Spaghetti westerns, beyond Leone - my 20 faves

Django Kill

which is surreal enough to not count tbf

Original Django is excellent tho

Have you seen Matalo? Similar vibe to Django Kill.

Half of these films were probably called Django something in Germany.

I was about to admit I haven't seen enough of these

Gotta go with Il Grande Silenzio just for Kinski's unhinged performance.. and of course the snow

Yes, I love me a wintry western and The Great Silence is a top rank one.

A Bullet for the General is probably the 'best' of these that I've seen, but as a Fulci loyalist I had to vote for Massacre Time, which does in some ways anticipate his gorefests later on, it's really intense in an unhinged way (again, similar vibe to Django Kill).

Last Italian Western I saw and enjoyed was Castellari's Kill Them All and Come Back Alone (1968), which sort of reminded me of a Shaw Brothers Kung Fu movie like Five Deadly Venoms - Chuck Connors leads a gang of mercenaries all with different mad skills, almost non-stop action.

Thank you for this, I've only seen Django.

Not seen too many of these but then you can't always rely on the titles as a guide, I've heard plenty of the soundtracks though! Silence, General, Django all top notch.

The occasional spaghetti western used to show up at odd hours on some of the Freeview channels but I haven't seen any for years.

write in vote for tombstone

Haven't seen many of these, tbh, but one title on my watch list that is not on this one is "They Call Me Trinity."

Il Grande Silenzio is incredible, so bleak, so beautiful. And my favourite Morricone score to boot

Winter westerns are few and far between but they rule.

Now we're talking. I think I've seen every one of these except for Bandidos and Johnny Hamlet. My pick is A Bullet for the General, which nails the political angle that so many spaghettis strive for, plus it's exceptionally well acted.

Runners up: The Great Silence, The Great Gundown (aka The Big Gundown), Django, and A Pistol for Ringo. The first two Ringo films are very different and both worthy, and I just like Giuliano Gemma as a gunslinger.

Ok, it's a Leone film, but an overlooked one: Duck You Sucker! aka "Fistful of Dynamite" with James Coburn and Rod Steiger... it's starts out kinda lighthearted almost and then goes just completely bleak and nihilistic.. great score as well

The Great Silence

Ive only seen that and Django off the list though

¡Vamos A Matar, Compañeros! needs to be here.

also The Mercenary by Sergio Corbucci

I've not seen Companeros or The Mercenary yet, saving them up cause it'd be kinda sad to have no more Corbucci classics to look forward to. Also haven't seen any Trinity, I fully endorse the farting and punch ups ethos of Spencer and Hill in theory but worry that sitting through an entire film might be a bit much.

Damiani fully rejected the label of course, arguing that Italians making a film about Mexico has zilch to do with westerns. Which is true but come on, Gian Maria Volonté shooting people in the desert, that's a spaghetti western baby!

In the hater department: I found Kill Them All to be severely lacking in the cast charisma department (Wolff excepted) and the fact that the baddies behaved like grunts in a video game on easy mode really undercut the action. Fistful Of Dynamite, despite the great score, feels like Leone flailing, struggling to keep up with the zapata/political western trend; the pathos is overblown and the worldview conservative bullshit. My Name Is Nobody is also him flailing but this time he's trying to incorporate the comedy western.

Josefa, Bandidos is by the guy who did the cinematography in the first two Dollar films and it really has that Leone sheen, just a very visually striking film. Johnny Hamlet is Castellari doing Hamlet in the West, very silly but I dig it.

My list would include The Price of Power, another Giuliano Gemma vehicle that reimagines the JFK assassination in the Old West. Fascinating.

The plot summary of Bandidos rings a distant bell, but I couldn’t swear I’ve seen it. And come to that I’m not totally sure I’ve seen Matalo. I’ve been fortunate to see most of these on the big screen as Film Forum in NYC showed a massive spaghetti western series some years ago. Something like 30 films and I caught the majority of them but some films blur together in memory.

