Spaghetti Westerns (3 page)

With more Spaghettis being made, the competition became tougher. There were epileptic gunmen, one-armed gunmen, gunslinger-priests, gunslinger-florists, amnesiac gunmen, albino gunmen, blind gunmen, deaf gunmen and mute gunmen, armed with everything from knives to Gatling guns. There were horror Westerns, thriller Westerns and musical Westerns, the latter exemplified by
Little Rita
of the West
(1967), which starts as a straightforward Spaghetti until an appalling Eurovision song blasts out of nowhere and the cast start singing and dancing.

By far the most popular of these offbeat diversions were the acrobatic Westerns directed by Gianfranco Parolini, who managed to lever acrobats and stunts into his scenarios, whatever the genre. His best Westerns, starring Lee Van Cleef as the black-clad, ex-Confederate major named Sabata, incorporated many gadgets into the action – gimmicky weapons, magnetic cigars, seesaws (to gain access to a bank) – making their action set pieces extraordinarily imaginative. The first one,
Sabata
(1969), was the best, though there were many other examples, including several actually set in a travelling circus, like
Boot
Hill
(1969) and
The Return of Sabata
(1971). The formula was updated in the seventies to incorporate kung-fu action into the mix, in East-meets-Westerns such as
Blood Money
(1973).

By 1970, the violence in Italian Westerns had escalated dramatically and just about every single Western avenue had been explored. With audiences tiring of such savagery, there seemed nowhere for the Spaghetti Westerns to go. Then, in 1967, an enterprising director named Giuseppe Colizzi had teamed a handsome, blond leading man named ‘Terence Hill’ (real name Mario Girotti) with hulking, Bluto-like ‘Bud Spencer’ (or Carlo Pedersoli) as the heroes in
God Forgives – I
Don
’
t
, which spawned two sequels (
Ace
High
[1968] and Boot
Hill
[1969]).

Enzo Barboni, an ex-cameraman, was looking to move into directing and hired the duo to star in his second directorial effort. Entitled
They Call Me Trinity
(1970), the film cast Hill and Spencer as unlikely brothers, Trinity and Bambino, in a light-hearted, clever parody of
The Magnificent Seven
and Westerns by Leone and Sollima. A runaway success at the box office, it led to an even more successful sequel
Trinity is Still My Name
(1971) that out-grossed Leone’s ‘Dollars’ movies. The films lampooned Western myths, including slapstick fist fights, speeded-up gunfights, drunken monks, sexy Mormon girls and farting babies in an uproarious send-up of the genre. As to be expected, there was the usual slew of imitators (which did wonders for the Italian breakaway furniture trade), but as the humour got cruder and more laboured, the comedy cycle spluttered, prompting Hill and Spencer to adapt their ‘Trinity’ double act in contemporary settings in a series of clodhopping comedies, which nevertheless cemented their superstardom in Europe.

By the early seventies, the Italian Western had run its course. The most popular Italian films of the period were the
gialli
(supernatural chillers and slasher movies pioneered by Dario Argento) and ultraviolent thrillers, continental versions of lone-cop scenarios like
The
French Connection
(1971) and
Dirty Harry
(1971).

The last great Spaghetti Westerns bore little resemblance to the ‘Dollars’ films that had popularised the genre. In 1973 Tonino Valerii directed
My Name is Nobody
, an analysis of the relationship between Hollywood Westerns (epitomised in the film by Henry Fonda’s ageing shootist) and their rougher Spaghetti cousins (represented by Terence Hill, who affords Fonda heroic status). The film even mocked Sam Peckinpah’s take on the Western, with a host of in-jokes. The last gasps of the genre were the mystical, misty ‘twilight’ Spaghettis like
Keoma
(1976), films that adopted a primitive, elemental approach to Westerns and addressed such subjects as racism with an incisiveness rarely seen in the genre. This wasn’t enough to save the cycle and, though there have been Spaghetti Westerns made since, with many American Westerns ripping off the Italian style, the heyday had passed.

