Spaghetti western

In practice

A spaghetti western is a western made by Italian filmmakers, mostly between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s. Many were shot in the deserts of southern Spain, with international casts and English or Italian dialogue dubbed afterward. Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964) made the form a worldwide hit, and his Dollars trilogy, with Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name, remains its best-known work.

Spaghetti westerns took the American western's cowboys, gunfights and frontier towns and made them harsher. Their heroes are often mercenaries or bounty hunters with no interest in civilizing anything. The violence is more stylized, the towns are dirtier, and the morality is gray. Long silences, extreme close-ups of eyes and Ennio Morricone's scores, with whistles, choirs and electric guitar, became the genre's signature.

The Spanish journalist Alfonso Sánchez coined the name in 1966, and it was often used as a put-down, implying cheap imitations of the real thing. Italians themselves called them western all'italiana. Over time the label lost its sting, and the films are now seen as a major influence on directors from Quentin Tarantino to the makers of modern action and anime, as well as on the American westerns that followed them.

A standoff written the spaghetti western way

The scene runs on what spaghetti westerns made famous: a hero with no name, a stretch of silence before a short exchange, and a small detail, the bucket, that turns into a countdown. The writing leaves room for the director to hold on eyes and hands, which is where the genre built its tension.

Where spaghetti westerns came from

By the early 1960s, Hollywood was making fewer westerns, but European audiences still loved them. Italian and Spanish producers began making their own, often as coproductions with West German companies, using Spanish landscapes that could pass for Mexico or Texas. The Tabernas Desert in Almería became the genre's most famous location, and some of its sets still stand as tourist attractions.

A Fistful of Dollars was the breakthrough. Sergio Leone based it closely on Akira Kurosawa's samurai film Yojimbo (1961), close enough that Kurosawa sued and, in the settlement, received the film's distribution rights in Japan. Its success started a boom: more than six hundred European westerns were made between 1960 and 1978, nearly five hundred of them in Italy, from Leone's epics to quickly made sequels and comedies.

What makes a spaghetti western

The hero is usually an outsider out for himself: a gunfighter for hire, a bounty hunter or a man seeking revenge. He talks little and is often barely distinguishable from the villains in his methods. The classic American western's faith in the law and the settling of the frontier gives way to greed, corruption and survival.

The style is as recognizable as the stories. Leone alternated wide desert vistas with extreme close-ups of eyes, hands and holsters, and stretched standoffs out for minutes before a few seconds of gunfire. Because dialogue was dubbed, the films relied heavily on image and music. Ennio Morricone's scores treat sound effects, whistling, bells and choirs as part of the music and often give each character a melody of their own.

Many spaghetti westerns also carry politics. A strand often called the Zapata western, including A Bullet for the General (1966) and Leone's Duck, You Sucker! (1971), set stories during the Mexican Revolution and used them to talk about class and revolution in 1960s Europe.

Spaghetti western vs. the classic Hollywood western

The western as a genre is the story of the American frontier in the late nineteenth century: cowboys, ranchers, lawmen, outlaws and the land itself. Classic Hollywood westerns by directors such as John Ford and Howard Hawks often celebrate community, duty and the law taming the wilderness, with heroes like John Wayne who stand for a code.

The spaghetti western keeps the setting and the iconography but drops much of that faith. Its towns are not worth saving, its sheriffs are often corrupt, and its hero rides away richer rather than wiser. American westerns of the late 1960s and 1970s, like Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), show its influence, and so, decades later, does Eastwood's own Unforgiven (1992), which he dedicated to Sergio Leone. The line between the two traditions blurred.

Spaghetti western examples

Sergio Leone's films are the core of the genre: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), followed by Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), with Henry Fonda cast against type as a cold-blooded killer.

Sergio Corbucci made the genre's darkest films. Django (1966), whose hero drags a coffin through the mud, launched dozens of unofficial sequels, and The Great Silence (1968) ends with the villains winning. Other well-known titles include Sergio Sollima's The Big Gundown (1966), Giulio Petroni's Death Rides a Horse (1967) and Enzo Barboni's comedy They Call Me Trinity (1970), which mocked the genre's conventions as its boom ended.

Later films borrowed openly. Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012) takes its title and opening song from Corbucci, and its standoffs and close-ups from Leone. Video games, anime and science fiction westerns such as The Mandalorian reuse the lone, silent gunman and the long, wordless standoff.

How to write a spaghetti western

Start with a hero who wants something concrete, usually money or revenge, and a world where everyone else wants it too. Give him a code that is personal rather than legal, and let the audience learn it from what he does rather than from what he says. A spaghetti western hero earns loyalty by competence, not by goodness.

Write the silences. A standoff on the page can be a few short action lines that slow the reader down: the wind, a detail that moves, eyes, hands. Keep the dialogue sparse and pointed, so each line lands like a shot. The genre's tension comes from waiting, so do not rush to the gunfire.

Let the landscape and the music do their share. Describe the place as harsh and empty, and leave room in the scene for the score the director will add. If you are writing a modern take, decide which elements you are keeping, such as the antihero, the moral grayness or the ritual of the duel, and which you are changing to say something new.