What in Tarnation is a Spaghetti Western?

Exploring the Western from a 21st Century Perspective. 

BY MIA MCKELL

For more than a century, Westerns have been America’s way of telling its own origin story, a world where lawlessness met civilization and heroes carved a nation from the wilderness. For the first half of the 20th century, American audiences were captivated by tales that glamorized the ideals of their national legacy: rugged individualism, frontier justice, and the restless drive toward expansion. Or so they say. 

As an American born in the 21st century, the Western’s mythology always felt more like legend than living memory, and a tired one at that. In my childhood, the genre was just another staple, no less distant or fantastical than science fiction or fantasy. I never connected them to the real American frontier, nor understood their ties to my own so-called national heritage. To me, they were myths, not history. And, anyway, they were for boys.

My first introduction to the cowboy in any form was through the character Woody of Pixar’s Toy Story franchise. Canonically a children’s toy, Woody is a commercial product inspired by an entire century's worth of Western media. With his cowhide vest, red bandana, and signature catchphrases …“there’s a snake in my boot”..., adult audiences would recognize him as an ironic caricature. As a child with no capacity for irony, he’d become the foundation for the concept of the cowboy as a caricature. 

Amongst his cast of fabled characters including dinosaurs, aliens, and Little Bo Peep; fearing his legacy will be forgotten to the wonders of the space age and advancing technology (represented by toy of the year and astronaut Buzz Lightyear); Woody is the perfect symbol of where the western stood in the American zeitgeist as we moved into the 21st Century. 

In this way, I, like many other Gen-Z film students (whether they’ll admit it or not), came into the genre backwards. As a 13-year-old in 2013 whose identity was quickly becoming reliant on my cool-girl cinema repertoire,  Pulp Fiction screencaps on my Tumblr feed led to a marathon through the filmography of one Quentin Tarantino, ending with his most recent release, Django Unchained. It was there, on the screen of a hand-me-down first generation Macbook, where cowboys first became cool in my own imagination. 

The story of Django, a runaway slave teaming up with a German bounty hunter to mow down Ku Klux Klan members and Leonardo DiCaprio, was far removed from my vague notions of the dull, ‘kill-the-guy-in-the-black-hat’ American Western. As a teenage girl with a rapidly growing morality complex, Tarantino successfully sparked my interest in a genre I’d previously written off, having assumed Western films followed straightforward, good-versus-bad plotlines. With a budding cynicism of  mid-century American popular media, I felt I had little to gain from stories where characters on either side exhibited blatant racism; set in worlds where women only exist in a vague, nominal sense. Worst of all, I feared they’d be boring. 

Django, however, was anything but boring, and as with any other media consumption I did at this age, I went straight online to the blogs and listicles. It was time to gather lingo and opinions, preparing for the opportunity to get in a “well, actually” at my high-school lunch table, if of course, the opportunity ever arose. In this case, the task was exceedingly easy. All the film-buffs and critics praising the movie were clearly defining the genre of this movie under one term: “Spaghetti Western.” 

This, I learned, was a subgenre of Western films that emerged in the late 1960s, named “Spaghetti” for one comically obvious reason: they were produced by Italian filmmakers. 

One mystery solved, it was time to dive in, and I was thrilled, to say the least. The doors had opened on an entire 50-year archive of films, allegedly akin to Django, and instantly available to me through various streaming services. 

Knowing where to begin was quite simple. Any article or forum discussing the Spaghetti Western is sure to mention the name Sergio Leone; director of 1966’s The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (one of few Western’s that even someone my age could recognize by name) as the undisputed pioneer of the genre. 

Leone’s filmography did not disappoint, immediately visually captivating enough to compete with the attention span of an internet-native. His signature style—dramatic close-ups, sweeping landscape shots, and creative use of lighting—creates a highly cinematic experience that feel to me both timeless and innovative. 