Sweet, I own (but have not yet seen) most of these, and the ones I have seen have been great. Django is certainly the best of those, Ringo or Massacre Time the most 'fun'.

I think it's between Gundown and Massacre Time for me, although the first Sartana film captures something the later ones don't and I think $10,000 is underrated.

thanks for this, lots of great stuff to check out here. "Johnny Hamlet" is a great name!

BTW, quite a lot of these are on YouTube in pretty decent versions.

ha i started looking for them last night but was apparently too pished to operate youtube

No love for Face To Face on ilx? Gian Maria Volonté is a big city intellectual whose fascination with bandit Tomas Millian leads him down a criminal path of Nietschean madness. Political, psychosexual and weird as fuck, plus a great Morricone score.

I wonder if anyone has seen all the Sartanas. I think there’s about eight of them. I have a dvd boxed set that I doubt I will ever make it all the way through.

I've got the 'Complete Sartana' box set that Arrow put out, which has five films, though there may well be Django-esque Sartana knock-offs not included in it. I've only watched the first one in the set so far, If You Meet Sartana... Pray for Your Death, which was fine, but certainly not top tier. Will have to give Daniel's picks a go too.

Confusingly (for me!), I also have the three-disc Masters of Cinema Sabata set.

It’s confusing bc most classic Sartanas have Giuliano Carnimeo directing Gianni Garko, but Carnimeo directed one with George Hilton instead of Garko, and Garko acted in one not directed by Carnimeo. And then there are the less reputable ones…

Giuliano Carnimeo meaning, er… Anthony Ascott

lol, just did a Sartana search on Letterboxd (which includes alternate titles in the results) and...yeah. Looks like at least 18-ish Sartanas? Probably still nowhere near the number of ersatz Django films.

(It looks like half the films in this poll were branded as Django sequels at some point/in some market.)

I once saw Tony Musante, Franco Nero’s costar in The Mercenary, do a brief speech before a screening of that film. Seemed like a very nice guy (and is a New York actor), but imo he’s a little too hammy in The Mercenary. I like him a lot more in Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage just two years later.

Killer ( no pun! ) thread by the way!

Thanks!

The first Sartana film is no great shakes, it's trying for a giallo thing but by that I mean a mystery plot and lots of scenes set at night, not psychedelic freak out sequences and elaborate killings. Things imo get much better once Carnimeo takes the reins and the franchise becomes this quirky comic book thing. Of the two I picked, I Am Sartana... has Klaus Kinski as a character called HOT DEAD and a climax at an all-gambling town; Sartana's Here (which is the George Hilton one) has a British dandy character called Sabbath and for some reason Sartana really loves hard boiled eggs now. If you own the Arrow set tho it's worth it to watch the interview with Gianfranco Parolini, the director of the first Sartana, to see him use the interview to try to get financing for a terrible looking peplum project. Gotta respect the grindset, that dude's whole ecosystem had collapsed decades ago but he was still trying.

Then there's the crossover Django And Sartana Are Coming...It's The End, which unsurprisingly is not directed by Corbucci, Canimeo or Parolini and does not feature Franco Nero, Gianni Garko or George Hilton.

Watched I Am Sartana... at the weekend, and yes, definitely a big step up from the first one (and the Arrow 2K restoration looked lush). Could watch a whole Hot Dead franchise: love the scene where he kills a group of gunmen who have ambushed his stagecoach and he straps their corpses to the roof so that he can claim the rewards and fund his gambling habit. Also, the stick of dynamite in the wagon wheel - lots of good paraphernalia business throughout. Laughed at the way it so obviously wasn't Garko's hands doing all the card tricks.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Not a bad result. More people need to check out Sollima tho.

People have mentioned having the Sartana boxed set from Arrow w/ five films... I have a different set titled 'Sartana: The Complete Saga' that has 10 films on 3 discs, from a company called Videoasia. Picture quality may not be ideal.

