The term "Spaghetti western" originated as a slang expression for the Italian-made westerns that came to prominence during the early and mid-1960s and filled a gap left by the American movie industry at the end of the 1950s. Hollywood had produced thousands of westerns during the first half of the 20th century, establishing both a genre and an audience. Most Hollywood westerns were "B"-pictures: low-budget genre films produced to fill out the bottom-half of double features. But the films that stand out today are the bigger-scale, more serious "A"-westerns such as Stagecoach (1939), High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), Red River (1948), and The Big Country (1958). The development of television after World War II spelled the end of the "B"-western, which moved to television in the form of weekly cowboy series. The aging of such master directors of the genre as John Ford and Howard Hawks, coupled with the decline of the studio system, ultimately doomed the "A"-western as well. John Wayne's films still made money during the 1960s, and a few American productions, such as John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (1960, based on Akira Kurosawa's 1954 The Seven Samurai) successfully integrated well-defined characters, driving action sequences, and relatively big-name casts. (Yul Brynner was then a major star.)

Nevertheless, the western was in general decline by 1960. The western audience, however, hadn't disappeared. There remained millions of people throughout America and Europe who were hungry for good action films involving horses, guns, and violence. Overseas producers recognized this, and as early as 1961 there were horse operas being made in Italy, Germany, and other central European countries. The films that emerged were very different from the romantic western visions embodied in the work of John Wayne and John Ford. In place of frontier moralizing or cowboy vs. Indian battles, they played off of grittier -- and, in many ways, more accurate -- conflicts. These European-produced westerns were filled with seemingly mindless gratuitous violence, which made them offputting to mainstream American critics, but were also very realistic and extremely exciting. They began to find audiences in the U.S., mostly playing in neighborhood theaters and small chains to audiences that didn't care what the critics had to say. Absent from Spaghetti westerns are any notion of the white-hatted hero -- often the only distinguishing trait separating heroes from villains in these pictures is the fact that the hero is slightly more selective in the violence he commits. This vision of the West isn't clean, and it isn't pretty -- it is hot, dusty, and uninviting, a hard land populated by hard men (sexism, in the form of men dominating and brutalizing the women around them, is almost a given), who do terrible things to each other in the course of trying to survive and prosper. Any of John Wayne's heroes would have a hard time surviving in the world of the Spaghetti western, and such vaunted American oater stars as Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott, and the Lone Ranger wouldn't last ten minutes on the streets of its towns.

The major breakthrough for the genre took place in 1964 with the release of Italian director Sergio Leone's A Fistful Of Dollars. The movie was based on Akira Kurosawa's hit samurai action film Yojimbo (1960), in which a lone swordsman was pitted between two rival factions contending for control of a village. In the same manner that John Sturges had transposed Kurosawa's work in The Magnificent Seven, Yojimbo's story was simplified, its setting transposed to Mexico, and its swordsman reworked into a gunslinger. Because Leone's movie was made in color (Kurosawa's original was black and white), the violence was especially graphic -- almost on a comical level. The dialogue was simple and undemanding. A relatively little-known American actor named Clint Eastwood played Leone's leading character, "The Man With No Name." A veteran of the series Rawhide, Eastwood had appeared in movies in tiny roles during the middle and late 1950s. His intense, taciturn demeanor and spare acting style fit in perfectly with Leone's vision, and the actor rocketed to stardom virtually overnight. Two sequels, For A Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly (1966), followed in short order.

Leone's film also benefitted from the music of Ennio Morricone, an Italian composer with a background in jazz, who had been scoring low-budget western and action films for several years. In this and subsequent westerns by Leone, his music is emotionally intense and demanding, highlighted by haunting melodies and scored for unusual vocal treatments (wordless male choruses and keening female soloists were standard features of his work) and odd combinations of instruments, especially flutes and whistles. Morricone's music became such a familiar trademark in Leone's films that he was subsequently asked to score other producers' European-made westerns, and his scores became heavily imitated by other composers and producers who sought to re-create the aura of the "Man With No Name" films. A Fistful Of Dollars was a breath of fresh air for western fans who were stifling in an era when virtually the only serious western production in the United States -- apart from the occasional John Wayne vehicle and the films of director Sam Peckinpah (who was only sporadically active in the '60s, thanks to his reputation for being "difficult") -- was on television, with series such as Gunsmoke and Bonanza.

Leone's success had a ripple effect throughout Hollywood and the world. United Artists, which made a fortune distributing all three of his Clint Eastwood films in America, immediately engaged Eastwood and his newly founded production company Malpaso in an American-made feature, Hang 'Em High (1967), which displayed many of the same characteristics as Leone's films (including a score by Dominic Frontiere that the producers insisted be devised to deliberately recall Ennio Morricone's music). Eastwood was supported by a large roster of familiar American actors, including Inger Stevens, Ed Begley Sr., and theater veteran Pat Hingle (who has since become a regular member of Eastwood's stock company). The results were equally impressive on a financial level, and suddenly Hollywood was scouring the world for foreign-made westerns to distribute in the United States. When Eastwood's second Leone western For A Few Dollars More was released in America in 1967, it introduced international filmgoers to Lee Van Cleef, an actor who had been working in pictures since the early 1950s. (He's one of the outlaws trying to gun down Gary Cooper in High Noon.) He quickly achieved stardom in Spaghetti westerns and became a popular action star in mainstream features as well. Other actors fared less well in their attempts to make it big in European westerns, and the major film companies discovered that there was more to success in this field than piling up lots of violence and action around the name of a major actor. Despite the presence of Anthony Quinn and Charles Bronson (not to mention an aging Sam Jaffe), MGM's Guns For San Sebastian (1968) was badly received as a confusing mess by audiences and critics alike.