Clint Eastwood remains the best-known hero of the Spaghetti Western, followed closely by Lee Van Cleef. This pair epitomised everything that the Italian West had come to symbolise – cool gunmen, stylish clothes, taciturn manner and the ability to kill half a dozen bandits without blinking an eye. But the Italian Western craze created a whole wagonload of stars, as actors of all nationalities flocked to Cinecittà to get a piece of the gunslinger action. Luminaries such as Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten and James Mason appeared in films that they hoped would never be released in their native countries, while everyone from William Shatner and Burt Reynolds to Henry Fonda and James Garner travelled to Spain to try their hands at Spaghettis. The Italian-style Western also made stars of many fifties Hollywood B-Western villains, like Lee Van Cleef, Jack Palance and Henry Silva. It revitalised the careers of actors on the wane, including Cameron Mitchell, Dan Duryea, John Ireland and Farley Granger, though their turns were often as plausible as Terry-Thomas playing a Mexican bandit. But the rejection of Hollywood stereotypes appealed to actors who had been shot at for years by bland heroes, and Van Cleef and Palance in particular were pleased to offer a different side to the story.

Most of all, the Italian Westerns created a slew of new, cosmopolitan stars whose looks, whether good, bad or ugly, lent themselves to these macabre tales. Actors like Franco Nero (the original Django), pretty boy Giuliano Gemma (angel-faced Ringo), Terence Hill (dusty-but-charming Trinity), Cuban Che Guevara lookalike Tomas Milian, German gargoyle Klaus Kinski and Spaniard Fernando Sancho (who made a living as a swaggering moustachioed Mexican
bandido
) became massive stars, especially in Europe, the Far East and the Third World. Everywhere, in fact, except Britain and the States, though Kinski did eventually break through to critical acclaim outside Europe when he started working for Werner Herzog on
Aguirre
Wrath of God
(1973).

Interestingly, actors who made their names in Spaghettis and later moved on to pastures new periodically referred to their Western roots, no matter how clumsy the context – like Eastwood facing a Tiger tank in a Spaghetti-Western duel during the World War Two adventure
Kelly
’
s Heroes
(1970) and Terence Hill in a showdown pastiche on motorbikes in
Watch Out
,
We
’
re Mad!
(1973).

Outside of Clint Eastwood’s stubble and blanket, Lee Van Cleef’s grim face and the stylised gunfights, it is the musical scores accompanying Spaghetti Westerns that are the most memorable aspect of the genre. They captured the mood of the Spaghetti West perfectly, as well as being extremely influential in popular culture, extending beyond Westerns and into pop music and advertising.

The most important musical figure of the period was Ennio Morricone, a classically trained composer and an old school friend of Leone’s. Born on 10 November 1928, Morricone attended the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome, studying composition, musical direction, choral work and trumpet (his father played the instrument in cabaret). But while Morricone studied he also played his trumpet in nightclubs (sometimes subbing for his father) and began honing his composition and arranging skills on standards of the day. Upon graduation he decided to move into the lucrative record industry, arranging pop records for popular artists like Mario Lanza and Paul Anka, before eventually expanding his repertoire to composing and arranging for radio, TV and theatre. His distinctive pop style can be heard to best advantage on Mina’s 1966 hit ‘Se Telefonando’ (co-written by Morricone for an Italian TV show), which sounds like a cross between a Burt Bacharach ballad, Phil Spector’s ‘Wall Of Sound’ and the epic quality found in Morricone’s Western scores. His popularity in the pop industry (and the tag ‘the father of modern arrangement’) inevitably led to film work in the early sixties and brought him into contact with Leone, who was preparing
A Fistful of
Dollars
. Morricone had already scored a Spaghetti Western in 1963 (
Gunfight in the Red Sands
) and was signed to work on another called
Bullets Don
’
t Argue
(1964). Both movies had used the same Spanish locations as
A Fistful of Dollars
, but that was where any similarity ended.