And yes the poll winner is deserving. I wonder if Sollima's The Great Gundown/The Big Gundown would get votes if were seen more. It's kind of the quintessential Tomas Milian performance and boasts an incredible theme song performed by the Italian singer known as Christy.

the john zorn / morricone LP is called (and opens with a seven-minute version of) "the big gundown" -- tho i don't have my vinyl copy to hand and it isn't on spotify or youtube afaics

Great Gundown theme is so great that there's a wedding scene and after just a few beats of the wedding march the band reverts back to playing the main theme.

Forgot to vote, would have been Gundown

China 9, Liberty 37 is one of the filthiest and most profane westerns ever, and I love every minute of it. I was very fortunate to see it once in 35mm at the American Cinematheque with Monte Hellman in perfect. How can you not want to see a film that has Jenny Agutter AND Sam Peckinpah in the cast?

Django is an astonishing piece of cinema. Haven't seen any of the sequels but I wouldn't be surprised if they were less astonishing.

What's funny is that I recognize the Morricone scores of many of these movies (if not the actual compositions, then certainly the titles), so hearing the iconic music in the context of movies that are ... not so iconic is kind of a surreal disconnect. I guess I've encountered that dissonance before, because god knows, the dude wrote a lot of music for a lot of less than reputable stuff.

After chatting with friends about Lee Van Cleef, I watched Death Rides a Horse. Highly recommended - great Morricone score, lots of choir and some quite abstract passages that reminded me of Goldsmiths' Planet of the Apes soundtrack - it was in the air. Along with LVC giving it good pipe, also has the Scottish actor Anthony Dawson, always excellent at playing sadistic cowards. It seems to be yet another Italian genre film indebted to Hitchcock's Marnie (children witnessing adult atrocities, flashbacks in vivid single colours).

OK, I had no idea that guy was Scottish!

Yes, he normally plays middle class English, but was an Edinburgh lad. Appeared in Doctor No, wonder if he was matey with Connery.

Good call on the Marnie influence, I'd never thought of that connection but lots of Italian films come to mind immediately

I haven't seen a lot of spaghetti westerns but death rides a horse was indeed good

the main problem i have watching films is the way they often use sexual assault as a plot point

and they're often pretty brutal. i recall the one in "death rides a horse" as being pretty brutal. brutal violence is one thing, but the SA... i don't do so good with it. not passing any judgements. just hard for me to watch.

it is genuinely a good film, i think.

Yeah there's a lot of it in the genre, and often enough it's used for titilation which is super fucked up.

Nowhere near as pervasive as it gets in 70's italian genre cinema tho.

i hope every single member of the cabinet dies in blistering pain asap

sorry i've no idea how this post ended up in this thread

Maybe Django could do the job with his machine gun

that would be an enjoyable spectacle yes

i hope every single member of the cabinet dies in blistering pain asap

Man they really got creative with the titles back then huh

"Spero che ogni singolo membro del gabinetto muoia tra atroci sofferenze (il prima possibile)."

Keir Starmer sounds like one of those made up names Italian actors were often given in Spaghetti westers.

"Spero che ogni singolo membro del gabinetto muoia tra atroci sofferenze (il prima possibile)."

Fun fact, this was released in Germany as Django - Der Kongress Stirbt

This is a film I'd love to watch rn

I watched the 4k DVD of "Django" last night. It's not my fave movie, but it's got its moments, and almost by happenstance has had a long tail and huge impact. One of the bonus features is an interview with Alex Cox, who made a connection I'd never considered before. He noted that while all these Westerns were being made overseas, the western was pretty moribund in Hollywood, bar the odd "Butch Cassidy" or small movies like The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid" or whatever, and I'm sure other exceptions before "Dances with Wolves" or "Young Guns" or the comeback like. And yet Cox traced the influence of a lot of these spaghetti western anti-hero protagonists to the quipping heroes of '80s action films, who would blow someone away and then make a wry joke. I'd never thought about it before.

bond?

at just first thought

There's Bond and there's also the direct line between Clint Eastwood in the spaghettis to Dirty Harry's "do you feel lucky, punk" and so on

absolutely had that same thought but allowed that the westerns came firsr!

where is where eagles dare chronologically actually, and not because of clint but because it has always struck me as one of the ur die hards

Bond is not a stone cold killer that guns down dozens, though, is he? That seems to set the stage for action movies to come, not just the quips but the quips paired with extreme indiscriminate violence.

is he not?