Smaller companies such as Embassy were much better set up to exploit such films, and soon a flood of mostly Italian-made films, starring such actors as Terence Hill (real name Mario Girotti), Dan Vadis, Tony Anthony, and Franco Nero (who had been established in Hollywood through the mammoth 1967 musical Camelot) were running very profitably in American theaters. Even Apple, the Beatles' record and film company, got into the act with Blindman (1972), a Spaghetti western starring Ringo Starr (who also sang a song on the soundtrack) and Tony Anthony, which featured an appearance by the group's former manager Allen Klein in a cameo role. Many of these films also gave work to American actors such as Peter Graves and James Daly, who were well known from television but whose film careers in the United States had never taken off, as well as aging film stars such as Rod Cameron, Richard Basehart, and Joseph Cotten. Their talents were undoubtedly a consideration, but it was just as important to have someone on hand from the country whose mythology was being exploited. Reading their lines in character was often difficult for English-speaking actors, who would find themselves stranded in a foreign country with an international film crew, trying to cope with actors who were emoting in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Years later, some of the more outspoken actors reminisced about their work in the genre and said that the then-sobering experience enabled them to hone their craft, learn European languages (which some of them barely understood at the time), and enjoy extended European vacations. A few actors, such as Lex Barker, wound up staying in Europe and found second careers as bankable American actors in European productions.

Leone followed up his three Clint Eastwood films with a production that marked something of an apotheosis for the Spaghetti western: Once Upon A Time In The West (1968), an epic-length tale of murder and revenge starring Charles Bronson and Henry Fonda (who stepped very much out of character to play a murderous gunman). There were European-made westerns produced after this classic genre tale, but no subsequent movie ever achieved the combination of critical accolades and audience success of this Leone picture. During this period, from 1964 onward, Hollywood continued to make some conventional, traditional westerns, principally in association with John Wayne, whose movies always made money (and who was producing his own pictures by that time in his career). But the Spaghetti western had a profound effect on American-made films within the genre. Pictures such as Duel At Diablo (1966), which in earlier years would have been aimed at more of a family audience, instead were punctuated by a realistic savagery that made them suitable only for older teenagers and adults. Burt Kennedy's Hannie Caulder (1972) used violence more graphically than any other major Hollywood-financed star vehicle. (Raquel Welch was its =raison d'etre= -- and its downfall for her lack of acting ability.) Even John Wayne eventually succumbed to the new morality and the new standards of acceptable mayhem, beginning in 1972 with The Cowboys (which proved so successful that it was spun off into a short-lived television series). Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter (1973), which he directed as well as starred in, was virtually an American-made Spaghetti western, somewhat more moralistic than the usual European standard but sparked by stylish, sadistic violence and a certain dark comic flair. It was a major international hit and has achieved cult status; along with Eastwood's Leone films, it is one of the few Spaghetti westerns to receive release in its proper widescreen format on laserdisc. Eastwood's subsequent westerns as director and star, including Pale Rider (1985) and Unforgiven (1992), also resound with echoes of Leone's approach, although they present much deeper conflicts over their violence -- and more serious moralizing -- than the "Man With No Name" films.

Any of the Leone films, along with the two Eastwood American westerns of this period, would make an excellent introduction to the genre, but the number and diversity of the Spaghetti-western genre far transcends this handful of masterpieces. The "Django" and "Sartana" films are among the most violent and inventive entries, both embracing a great deal of technical wizardry for their heroes to use in their brutal and often sadistic retribution. The "Ringo" series is built around the character of a returning Civil War veteran who avenges his family against crooked town bosses, retreading the same plot for nearly every film in the series. And the "Trinity" series, starring Terence Hill and Bud Spencer (real name Carlo Pedersoli), heralded the end of the Spaghetti western with comic, entertaining vehicles, almost a precursor to the Mel Gibson and Danny Glover Lethal Weapon team-ups of the 1980s. Ironically, the death-knell for the Spaghetti western was sounded during the mid 1970s with the growth of the martial-arts film genre, which used choreographed violence in ways that no horseback heroes could possibly match. The last gasp of the once-popular "Django" and "Sartana" characters came in a series of adventures that tried to add more sex and James Bond-style gadgetry -- in the manner of television's The Wild, Wild West -- to the western formula, in a failed effort to save the genre.

A neophyte's guide to the best Spaghetti westerns:

A Fistful Of Dollars (1964) Death Rides A Horse (1969) Cemetery Without Crosses Django (1968) For A Few Dollars More (1965) The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly (1966) The Great Silence The Hellbenders (1967) Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)

Honorable Mentions:

Ace High (1969) If You Meet Sartana, Pray For Your Death (aka Sartana) Django -- The Grand Return, And God Said To Cain, Price of Power (1969) Ruthless Four (1968) Pray And Die, They Call Me Trinity (1971) Trinity Is STILL My Name (1972)