WHAT WENT WRONG - Spaghetti Westerns! A Primer

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

Who do you think of when you think of Spaghetti Westerns? Because Sergio Leone thinks of... Akira Kurosawa? In this week's primer, Chris & Lizzie dive into the Eurocentric Western revival of the 60's and 70's, how it saved Clint Eastwood's career, drew the scorn of American critics, and gave birth to some of the most stylish movies ever made.This episode is brought to you by Brami. Shop Brami at enjoybrami.com or your nearest retailer, and find their newest shape Cubetti exclusively at Whole Foods.Plus, we're giving away exclusive What Went Wrong x Brami kits! Enter at whatwentbrami.com for your chance to win. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, dear listeners. Before we dive in to today's episode, we have some exciting news. As you know, if you read the episode title, this is a bonus primer, primer, primer, primer, on Sergio Leone, king of the spaghetti Western, and we're able to bring you this antipasto today, thanks to well, spaghetti. Today's episode is brought to you by Brami. Pasta made in Italy from just two old world ingredients, Italian wheat and lupini super beans, no fillers, no shortcuts, just real pasta that tastes like real pasta,

with more protein and fiber built right in. Pasta perfecta. We were fans of Brami long before they sponsored this podcast, so when they came to us and said, hey, we make great pasta, and we think you could make a great episode about spaghetti westerns, we said, absolutely si! And then we asked for forgiveness from all of our Italian fans. Now, you might think, yes, we get it.

They make spaghetti. Leone made spaghetti Westerns, but the connection actually goes deeper than that. Leone wasn't born in America, but he was obsessed with American Westerns. He loved what he saw, but he also knew he could make them a little more stylish, a little more Italian. Brami's founder wasn't born in Italy,

but he is obsessed with the way Italy eats, fewer ingredients, better quality. So Brami made a new kind of pasta full of protein and fiber that is still so delicious it's worth slowing down for. More from Brami later in the episode, including something new they're launching this summer. But first, let's talk about the man,

most synonymous with the reinvention of the Western Italian style. Lizzie, welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong? Are you familiar with spaghetti westerns? Chris, I had never seen a spaghetti western before in my damn life before we decided to do these episodes, which is an embarrassment. I should have seen them. I think I had in my head that I didn't like westerns. And then we watched The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which, spoiler alert, we will be covering on Monday. And I will withhold my thoughts until then. But in case you can't tell, I loved it. And then I thought about it. I was like, wait a minute. I loved 310 to Yuma. I love true grit. I loved this. I've loved many

Westerns. I think I just don't like John Wayne is what I've heard. And so I'd avoided some of the genre because of that. And these movies are very much a response to, in a sense, John Wayne. And there's another movement, the revisionist Western that happens in the United States, kind of concurrent to this. You also have acid Westerns, something like Yodorowski's El Topo, for example. So there's a lot of variation within the genre, to be fair. But yes, it was a dusty, stayed genre before one Sergio Leone. And as we'll learn, many, many, many more people, not just him, not just him as a director, and also just not just him on his movies. These are deeply collaborative projects. Came to redefine these movies in some really fun and specific ways. And I think these movies have

continue to influence a lot of filmmakers. Obviously, you have someone like Quentin Tarantino who's very vocal in the way in which he expresses his admiration for these movies in Leone as a filmmaker and also the ways in which it's influenced him. But as we'll discuss, I think a lot, there are many, many more directors who I think this is deeply influenced. And I have a couple examples that come to mind. Definitely.

And some music that I think these movies and Eño Morricone is very much influenced as well. First of all, I was so surprised by how funny this genre is. while also being very exciting, very, you know, at times scary and violent. Absolutely see the Quentin Tarantino influence just immediately as soon as the titles start to roll. But it's so stylish. It seems like such an incongruous mix to have, you know, Italian style taking on this most staid American genre. And yet it works so well. And it just makes the whole thing so much more fun.