He is definitely a stone cold killer.

Sorry, wrong choice of words, then. I should have said something like "he is not the sort to sit in ambush with a machine gun and mow down a village of baddies," which is the model adopted by a lot of later action heroes. My Bond knowledge is pretty weak, but I assume Alex Cox is pretty familiar. He's the one that made the observation. Iirc his take was more or less that the (anti) heroes of the spaghetti westerns are typically not really good guys or bad guys, they are more often than not mercenaries with a pretty flexible moral code, very "shoot first." Otherwise, dunno why he overlooked/ignored Bond as a quipping killer.

ok and ok but

bond!

absolutely a mercenary with a flexible moral code and the austin powers henchman family gag isnt out of nowhere

Do you think the Bond movies had an influence on the spaghetti westerns?

Possibly?

The film was initially shunned by Italian critics, who gave it extremely negative reviews. Some American critics felt differently from their Italian counterparts, with Variety praising it as having "a James Bondian vigor and tongue-in-cheek approach that was sure to capture both sophisticates and average cinema patrons".[46]

Interesting! I found this essay discussing this subject:

https://dcairns.wordpress.com/2022/07/01/coxs-orange-pippins-the-pink-desert/

Anyway, Sartana: “You look just like a scarecrow!” sneers a henchman after the black-clad gunslinger shows up, in the middle of nowhere (an Italian quarry, faded to a strange pink hue) without anyone seeing him coming. “I am your pallbearer,” he replies, and kills them all (save Kinski). He does it a couple of ways: with a gimmick tiny pistol (of the kind Sabato would also enjoy) and with a shotgun. But he never bears their palls, that was just a figure of speech I guess. These guys’ bones are gonna bleach in the sun.

The pithy quip in the western does have some antecedents in John Wayne (“That’ll be the day!” “Fill your hand you sunnovabitch!”) but it becomes a thing in Italian westerns via Leone’s transposition of the “Cooper, prepare three coffins,” bit in YOJIMBO from Mifune to Eastwood in A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS. At the same time or slightly earlier actually, Sean Connery’s James Bond had started quipping after a kill (“Shocking!”). The Italians led the world in cheap Bond knock-offs, many of them made by people who also made westerns — Michele Lupo, Sergio Sollima, Duccio Tessri, Gianfranco Parolini (who gives us Sartana, here, and then Sabata), Mario Bava, and writers like Ernesto Gastaldi, Sergio Donati, Fernando Di Leo… It seems to be a matter of temperament whether you went from gladiator movies to spy films or to westerns or to Gothic horror or to gialli or to polizioteschi or soft porn. With only Bava having a go at virtually every genre on the list, sometimes two at a time.

Lots of good observations in that piece:

Despite his lethal array of dad jokes, Bond’s catchphrase is just a lame introductory statement: “The name’s Bond. James Bond.” And likewise the spaghettis seem obsessed with naming their heroes: MY NAME IS NOBODY, THEY CALL ME TRINITY, MY NAME IS PECOS, MY NAME IS SHANGHAI JOE, MY NAME IS MALLORY… M MEANS DEATH!, THEY CALL ME HALLELUJAH, I AM SARTANA YOUR ANGEL OF DEATH and, a bit desperately, TRINITY IS STILL MY NAME. Plus numerous Joes, Johnnies, people with Colt or the name of a state in their name…

The Bond films, though, were directed by British traditionalists who shot things in fairly staid ways, but then had Peter Hunt pick the pace right up in the cutting. No crash zooms, zip pans, bizarro POV shots or gratuitous camera movements for Eon Productions. It took Sid Furie’s compositional eccentricity on THE IPCRESS FILE to bring the spy flick closer to Leone’s exuberance.

