves on the big screenBy
Michael Horowitz

Daily Bruin Staff

Trying to find critical praise for spaghetti westerns subgenre
is next to impossible. You’d have a better chance playing a
character in a film and hoping to survive it.

To begin with, the moniker "Spaghetti western" is a derogatory
term given to the 550-plus films about the North American old west
ironically filmed by Europeans in Europe. Although the subgenre
that brazenly bastardized the traditional western by leaving its
mark with some genuine stars, esteemed classics, and one
world-class director, film criticism has by in large ignored this
group of productions for reasons including cinematic snobbery.

This November, the American Cinematheque is doing their best to
legitimize the style and the films displayed in it. Their series
"The Bloody Trail of Spaghetti Westerns" runs through Nov. 29,
showcasing most of the work of the famous Sergio Leone and his less
famous contemporaries. Those in doubt can view the films on wide
screen where they look their best, and the converted can enjoy the
visceral thrills that the films offer. And perhaps some
rehabilitation of the subgenre’s reputation is in order.

"They’ve never really been taken seriously," says Cinematheque
programmer Dennis Bartok, "although a lot of them shouldn’t be
taken seriously." After the world-wide success of Sergio Leone’s
"Fistful of Dollars" in 1964, the European filmmakers deluged the
world’s theaters with hundreds of faux-Westerns, high on violence
and low on high-minded artistic content. If released in the United
States at all, the films were badly dubbed and critically ignored,
especially by officianados of the "proper" Western.

In his encyclopedia of western films, critic Brian Garfield
gives an incomplete list of the flaws of the subgenre, including
"crude cliches," "no evidences of artistry," and "slavish and
unimaginative plagiarisms." He concludes his attack declaring "as a
body of work the spaghetti films can be dismissed out of hand as
the equivalents, or inferiors, of the overblown ‘B’ melodramas of
silent-film days."

Clearly, Garfield isn’t a fan. And spaghetti supporters would
have to agree to these flaws and more, but there’s still much to be
appreciated in these blood-soaked interpretations of the American
west. You just have to see the right films.

Bartok calls the spaghettis a "great pulp genre," and in their
purest sense, the spaghettis are about pulp filmmaking. Historical
reality wasn’t important to filmmakers like Leone, Sergio Corbucci,
and Giulio Petroni, nor was steady character development; what
mattered was the showdowns, face-offs, and ever bleaker landscapes.
"They cut out everything that didn’t have to do with violence,
redemption, and revenge," says Bartok. "There’s very little about
community."

The stories are lifted from art forms around the world,
especially the Japanese Samouri films. "Fistful of Dollars" is
straight-up "Yojimbo," by the legendary Akira Kurosawa, tweaked
just a touch to produce a meaner bad guy. Leone’s sequel, "For a
Few Dollars More" grabs the bulk of its bounty hunter tale from
"Sanjuro."

These adaptations worked well. Other spaghettis translated less
plausible stories into the Western format, bringing witches,
plagues, and biblical epics to what’s ostensibly still the Old
West. And they ripped off each other more than anyone else. "It was
like hot wiring cars," says Bartok. "They were taking anything with
a motor and seeing if it would run."

A bizarre footnote is that some of the ’70s Japanese Samouri
movies started ripping off the Spaghettis, an example of
cross-cultural pollination at its most absurd.

But in the midst of story-snatching and a general lack of
attention paid to plotting, some immensely viewable movies were
crafted. Sergio Sollima’s "The Big Gundown" is perverse enough to
feature 13 year-old Mormon girls shooting men in the back. Tonino
Valerii’s "My Name is Nobody" exhibits mugs and meanders through an
exploration of mythology and hero worship, sporting Henry Fonda as
an aging gunfighter. Premiering late this month for the first time
in the U.S., Robert Hossein’s "Cemetery Without Crosses" acts out
murder and revenge with lyrical beauty. And then there’s the last
of Leone’s "Dollars" trilogy, considered among the pinnacle of
Spaghetti-dom, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."

While only director Leone is regarded as a true master, the
upper echelon of these films ended up having a lasting influence on
the Western itself. Bartok feels the dark, apocalyptic vision of
the old west in these films allowed Peckinpah the creative space to
make "The Wild Bunch," 1969’s cinematic death of the genre.
Certainly Eastwood’s Best Picture-winner "The Unforgiven" takes
some of its world view from the doomed proceedings of the
spaghetti. "Spaghetti’s didn’t mourn the west because it wasn’t
something they had lost," says Bartok, but they served as thematic
precursors to American films inspecting the end of the
movement.

The subgenre also gets some credit for depicting the West
itself, an initially implausible but eventually acceptable notion.
Although primarily filmed on the Spanish deserts, the Spaghettis
serve as chronicles of America’s westward expansion and civil war
era, albeit through the eyes of mainly Italian filmmakers. Says
Bartok, "It was kind of insane how convincing they became …"

Again, on the thematic front, the spaghettis take the Western
into the ’70s, and embrace the "Me" generation. While Western
heroes of yore fired only when fired upon and fought out of honor
and other positive values, spaghetti protagonists are seldom
motivated by anything but cash and possibly vengeance. These
nihilistic antiheroes fire first, and it’s not infrequently that
these films end with all the principal characters bloodily shot and
killed. A new era of world-weary cynicism spread to the western
courtesy of the corrupting spaghettis before the subgenre ripped
off anything and everything it could think of, collapsing halfway
into the ’70s.

But this examination should be swept aside as you enter the
theater, because spaghettis are certainly not about esoteric
cinematic worth. "To talk about them is to kill them," says Bartok.
"You have to see them onscreen."

Wide screen is where these films transcend their limitations in
story construction. Close-ups of grotesque faces fill the screen,
sunbleached CinemaScope deserts stretch out of sight and cool
dialogue proceeds cooler gunfights. You aren’t going to get the
full effect of three-man gunfights on TV in butchered pan and scan
versions. You need to be sitting in a theater to experience Clint
Eastwood telling the undertaker to "get three coffins ready" as he
marches toward a group of villains with the glorious Ennio
Morricone score kicking up in the background.

Cliches, lack of artistry, and plagiarisms be damned.

FILM FESTIVAL: "The Bloody Trail of Spaghetti Westerns," at the
American Cinemateque through Nov. 29. "Death Rides a Horse" and
"The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" on Nov. 15. "Companeros" and
"Once Upon a Time in the West" on Nov. 16. "The Big Gundown" and
"My Name is Nobody" on Nov. 22. "Duck, You Sucker (A Fistful of
Dynamite)" and "Keoma" on Nov. 23. And "Cemetery Without Crosses"
on Nov. 29. For more information, call (213) 466-3456.

Metro Goldwyn Meyer

Clint Eastwood stands tall in his film "The Good, the Bad, and
the Ugly"

Clint Eastwood adds meat to the spaghetti film, "The Good, the
Bad, and the Ugly", playing at the American Cinematheque this
November as part of "The Bloody Trail of Spaghetti Westerns"
series.