Although Leone was unimpressed by Morricone’s early Western scores, the composer was nevertheless hired to concoct a musical soundtrack for
A Fistful of Dollars
. Initial pieces proffered by him were vetoed by Leone, until Morricone played him an unusual arrangement of ‘Pastures of Plenty’, a Woody Guthrie song re-voiced by Peter Tevis. Leone liked it and decided to use the piece (minus the vocals) with a whistler replacing Tevis. Employing Alessandro Alessandroni to whistle and play guitar, an orchestra and Alessandroni’s choir, ‘I Cantori Moderni’ (‘The Modern Singers’), Morricone produced the most amazing theme tune. With its whiplashes, bells, electric guitar (very similar to Hank Marvin’s Shadows-style tremolo) and an eerie whistled melody, the piece instantly evoked a Western setting. It was also refreshingly simple and highly catchy – almost like a pop single. In fact, many of Morricone’s subsequent singles and albums were hugely successful in Italy, while a cover version of his theme from
The Good
,
the Bad
and the Ugly
by Hugo Montenegro topped the UK charts in 1968. It is interesting that the two most innovative film composers for action films in the sixties, Morricone and the Bond films’ John Barry, both made their names with distinctive arrangements of other people’s work. Barry created the famous ‘James Bond Theme’ by reworking Monty Norman’s original composition and augmented it with his own ‘Bees Knees’ instrumental. It seems that just about every aspect of
A Fistful of Dollars
had a source elsewhere. But when these myriad influences converged (Eastwood’s image, Leone’s artistry, Morricone’s musicianship), they created startling effects.

With the success of the
A Fistful of Dollars
score, Morricone soon became synonymous with Italian-style Westerns and his music became a major contributing factor to their popularity. The following year he worked for Leone on
For a Few Dollars More
, creating an even better backdrop to the action, whilst also scoring Tessari’s ‘Ringo’ films, with compositions that echoed his work in the pop industry. The title songs of both the ‘Ringo’ movies were voiced in English (even in the Italian print) by Maurizio Graf. But between 1966 and 1969 Morricone was incredibly prolific and wrote for many of the most financially successful Spaghettis of the day. Sometimes (as in the case of
A Bullet for the General
and
Fort Yuma Gold
[1966]) he worked in collaboration with other composers. Sometimes he used pseudonyms to conceal his prodigious output. On
A Fistful of Dollars
Morricone called himself ‘Dan Savio’ to fall in line with the rest of the production, but on
The Hills Run Red
,
Navajo Joe
and
The
Hellbenders
(1967) he worked as ‘Leo Nichols’. Many of Morricone’s scores were conducted by his assistant Bruno Nicolai, who also moved into composing in the mid-sixties. Morricone worked fruitfully with Tessari, Sollima (
The Big Gundown
and
Face To Face
) and Corbucci (
Navajo Joe
,
The Big Silence
[1967] and
A Professional
Gun
), but with much less recognition. When these films were released outside Europe (in the late sixties and early seventies), they were immediately labelled copies of Leone’s movies. This assumption was further compounded by the similarity of Morricone’s music in each film, which often sounded very ‘Dollar-esque’.