Yeah, I was going to mention that the Italians also made Bond ripoffs, none more blatant than this!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O.K._Connery

Spotted this at another forum:

Got the Dollars Trilogy for Christmas on Blu-Ray (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly) and was watching the historian's commentary for all of them.

On the commentary for A Fistful of Dollars they discussed how much Bond had influence the direction of Sergio Leone as well as elements of the story.

The only trailer I can find for this film (horrible screeching theme song by Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk1gNgjrfPg

Apparently Morricone also scored a 1967 Bond knockoff called "Matchless" (also known as "Mission Top Secret").

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x34WIuC_bc4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjAajM35yl0

I remember that Operation Double 007, as it was also called, was featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. I've seen it, but I can't remember a thing about it! The other Eurospy films that featured on the programme were much more memorable. Secret Agent (doot doot) Super Dragon (doot doot) and Danger!! Death Ray, where the hero was called Bart Fargo and the script kept throwing in random US cities to give the impression that the film wasn't Italian.

In fact it's at 01:32:12 in this official upload of MST3K spy movies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytF5dTGp_fs

Co-starring the lovely Daniela Bianchi, the lovely Bernard Lee, the lovely Lois Maxwell, the lovely Adolfo Celi, and Anthony Dawson, all from the actual James Bond films, who all appeared to treat it like an all-expense-paid foreign holiday. The director also filmed one of the Secret Agent 077 Bond clones. My hunch is that Boeing prevented them from using the number 707.

It strikes me that in order to understand Spaghetti Westerns you'd need to be Italian. The country had survived a ruinous war and post-war poverty and was rebuilding by the 1960s, just like Britain, and I suspect the population wanted a glamorous power fantasy in an unusual environment, starring macho supermen and attractive women, although curiously the heroes of Spaghetti Westerns seemed far less interested in women than James Bond.

Which is something else they have in common with 1980s action films. The men were sexless and the women were usually big sister types - platonic pals of the hero, often played by women from South America so that no-one could accuse the white star of being racist. I long ago gave up on trying to understand Italy.

Yes spaghetti westerns absolutely borrowed from Bond a lot. Characters like Sabata are gadget obsessed in the same way and the opening titles to the Leone films are v much influenced!

Ha, I'd never even thought about it before, but that's totally true about the opening credits.

And then in the 70's you get Bruce Lee's Way Of The Dragon doing similar titles - at that point, is he doing Bond or spaghetti homage? Who knows?

And yet, I'm not sure you'd call Bond an influence on the violent action heroes of the 70s and esp. 80s. Like, Eastwood is Eastwood, but Eastwood as Dirty Harry is a pretty different animal than his Leone roles. Less cynical/mercenary, more reactionary and mean/angry.

As to understanding Italy through the genre: it is indeed connected to the experience of wartime and the economic boom thereafter. Spaghetti westerns often feature betrayal, separate desperate factions fighting it out over prizes that prove underwhelming or absent, a general lack of a moral centre - all of which makes sense for a generation whose parents saw the turmoil and confusion of WWII Italy, many of whom at one point or another betrayed or were betrayed as the tides turned. Likewise the absolute obsession with wealth - which yeah absolutely trumps sex in this genre's world, easily so - found its paralells in the cutthroat capitalism of the boom years.