So let's get into it. So in preparation, as you mentioned, Lizzie, for the good, the bad and the ugly, which we were covering on Monday, the third film in the Dollars trilogy, we need to figure out what is the spaghetti Western. How did this phenomena start? What did it represent? How long did it last? When did it peak? We're going to get into all of it today. So briefly, what is a spaghetti Western?

As you mentioned, Lizzie. It's very funny, often, very violent, very violent for the time, highly stylized, morally ambiguous, and affordable, very low budget. These movies were very affordable compared to their American counterparts. Is that why no one's mouth matches what they're saying over the entire movie, including the Americans? They did not shoot with sync sound. And so that was done partially for budgetary reasons and also partially because they knew this is a very international cast. And they were just going to dub everybody in every possible language after the fact. And we'll get into some issues that creates.

I have one other thing I want to call out about at the very least, the good, the bad, and the ugly, which is that I just love that every time it cuts away to a crowd, It's full of, like, the most handsome Italian men you've ever seen. And it's just like, sir, those men were not in the American West. They're playing the American soldiers. They're playing the Mexican outlaws. They're playing everybody. And they all took on funny.

There's, like, full-on models, that guy who's dying that Clint Eastwood puts his coat over. Anyway, they're very beautiful. The captain, yeah, at the end, yes. What I think the name Spaghetti Western belies is the simple fact that they comprise, in my opinion, one of the most important and influential subgenres in the history of film. And I would argue feature some of the greatest movies ever made. And we're going to talk about one of those on Monday, but there are a few others. And many, although not all of these movies, were directed by Italians.

Hence, the spaghetti of it all. Now, we were not able to confirm the origin of the name Spaghetti Western, but one widely reported claim is that it was coined by a Spanish journalist, Alfonso Sanchez Martinez. So, again, not just Italians involved in this process. And as we'll get into, many of these Spaghetti Westerns were filmed in Spain, not Italy, including the good, the bad, and the ugly. Now, many were Italian-Spanish co-productions, some were even directed by Spaniards, and the cast and crews came from all over the world. As you've mentioned, Lizzie. Now, we'd call an international horror movie a horror movie.

So why not just call these westerns? You can't, because it is an American genre about the... American West that you are then infusing with a whole entirely other style and culture. So, yeah, as you just pointed out so perfectly, Westerns are viewed as intrinsically American. And there are a lot of people at the time who did feel that spaghetti Westerns were trampling on the great myth of the American frontier. Which is what? Which is nothing good. That these gunslingers were morally right.

Oh, you know, they only killed when necessary. We'll get into some of the hallmarks of the genre. and I think what this exposed. Okay. These foreign westerns, though, created new tropes in American movies. They created, as we'll learn, new American movie stars that did not exist beforehand. And they inspired many generations of American directors. Over in Italy and Spain, they made a lot of money, and they created a lot of jobs,

including in a region that you discussed recently on one of your episodes, Almeria, Lizzie. And Lawrence of Arabia. Yeah, that's right. Now, they are synonymous with the name, of one man. Lizzie, who is the first person that comes to mind when somebody says Spaghetti Western? Sergio Leone. Sergio Leone, who if you've ever seen a photo of him, it's great. He's just, he's the most interesting looking guy. He's got these Coke bottle glasses. He was not the only man behind the Spaghetti

Western, and I don't think technically he was the first, but he's our star. And we're going to get to him after we take a short detour to Japan. So Lizzie, this episode was set up. by Seven Samurai, which we covered earlier in the year. And as we discussed, director Akira Kurosawa was enjoying international recognition in the early 1960s. And one of his major influences was American director John Ford, who, as you know, had been making Westerns since the silent era. As Kurosawa put it, since humans are weak, they want to see good people and great heroes. Westerns have been done over and over again.

And in the process, a kind of grammar has evolved. I have learned this grammar of the Western. and his films were starting to influence the West. We talked about Roshamon and then key to our story, Seven Samurai had made it to the Oscars. Seven Samurai was then remade by John Sturgis under Kurosawa's original title. The Magnificent Seven. The Magnificent Seven. Now, you would assume that Kurosawa, a devotee of the Western, must have been thrilled.

