The Birth of the Western; Spaghetti Style

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

Sergio Leone had only directed one other movie before he plunged head first into the western genre. His first directorial effort was an impressive, but completely forgettable, sword and sandal epic called the Colossus of Rhodes. The sword and sandal movies were beginning to die out at this time, they’d had a massively successful run in Italy for a very long time, but the genre was running out of steam (something that is very apparent when you watch the Colossus of Rhodes), so the Italian film industry was desperately in need of a shot in the arm, some new medicine, and Leone was all too willing to be the physician that would deliver the needed prescription.

It’s a little unclear to me if Sergio was aware of the westerns that were already being made in Germany at the time, or even the small number that had been made by the French at that time as well, but in the end it didn’t really matter, because Leone inadvertently invented a new genre called the spaghetti western. Which is a good thing; because croissant western, or schnitzel western for that matter, just doesn’t have that certain ring to it.

Oddly enough the inspiration for this movie didn’t come from some great John Ford directed epic, or one of the many John Wayne, Randolph Scott, or Gary Cooper western vehicles. Not at all, surprisingly the inspiration came from a Toshiro Mifune samurai vehicle directed by Akira Kurosawa, and inspired by a Dashiell Hammett novel entitled Red Harvest.

Kurosawa had already inspired one of the most popular westerns of all-time. His movie called Seven Samurai was re-made in America as the John Sturges directed western the Magnificent Seven, in fact, when Leone went looking for a lead for his first western, he really wanted to cast one of the younger stars from that movie, like James Coburn, or Charles Bronson (both of which he would eventually work with in the future). He also really wanted to cast Henry Fonda in the lead, again it wasn’t meant to be, but he did eventually cast Fonda in a rare villainous role in another western called Once Upon a Time in the West.

Sergio Leone eventually did find his lead in the form of a young Clint Eastwood; this was just around the time that Eastwood was beginning to make a name for himself with his role on the western TV series called Rawhide. He came to Leone’s attention from an agent friend who obtained an episode of the show that Leone never even finished watching. Instead, Leone drew a few alterations over a promo photo of Eastwood he was given; he gave him some stubble, and added a cigar to the image. Suddenly, he had his star.

The movie’s story is so simple that it probably didn’t have the right to be as great as it was. A stranger rides into a town controlled by two powerful gangs and plays both of them against each other, by hiring himself out to both of them, while working against the two at the same time. The ambivalence of the plot actually caused the network that ran the American television premier of the film to shoot a new opening that would somehow provide a justification for the violence that would soon follow.

A Fistful of Dollars will always be considered a classic, not only due to the fact that it really re-defined the western genre, but also because it was made by an individual that had an incredibly artful eye. It’s great on its own right, but it’s legendary for starting a new movement for the western, and that’s an impressive accomplishment to say the least.

-William J. White