As to race: there's a concerning amount of movies where the confederates are protagonists, partially I think this is just unexamined consumption of US cinema but it also must have struck a nerve to portray the losing side of a war; the dynamics between Italy's own North and South further complicate things. But for all of this they pretty much have to take slavery out of the equation, and most of the time end up at "both sides are greedy and corrupt, there are no good guys" anyway. The idea of an Italian western from the 60's doing ANYTHING because they wanted to avoid accusations of racism is amusing to me - like most European media depicting the Old West I think mostly spag westerns are self satisfied in their certainty of being better than those Bigoted Americans, so poc are almost always positive characters, though usually handled with a lot of noble savage tropes.

Big generalizations here ofc, individual writers and directors did sometimes succeed in making credible anti racist films.

spaghetti westerns are set as a rule in be or be killed towns, or the unforgiving wilderness. its usually only a question as to why our lone ?hero? is out there, if we ever find out.

the bounty hunter figure is one that can play either way

cops and spies are i feel built into a longer developmental arc of a career in the chosen cutting edge of recognisable structures and as such are speaking a lot more directly to an audience, yer spaghetti clint is a figure out of herzog. be smart, be quick, be deadly, the desert doesnt care

bond is constantly being reminded how much everyone cares, he smells great his hair is done and he is constantly freshly fucked.

thats not the energy clint is giving us in his dusty poncho, hes fucking wrecked and his groin area is absolutely rife with boils

so thats the context there imo

dirty harry its halfway. i havent seen his groin

Feels like a lot of action heroes/vigilantes in the '70s were cops or civilians. By the '80s a lot of them were crypto-military, former Special Forces and the like, which maybe explains their way with giant guns and creative kills. I suppose that's what made Die Hard special, he's essentially a cop *and* a civilian, but in his own way owes a lot to Eastwood's wry Leone (albeit in a different context); rather than playing two towns against one another, his warring factions are cops and robbers.

I love how dirty all the spaghetti westerns are. Much of Django is literally just slopping through mud.

"Death Rides a Horse" on Freeview (London Live) right now. I was sure I'd seen this before but apparently not.

... it's a good one, even though John Philip Law isn't very good, but was he ever?

Yeah, JPL is the big downside to that one.

His eyes were right for the part but unfortunately he proved to be no Terence Hill or Franco Nero.

No love for "Requiescant", which stars Pasolini as a priest? Saw it years ago and don't rememeber much about other than it stars Pasolini as a priest. Pasolini of course had the perfect face for Spag westerns.

https://onceuponatimeinawestern.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Piero-Paolo-Pasolini-as-Juan-religious-leader-of-the-revolutionaries-in-Requiescant-1967.jpg

The Ebert review is particularly colorful:

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/death-rides-a-horse-1969

Fave bits:

From time to time you will laugh, or be thrilled, or distract yourself by noticing that some of the outdoor scenes are shot in a studio with backdrops (at one point, the hero casts a shadow across an entire mountain range).

The heroes of these films would save a lot of time if they’d accept one simple rule of thumb: Generally speaking, everyone they meet is either (a) the man who killed their families 15 years ago, (b) a stranger who is after the same villains for mysterious reasons of his own, or (c) their father, brother or son.

Van Cleef’s face, in closeup, has the lean, hardened, embittered expression of a man who has either (a) been pursuing his lonely vengeance across the plains of the West for 30 years, or (b) realizes he will be making spaghetti Westerns the rest of his life. These two feelings are nearly indiscernible.

for several years i'd been looking for the title of one i caught the last half of and was intrigued, but i'd had no luck narrowing it down with my memory-limited search terms (gold! former confederate soldiers! uh, gambling!).

last night i put on light the fuse...sartana is coming and bingo! that's the one! very entertaining, and increasingly bizarre as it moves along. you'll never trust a pipe organ parked in the middle of the street again.

and it looks like i've seen several of carnimeo-directed things over the last few years, including most recently the absolutely wretched rat man. woof.

Ha, echoing your process, reading "you'll never trust a pipe organ parked in the middle of the street again" I thought, huh, I could have sworn I saw another Western with an organ in the middle of the street. And I did! "The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid," which iirc prominently features a steam calliope on the sidewalk.