Spaghetti western

Around six hundred westerns made by Italian companies between 1964 and the late 1970s, shot mostly in Almería in southern Spain, with international casts dubbed in post.

Where it started

Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964) is an unlicensed remake of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, which Toho successfully sued over. It cost very little and made a fortune.

What changed

The American western had heroes. The Italian one has men who want money. Violence is ugly and frequent, the church and the state are corrupt as a matter of course, and the landscape is dust rather than monument valley grandeur.

Ennio Morricone did the other half of the work. Morricone's scores are half the reason several of these films are remembered at all.

The political wing

The Zapata westerns, A Bullet for the General, Companeros, Duck, You Sucker, moved the setting to the Mexican Revolution and made the politics explicit. Sergio Corbucci's Django (1966) and The Great Silence (1968) are the bleakest things in the cycle. The Great Silence ends in a way no American studio would have permitted.

Where to start

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly if you have somehow not. The Great Silence if you have.