You want menace? You want brooding tension? You want visceral authenticity pulling you to the edge of your seat? Then look no further than the Spaghetti Western.
The Spaghetti Western was the product of a decade of production between 1965-1975. Sergio Leone was the foremost directorial talent, but director Sergio Corbucci and Clint Eastwood (who became a household name through the 'Dollars' trilogy) also played key roles.
Turning the genre on its head, Spaghetti Westerns brought new levels of authenticity and dogged realism to a well-worn genre. By using deep zooms, sparse guttural dialogue, and brooding menace - broken only by short spells of intense violence - Leone and Corbucci shocked audiences out of the moral conservatism of the post-war years and led the charge for a new wave of morally ambiguous, politically radical film makers.
By choosing to shoot their films in Spain and Italy (hence the name 'Spaghetti Western') they directly challenged the exclusive power of Hollywood. To Leone and Corbucci 'The West' was more a frontier state of mind than a place, and their films represented a deliberate criticism of Hollywood's reconstruction of the West and its meaning.
Although widely attacked at the time of release for gratuitious violence and sexual sado-machochism, the films have proved enormously influential. It is now commonplace for directors such as Tarantino to celebrate the anti-hero, and both mainstream ("Unforgiven") and revisionist westerns ("The Quick and The Dead") frequently use stylistic elements developed in the Spaghetti Western.