Similarly, it was assumed that other composers working on Italian Westerns were influenced by Morricone’s style. But more often than not they produced material that bore little resemblance to Morricone’s music and was original in its own right. Luis Bacalov’s dark, gloomy score to
Django
could never be mistaken for Morricone. The same goes for Riz Ortolani’s breezy, brassy title music to
Day of Anger
. Among the best of the other composers are Gianni Ferrio, Nico Fidenco and Bruno Nicolai. Roberto Pregadio holds the honour of having composed one of the most familiar pieces of Spaghetti Western music, though few people actually know what it’s called, where it comes from or who wrote it. This haunting whistled theme, which appears whenever a suitable Spaghetti-Western atmosphere is required (in anything from adverts to holiday programmes), is the theme from
Gunmen of Ave Maria
(1970), also rather aptly known as
The Forgotten
Pistolero
. This piece is a formula composition, the classic example of a Morricone pastiche. Morricone’s style was later parodied by Marcello Giombini (with
Sabata
), Franco Micalizzi (
They Call Me Trinity
) and Guido and Maurizio De Angelis (who came into their own in the seventies with scores including
Trinity is Still My Name
and
Keoma
), when Spaghettis themselves moved into more light-hearted territory. Even Morricone eventually adapted his style at the end of the Spaghetti boom and ended up parodying himself.

The key collaborator throughout the Western cycle was Alessandro Alessandroni, an immensely important figure who worked with most of the main composers on many of the finest Westerns. His distinctive whistling and guitar playing, and the diverse vocal talents of his choir, are instantly recognisable. Never more so than in
The Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
– Morricone’s most famous score – where bizarre shrieks and whoops replace the whistled melodies of the previous two ‘Dollars’ films. Morricone was experimenting with using human voices to replicate animalistic sounds – the howl of a coyote, the screech of a bird – and this is most apparent on the raw vocals used in
The Good
,
the Bad and the
Ugly
and other films of the period like
The Hills Run Red and Navajo
Joe
. The howls in
The Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
were applied like signature tunes to each of the three main characters, and freezeframes and title cards introduced each of them (‘the ugly’, ‘the bad’ and ‘the good’ respectively) as the film progressed, though even this title-card device was borrowed from the American B-Western Rage
At
Dawn (1955), where it introduced the villainous Reno brothers. But
The Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
also featured the soprano vocals of Edda Dell’Orso, a pure, ethereal voice that would become synonymous with Morricone’s best scores. In
The Good
,
the Bad
and the Ugly
, she performs Morricone’s pounding ‘Ecstasy of Gold’ theme, which accompanies Tuco’s search for the $200,000 grave at the film’s climax. Dell’Orso’s voice was used to even greater effect in ‘Jill’s Theme’ from
Once Upon a Time in the West
, one of Morricone’s most moving compositions. In fact, Leone and Morricone’s relationship was such that the themes for
Once Upon a
Time
were written before Leone started shooting. The film also featured the track ‘Man with a Harmonica’, which epitomised Morricone’s showdown themes up to that point.

For all the competition, Morricone was the foremost composer of the genre. His scores often made the films successful, while even some of the worst Westerns are bearable, if only to hear his accompaniments. His scoring was sometimes formulaic, and his pieces were often reused from film to film, but they were far away from the epic, brassy (and sometimes interminably slow) scores from American Westerns. He also quoted liberally from classical music, stealing phrases, passages and whole compositions (which he reorchestrated) from Mozart, Beethoven, Mussorgsky and Wagner.

If Spaghetti-Western music conformed to a loose formula, it would read thus: Spaghetti title themes are usually up-tempo, catchy and anarchic, and are often accompanied by cartoonish, pop-art title sequences featuring action and stills from the film. Moments of tension tend to be scored with unsettling, atonal sound effects, mingled with the clever use of actual sounds (horses’ hooves, spurs, the wind, a creaking sign). Gunfights are preceded by extended scenes where the protagonists stare at each other, waiting to draw, while triumphal trumpets, church organs and guitars whip up a macabre bolero before the moment of death. Pathos is added to other scenes with elegiac, delicate melodies – themes that seem a million miles away from the violent world conveyed on screen.
Navajo Joe
wouldn’t be as effective without Morricone’s wailing, electrified take on Native American Indian music. The chase through the cane fields in
The Big Gundown
(1967) would be less than impressive with anything other than Morricone’s percussion-driven tour de force, and the mute gunslinger’s bloody death in
The Big Silence
wouldn’t pack such a punch without Morricone’s plaintive reprise of the ‘Love Theme’. Moreover,
The Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly
and
Once Upon a
Time in the West
are almost totally reliant on music to make their visuals, plot twists, action sequences and humour successful.

