spaghetti western

Italian producers started shooting Westerns in Spain in 1964, cheap and outside Hollywood's reach, and in 1966 the Spanish critic Alfonso Sánchez Martínez coined "spaghetti Western," naming the genre for the country paying for it. The name stuck to a genre built on the idea that nobody moves without being paid for it: Sergio Leone's stranger in A Fistful of Dollars sells false information to both sides of a smuggling war he had no stake in until he decided to profit from it. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly sends three men who trust nothing but a map across the Civil War, chasing a single strongbox of stolen gold. Sergio Corbucci pushed the same arithmetic toward outright cruelty: Django drags a coffin into a border town split between a white-supremacist major and a Mexican general, and only takes a side once the coffin forces his hand; The Great Silence hires out a mute gunman to a widow after bounty killers murder her husband, sending him against men who are, by the letter of the law, allowed to be doing it. Morricone plays loud over enormous close-ups, and every trigger gets pulled for a fee, never a cause.

Distinguish from American Westerns of the studio era presented the frontier as morally legible; Spaghetti Westerns stripped that away. New Hollywood directors (Peckinpah, Altman) applied similar revisionism to the American Western but from within the Hollywood system. Film Noir's moral cynicism is a kindred spirit in a different landscape.