Spaghetti Western, also known as Italo-western, is a nickname for a broad sub-genre of Western film that emerged in the mid-1960s, so named because most were produced and directed by Italians, usually in co-production with a Spanish partner and in some cases a German partner. The partners would insist some of their stars be cast in the film.
The typical team was made up of an Italian director, Italo-Spanish technical staff, and a cast of Italian and Spanish actors, sometimes a fading Hollywood star and sometimes a rising one like the young Clint Eastwood in three of Sergio Leone's films. The films were typically shot in inexpensive locales resembling the American Southwest, primarily the Andalusia region of Spain, Almería, Sardinia, and Abruzzo.
Because of the desert setting and the readily available low-cost southern Spanish or southern Italian extras, typical themes in spaghetti westerns include the Mexican Revolution, Mexican bandits, and the border region shared by Mexico and the United States.
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Originally, spaghetti westerns were characterized by their production in the Italian language, low budgets, and a recognizable highly fluid and minimalist cinematography which eschewed (even "demythologized"[1]) many of the conventions of earlier Westerns. This was partly intentional and partly the context of a different cultural background.
A favorite locale in Andalusia was the Tabernas Desert of Almería, with production at three main studios, Texas Hollywood, Mini Hollywood, and Western Leone.
The movie that qualifies as the first spaghetti western, Tierra brutal (1961), showed no Italian involvement at all, being a British-Spanish coproduction, but was shot in Almería and featured the very heterogeneous cast typical of later movies in the genre (in this instance combining American actors Richard Basehart and Alex Nicol with the Spanish folclóricas Paquita Rico and María Granada), and directed by English horror films specialist, Michael Carreras.
The best-known and perhaps archetypal films were the "Man with No Name" trilogy (or "Dollars Trilogy") directed by Sergio Leone, starring Clint Eastwood and with the musical scores of Ennio Morricone: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Atypically for the genre, the last had a relatively high budget, over a million United States dollars. Leone's next film after the "trilogy" was Once Upon a Time in the West, which is often lumped in with the previous three for its similar style and accompanying score by Morricone, though Eastwood was not involved.
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