The Spaghetti Western is one of the genres that has cleared Italian cinema in the world, becoming a source of inspiration for a large group of directors and authors such as Quentin Tarantino or Taylor Sheridan. With the arrival of Django, the TV series inspired by the cult film by Sergio Corbucci, on NOW starting February 17, we briefly retrace the history of the genre that exploded with the incredible success of For a Fistful of Dollars signed by Sergio Leone.
Spaghetti Western: from Sergio Leone to Django
The origins and development of the Spaghetti Western The characteristics of the Spaghetti Western Films to learn about the Spaghetti Western
The origins and development of Spaghetti Western
Throughout the 1950s, Italian cinema had concentrated on the peplum genre, a trend which however had exhausted its appeal to the public. The first to feel the inadequacy of the genre was Sergio Leone who, after working on The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), concentrated on the screenplay of a film that would rejuvenate the stylistic features of the peplum. The project Leone was working on was a film called The Eagles of Rome inspired by Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Precisely this intuition will lead the director to accept, at the beginning of 1963, the proposal of the cameraman Stelvio Massi and the director of photography Enzo Barboni (who will also become director) to try his hand at the western by adapting La Sfida del Samurai (1961) Kurosawa which will become, thanks to word of mouth from Leone himself, the plot of all subsequent productions. In fact, in 1964 Per un Fistful of Dollars was released in theaters, which is unanimously considered the film that kickstarted the new vein of the Italian western or spaghetti western, even if there had already been some previous experiments both in Italy and in countries such as Spain and Germany but without a particular response from the public or critics.
