Italy made nearly five hundred Westerns, many filmed in a Spanish desert
Between 1960 and 1978 Europe turned out more than six hundred Westerns, and Italy produced nearly five hundred of them. At their 1968 peak they made up a third of all Italian films. A Spanish journalist named the craze after pasta in 1966, and the label stuck worldwide.
Alfonso Sánchez Martínez coined the phrase spaghetti Western, and the food jokes spread: Japan preferred macaroni Westerns, Germany said Italo-Western, and Spanish productions were sometimes dubbed paella Westerns. Most were low-budget co-productions between Italy and Spain, often with French or West German money, typically pairing an Italian director with an Italo-Spanish crew and a mixed cast. Because the actors spoke different languages and all sound was added afterwards, many of these films have no single official language.
Stories set in the American Southwest and northern Mexico needed dry scenery, so crews went to the Tabernas Desert and the volcanic Cabo de Gata-Níjar park in Almería, south-eastern Spain. Some of those sets survive as theme parks, among them Mini Hollywood, and are still hired for filming. Interiors were often shot at Cinecittà in Rome, and hills and quarries across central Italy doubled as frontier country.
European fascination with the Wild West is old. Puccini's 1910 opera La fanciulla del West is sometimes called the first spaghetti Western, and in 1913 Vincenzo Leone directed a Western vampire hybrid, La vampira Indiana, starring his wife. Their son Sergio would transform the form. Animator Bruno Bozzetto claims he invented it, since his parody West and Soda started production a year before Sergio Leone's film, though it came out later. With no agreed boundary between spaghetti and other Eurowesterns, nobody can name a definitive first.
The breakthrough came in 1964 with A Fistful of Dollars. Leone's giant facial close-ups, Ennio Morricone's odd, sacred-sounding score and Clint Eastwood's squinting, poncho-wearing antihero, who plays two gangs against each other for profit, set a template. A cheap, imitative industry copied it relentlessly, producing laconic sharpshooters played by Franco Nero, Terence Hill and others, flamboyant Mexican bandits and grumpy undertaker sidekicks. Critics describe the core films as stripping the myths from American Westerns. The boom collapsed quickly, falling to a tenth of Italian output by 1969, yet its influence on later filmmaking runs deep.
Source: Spaghetti Western
