A Beginner's Guide to Spaghetti Westerns

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Despite being Italian, I never watched any spaghetti western for well over 15 years, until one day, thankfully, my father gently forced me to go to the cinema with him because there was a rescreening of The good, the bad and the ugly.
Man, what a ride, it shook me to the bones. To this day I'm still proud and grateful of that decision. Experiencing such a timeless movie on the big screen was eye-opening for sure.
Needless to say, I went on and watched many other westerns, with Once upon a time in the West becoming my favourite, from an artistic point of view. The ending never fails to make me cry like a little baby, it transcends genres, ages, everything. It's a true masterpiece. Just the final stare between Charles Bronson and Claudia Cardinale gives me chills every single time.
It really is one of my favourite endings of all time, alongside a bunch of John Carpenter's movies (mainly Escape from New York and In the mouth of madness) and Isao Takahata's Only yesterday.

This channel is underrated.

I like how they take away the glamour of traditional westerns, making them more real like. The rawness of the music and that there're no actual heroes in the movies.

I cannot thank you enough for this, I've ALWAYS have tried to get into westerns and the most I've gotten are the more popular ones and maybe El Topo if you consider that to be one...

The Big Gundown (1966) and The Mercenary (1968) deserve immense praise, both are great revisionist westerns and feature some of Ennio Morricone's best scores

Gui la testa is such a hidden underappreciated gem, probably the most underrated film of Leone.

This is very well done. Well put for brand new film lovers and for those that know westerns well you checked all the boxes. I enjoy your lay out and your critiques that are personal to you as well as you holding the balance of seeming like a neutral film teacher. I wish you luck in your future videos! I'll be watching.

Lee Van Cleef dressed exactly like one of his childhood heroes in two movies “Spaghetti Westerns’ Wyatt Earp. Lee’s costume is a perfect copy of the famous outfit worn by Wyatt Earp in 1881 in Tombstone Arizona. Lee provided his own clothes as did Clint Eastwood. Lee even used a 12 inch barrel Colt like the one used by Marshall Earp. The Hat, Coat, Shirt, Vest, Tie with Tie pin, Boots, Guns every detail is a Tribute to the most famous Lawman-Marshall in American history. John Wayne often said he made all his characters after Wyatt Earp saying every time he walked onto a movie set he pretended to be Wyatt Earp in the way he walked and talked. Clint Eastwood was also influenced by Wyatt and said he fashioned Inspector Harry Callahan “Dirty Harry” after the most famous Lawman Marshall in history… Wyatt Earp.

Great job! Even as a big spaghetti western fan I've learned something new with this video. I've seen so many spaghetti westerns that I'm not always sure if I saw a particular movie or not, but I think some on this list I have missed so far.

I actually missed the classic days of Spaghetti westerns.

wow delicious spaghetti

Excellent video on spaghetti westerns sir! My favorite genre of all time, some other ones that weren’t mentioned in this video that I highly recommend are:
“A stranger in town” & “The stranger returns”, “The forgotten pistolero”, “His name was king” “Shoot the living and pray for the dead” “A minute to pray and a second to die”, “Bandidos” “And God said to Cain” and the excellent “Blindman” (even though there was footage shown for this one in the video).

For a few dollars more is the best in the trilogy imo.
Greatest story between Van Cleef and the bad guy!^^

I would love a video that is a guide to classic American Westerns.

Believe me, the pronunciations made by a non-Italian are very funny, ha ha ha.
However "Giù La Testa" (or as you others call it) is one of my favorite films of all time, and together with Carpenter's They Live one of the most important films for my growth and the maturation of my ideas on a political and social level..
However, it is certainly an interesting video.

This is probably my the best approach for the new fan. Roughly follows my own path into the genre. I’d like to shout out my favourite western though - not Spaghetti but still revisionist, Eastwood’s ‘High Plains Drifter’. It’s the brutal tale of what happens when you invite the devil in to help you defeat another evil.

The Italian westerns (not spaghetti westerns which was a derogatory term then overwhelmed by the prestige received in the following decades) as rightly said began with the first film by Leone. Leone has directed a few films but had a solid background as a second unit director (an example for all is the famous chariot race scene in Ben Hur).
Beyond what is explained in the video there is to further underline the extraordinary symbiosis between the film and Morricone's music, with Leone himself who came to affirm that Morricone's music was for him a sort of script itself. From the good, the bad and the ugly, the music was written first and filmed synchronizing the action to the music itself and even letting the actors listen to the music before filming or during the filming itself.
The novelty in the characters, the absolute beauty and novelty of the shots and the preponderant part that music plays in the economy of the film itself has created films that have become iconic and entered the history of world cinema. Keep in mind that I am an iron Fordian but I have no difficulty in placing Ford and Leone on the same step, obviously the highest.