By the late sixties, Morricone was becoming a major force in the Italian film industry. Apart from working on dozens of Westerns (35 in all), he worked on both award-winning art cinema projects and genre trash, ignoring snobbishness and creating effective, apt scores for both camps. On the arty side, he provided music for critically acclaimed movies like Marco Bellocchio’s
Fists in the Pocket
(1965), Gillo Pontecorvo’s
The Battle of
Algiers
(1966) and Burn! (1969), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
Hawks and Sparrows
(1966) and
Theorem
(1968), Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976) and Elio Petri’s
Investigation of a
Citizen Above Suspicion
(1970). At the other end of the spectrum, Morricone worked on most of the popular Cinecittà genres of the sixties and early seventies: black-and-white Gothic horrors (
Night of
the Doomed
[1965]), spy movies (
Operation Kid Brother
and
Matchless
[both 1967]), sci-fi (
Danger
:
Diabolik
[1968]), war movies (
The Dirty Heroes
[1967]), thrillers (
Wake
Up and Kill
[1966],
Grand
Slam
[1967] and
The
Sicilian Clan
[1969]), adventures (
The Rover
[1967] and
The Red Tent
[1969]) and
giallo
horrors (
The Bird with the
Crystal Plumage
[1970]). His prolific output and obvious talent resulted in his transition to Hollywood movies in the seventies, though the results (on movies like
Exorcist II
and
Orca – Killer Whale
[both 1977]) were often indifferent. One of his most famous pieces of the eighties was ‘Chi Mai’ (initially written for
Maddalena
[1971] a decade earlier), which was used by the BBC TV series
The Life and Times of David
Lloyd George
(1981) and became a hit. But it was his involvement in Leone’s last film
Once Upon a Time in America
(1984) and Roland Joffe’s
The Mission
(1986) that revitalised his career and finally announced to the world that Morricone was one of the most important film composers of the twentieth century. Initially, Morricone refused to work on
The Mission
, but not because of money. Having seen a rough cut, he felt the film was so powerful that he couldn’t do the images justice, though he was eventually persuaded otherwise.

Morricone has been nominated for an Oscar four times (
Days
Of
Heaven
[1978],
The Mission
,
The Untouchables
[1987] and
Bugsy
[1991]) and in 2007 Eastwood presented him with an Honorary Oscar. The most enduring aspect of his scores, be they Westerns or otherwise, is their ‘listenability’. Morricone is one of the most collected soundtrack composers in the world, with each successive generation of film fans entranced by his genius with a melody. He has even taken to conducting his scores live, as in the celebrated concert at Santa Cecilia in 1998. Even years later, their power is undiminished, as
The Mission
and
Cinema Paradiso
(1988) sit beside
The
Good
,
the Bad and the Ugly and Burn!
. This is especially noticeable in the exquisite choral arrangements and solo vocalists. It is also strange how stars like Eastwood have become synonymous with Morricone’s music. Though the actor has only appeared in a few films scored by Morricone since his Spaghetti jaunt (
The Witches
[1966],
Two Mules for Sister Sara
[1970] and
In the
Line
of Fire
[1993]), most Eastwood documentaries make liberal use of Morricone on the soundtrack, even in the sections of his life not dealing with his Italian work. And when the American Film Institute honoured Eastwood for services to the industry, he arrived at the gala to the stirring strains of ‘Ecstasy of Gold’ from
The Good
,
the
Bad and the Ugly
, reiterating how important Leone’s films were to his career. Ironically, though Morricone now composes for Hollywood blockbusters, writes cantatas and has received great critical acclaim, the mere mention of his name still conjures up his Westerns, and images of dusty landscapes and ruthless gunslingers.