From The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, featured in any given ‘films to watch before you die’ list, in which three men compete in a race for confederate gold, a story that focuses more on their shared greed rather than any single characters triumph– to Once Upon a Time in the West, including an expansive cast of diverse characters that exhibit similarly complicated motivations and morals, Leone’s films also felt ahead of their time to me as a young modern viewer, who had been accustomed to the bias against Western films familiar tropes of dusty towns, stoic cowboys, and black-and-white morality. 

While Sergio Leone defined the style of the Spaghetti Western, directors like Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Sollima expanded its range and depth in distinctive ways. Corbucci’s films, including Django (1966) and The Great Silence (1968), were darker, more violent, and more cynical than Leone’s, often depicting bleak landscapes and morally corrupt worlds where traditional heroes had no place. 

In contrast, Sollima’s Westerns, such as The Big Gundown (1966) and Face to Face (1967), were more overtly intellectual and politically charged, exploring themes of class struggle, corruption, and personal transformation. Together, Corbucci and Sollima helped evolve the Spaghetti Western from stylish entertainment into a vehicle for complex, often subversive storytelling that reflected the tensions of 1960s Europe.

So, could it simply be that the Italians were better at making Westerns? 

That was enough for me as a teenager with a tendency for black-and-white thinking, but the future skeptical film student in me would find that explanation hard to believe. 

Tarantino, an American himself, who confirmed his homage to the Spaghetti Western genre in many interviews following the release of Django Unchained,  saying in an interview with Husam Asi “I’ve always just had an affinity for a combination of heightened genre storytelling in spaghetti westerns, the heightened music and then the way it brings things up to operatic proportions. Those are just three elements that you can’t lose if you blend them the right way.” 

He indeed drew inspiration from Leone, but some of his favorites actually hailed from the homeland itself. Among these was American director Bud Boetticher, best remembered for a series of low-budget westerns he made in the 1950s, almost two decades before the Spaghetti Western genre emerged in popular culture. 

Boetticher got his start in the Western genre with films like The Cimmaron Kid and Red Ball Express, which were considered highly controversial at the time of their release. Red Ball Express in particular, a 1952 film about World War II, prompted the U.S. department of defence to call for the production company, Universal, to modify the film due to the high percentage of African-American drivers in the Red Ball Express operation. 

“The army wouldn't let us tell the truth about the black troops because the government figured they were expendable. Our government didn't want to admit they were kamikaze pilots,” said Boetticher. 

Boetticher was not the only American Western director facing controversy. Sergeant Rutledge, the 1960 American Technicolor Western film directed by John Ford, was considered an enormous box-office risk and performed terribly in American theaters, due to its casting of Woody Strode, an African American actor, in one of its leading roles. 

The truth is, in  the 1940s and 1950s, American directors were often restricted from making controversial Westerns due to both censorship and political pressure. The Hays Code, Hollywood’s strict set of moral guidelines, limited what could appear on screen, requiring Westerns to uphold traditional ideas of justice, heroism, and morality. Filmmakers couldn’t openly question American values or portray moral ambiguity without risking censorship.

At the same time, the political climate of McCarthyism and the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee made studios wary of producing films that could be seen as unpatriotic or subversive. As a result, many Westerns from this era avoided complex social or political themes, instead reinforcing the myth of the noble cowboy and the righteous frontier.

Italian’s, unburdened by such regulations, began making Westerns in the early 1960s largely because the genre was popular, affordable to produce, and adaptable to European filmmaking conditions. American Westerns had dominated global cinema for decades, but by this time Hollywood’s interest in the genre was fading, leaving space for international reinterpretation. Italy, along with Spain and Germany, offered cheap production costs and vast, arid landscapes. 

While their films may remain some of the most well-known, exciting, and complex Western’s of the later 20th century, it seems that the true spirit of the Spaghetti Western lies in its rebellion against traditional heroism and moral simplicity. And in some ways,  it could be considered even more subversive for American directors to have challenged those cultural narratives that shaped them. Perhaps the boldest rebellion is not an outsider’s critique of America, but an American’s willingness to question the myths of their own making.