I just watched the great silence and it is really good!

Great video. My only criticism is that I feel you should mention more of Gian Maria Volonte's involvement in the first two Dollars film

I feel like the show The Mandalorean has a hint of spaghetti western the way the show is portrayed. Even the music reminds me of it.

Thanks a lot for this video !

Good guide to Italian westerns! While I love the American westerns that came before it (I actually saw some of them before I saw the Italian ones, despite being born well after their heyday), I do like the grittiness of the Italian westerns, as well as their potent drama bubbling underneath it all. I especially love Once Upon a time in the West. The score alone is worth watching it imo.

I really enjoyed this video, learned alot! ty

Very interesting. Thanks !

I've seen all of them you said.. 😀 n you can't imagine the impact it created on my personality..! Western Spaghetti's are to be handled with care!

FANTASTIC VIDEO!!!!!!!!❤️

My all time favorite western has to be Leone’s “Duck You Sucker!” So many fantastic quotes

Brilliant channel

The only issue with starting with Sergio Leone movies is knowing it ain't gonna get better than this. Don't get me wrong there are alot of entertaining spaghetti westerns out there but Leone is simply in a league of his own

excelente este canal!!

Bravo very well done sir.

Okay I finally watched The Great Silence. It was dubbed in Italian and I had to use subtitles so I don’t know how great the translation was. But when you said a bleak ending you weren’t lying.
And I I guess both the best and worst part about it is that there is no logical way to dispute the ending. The only dispute you can say is that it doesn’t make an audience feel good with that ending. Yet the bleak ending almost grounds it to the bleakness that is reality.
I am trying to remember the most recent film that has a bleak ending like that and it might be Avengers Infinity War of all things. But the similarity is that the heroes lose badly.
Yet with all the bleakness I can’t deny how much I love the movie. Some people put it as their greatest western ever and I can’t do that but it is definitely one of the most original.
I find Corbucci out of all the spaghetti western directors is the most forward thinking. While many spaghetti westerns would have benefited from bigger budget and more modern technology. I feel Corbucci is the one who would have benefited the most.
And with that I feel The Great Silence would actually work better today than it would have in 1968. In my head I could just see Zoe Saldana playing Pauline if it was made today.
Anyway I went way longer than expected. Maybe I should start doing movie reviews lol. But you were the first place I heard about The Great Silence and can’t thank you enough for that.

Well Done, Amigo! ✌

your channel is severely underrated. keep going dude because you really are making great things

The Red Dead video game series is basically a love letter to the spaghetti western genre. Read Dead Revolver goes whole hog, while Redemption 1 & 2 are more subtle, with many tips of the hat.
This is only good in my book.

In my personal opinion Once Upon A Time in The West has the greatest score ever not just in a western. Now I might be too biased as I think Once Upon A Time in The West is probably my favorite movie and think it has become one of the most underrated movies ever and Leone’s best film in my opinion. I find it interesting how the Zapata western came and went. I feel like that would be a really interesting think for someone to do now maybe?

thanks for this video

Very good video, two thumbs up!

Very interesting video.
May I ask you what is your opinion on the Winnetou mo is based on the Karl May books?

Great video btw

Best spaghetti western I’ve seen is California 1977 great film

The Dollar movies are the best Western ever! And i like The great silence a lot, the best Corbucci western!

I recently watched Django 1966 and the great silence just to get a feel for what Corbucci was about and i have to say. If Once upon a time (My personal favorite western) is a 10/10 then the great silence was a 9/10 and Django was a 7,5/10.
I was pleasantly suprised by Silence and it quickly got on my top 10 list.
I was really dissapointed with Django. I loved some things about it, but found some other things really wierd and some parts i actually disliked.
Lets start of with the possitives. I really enjoyed the music and the finale. And i think the opening to the movie is very good for setting the tone. I also really liked the final shot of the movie. It was actually a beautiful shot.
The negatives: I really found the romance between Django and Maria to be unnessecary. I feel like if it would have just been a revenge movie it would have been much better. I think romance worked way better in The great Silence. I also noticed that the editing in Django was really wierd. I could tell that it was a prettu cheap movie. And the side characters were really forgetable.

You deserve sub

I agree.

Lot of Italian directors named Sergio, huh?

I like Sartana

I remember liking The Hills Run Red ...

A video on Poliziotteschi films could be interesting. I know you addressed them in your big Italian video and I'm not familiar enough with Poliziotteschi to know if there's enough material to make a separate video, but maybe you could consider it

I would love to see you review the modern western “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” by Andrew Dominic. It’s my favorite movie but sadly not a lot of people know about it. It would be cool to hear your thoughts about it lol

Okay you don’t have to reply if you don’t want to but would be interested to hear your thoughts. Westerns are my favorite movie genre so I have obviously watched a lot of them.
To my point Tombstone is an oddity for me. It clearly took the stylistic notes from both spaghetti and American westerns with the editing and the close ups.
Yet I feel it is weird in that it then tonally is more in line with an American western from the 50s and 60s. Where the good guys are good guys while the bad guys are bad guys. There really isn’t a lot of gray area.
Which I find interesting from a post spaghetti western perspective and even a post Unforgiven western.
I mean the real events are baked in this morally gray area which I feel like a more modern filmmaker would eat up.
If I were more inclined I would maybe do a video essay of some sort but that likely won’t happen but you never know.
Curious on your thoughts though given you clearly know westerns. Any way love this video and just have to comeback and watch it every time I see it.

Has anyone noticed that Clint doesn't find his puncho until the end of the last movie,
The Good The Bad And The Ugly

ill be calling american westers burger westers from now on

Does anyone know a solid list for an introductory to Westerns. As a Texan, I want to try to give the genre a fair shot and looked it up. These Spaghetti Westerns, complicated things.

It's the best kind of western because it took the grandiloquence and academicism of the american genre and drive them to the hell of its own mythology, recreating in a more faithful way what the Wild West could be: a barbarian desert of blood, flies, sand, sweat, alcohol and rotting corpses.
But Sergio Leone did not create anything, the spaghetti was growing and mutating in Europe since the late 1950s (you have Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent, Sergio Bergonzelli or Marino Girolami before him).
After so many movies and so many years, a Top 10 would be very difficult for me.

I didn’t even watch a fistful of dollars, instead I went right to for a few dollars more but I still knew what was happening which is a great trait for a movie series

12:59 Who is that? Is it Terence Hill or Franco Nero? Thanks.

For the Algo.

Italian westerns were the immediate successor of the Italian "sword and sandal" movies. The gladiator/Hercules/Maciste genre died so abruptly that scripts were repurposed into westerns.
Avoid 'A Fistful of Dynamite". It's the shortened-- by about forty minutes-- version of "Duck You Sucker".

Spaghetti's awesome though. It's not derogatory

Stuka
Whirlwind

waw

I think they didn't give Clint Eastwood's character a name because it would never be cooler than Clint Eastwood.

It’s definitely the same character across the dollars trilogy. In fistful he gets his hand crushed by the Rojo brothers and has to modify the way he shoots his gun. you see that in For a few dollars more and The good the bad and the ugly that he still shoots the way adapted to. Also his nickname “Manco” in the second film means “one armed.”

When people are shot in Spaghetti Westerns, the fall like spaghetti's.

The only complaint I have about these films is the yellow tint on them.

Italians teached to Americans how to make western movies. 🤔

Just how westerns should be shown. Instead of perfectly pressed clothing and brand new shiny boots lol😅🇬🇧

QuentinTarantino is an absolute genius

you shouldn't start with the dollars trilogy, you should start with something that's pretty good but isn't the best so that when you get to the dollars trilogy and 1966 Django you can appreciate them. Start with Vera Cruz, the Searchers, or High Noon, and then get into the really good stuff.

ist view

You forgot High Plains Drifter and Unforgiven?!

Italian and most of them SPANIARDS. Spanish directors. Because they were filmed in ALMERIA. Southern Spain

John Wayne looks like a clown compared to Clint Eastwood

The term spaghetti western is kinda insulting isn’t it

The amount of stereotypes for Mexicans and Natives in spaghetti westerns were overreacted AF

Back when left wingers were anti-authoritarian...

Call excellent westerns "spaghetti westerns"?
Then American westerns are "cartoon westerns"

Why do spaghetti westerns have such unrealistic gunshot sounds? Pshoo..pshoo...

Great video. But I'm not sure if I'm right but should "El Topo" be talked about in this video?