Lizzie, he was not thrilled with The Magnificent Seven. In 1966, he told a journalist that the movie was, quote, a disappointment, although entertaining. It is not a version of the Seven Samurai. I do not know why they call it that. And the New York Times agreed. They called it a pallid, pretentious, overlong reflection of the Japanese original. Well, now, hold on, your partner, there's seven of them. American audiences were also lukewarm.

The Magnificent Seven is seen more or less as a classic today, but it reportedly eeked out just $2.25 million domestically against basically a budget of the same amount. Compare that to John Wayne, for example, the Alamo, I believe of roughly the same year, which pulled in nearly $8 million, although on a budget of $12 million, to be first. So that one lost money. I want to clarify with my John Wayne hatred, he's very good and true grit. That's the only thing I really do like him in, and he is great in that. And I understand the movie star quality. It's just that he sucks. Continue.

He does. According to one estimate, roughly a third of the films made in the United States through the 1950s had been westerns. But Lizzie, the times they were a change in. In the 40s and 50s, Hollywood pumped out 100 westerns a year, more or less. In the 60s, that number was closer to 20. Now, Lizzie, where had the Western gone? Where could you still see images of the frontier and cowpokes and cowboys and cows?

Lots of cows? Kansas? I don't know. Texas. Television! Oh, television. Rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling. Keep them dogs'ies rolling. It was an infestation, according to TV critics.

In a 1960 issue of Television Age magazine, a letter from the publisher read, no television critic worthy of the name can let a week go by without saying at least once that the thing wrong with television today is too many westerns. Bonanza, Rahide, Gunsmoke, Maverick, the TV programs with the biggest total and average audiences in 1960 were Westerns. Over the previous four years, the number of Westerns on network TV had gone from three to 27.

I mean, it's the Taylor Sheridan effect in 1960. Paramount. We're doing it again. We're just going to do Dutton Ranch. Then it's Dutton Ranch's ADU. Then it's Dutton Ranch down by the creek. I watched Dutton Ranch. I watched The Madison, which is basically that.

I kind of liked it. It's all that. By 1959, the ratings bonanza had started to trend down. Some critics said that the novelty of adult cowboys and Indians' stories was finally starting to wear off, maybe in the United States, but not in Europe. Across the pond, Magnificent Seven was a hit, and European directors were making their own westerns. Now, this was hardly new.

There were European westerns as far back as. is the silent era. In fact, there are some historians who argue that the first Western was not the Great Train Robbery, which was made in 1903 in the United States, but an 1899 British production called Kidnapping by Indians, which was filmed in England. So probably didn't happen there. There were also Italian Western operas in the early 1900s and one early Italian Western called La Vampira Indiana, the Vampire of Indiana, was directed by Roberto Roberti, is a pseudonym of Vincenzo Leone. Oh.

And also featured Biche Walleran, or Valerian, I also read, the stage name of, and I apologize for the pronunciation, Edvigier Maria Valcareni. I think that's right. The parents of Lizzie. Sergio Leone. Yes. Back to this Nepo baby in a moment. So by the 1950s, there were a lot of Italian parodies of American westerns.

like the Terror of Oklahoma. So you mentioned the comedic effects in these movies. A lot of these, they were also leaning all the way into parody as well. So there was a real streak of humor through a lot of these films. And it wasn't just Italy. There was a series of German Yugoslav co-productions about a fictional native character named Winnitus, based on novels by famed German author Carl May. These are very culturally insensitive by today's standards.

Just a fair warning. There was also a series of Spanish-French westerns based on the legend of Zorro, the shadow of Zoro, Zoro and the court of Spain, the three swords of Zoro, and then also duel at the Rio Grande, Zorro was apparently there. One key to these productions, you could pass off locations across Europe as the American West, or as the Middle East, as we learned in Lawrence of Arabia.

Now, as you mentioned, Lizzie, many of these spots in Italy and recently Spain were best known for doubling as North Africa, the Middle East, in the Sword and Sandal or PEPLum films of the time. We covered Ben Hur, which was shot at Chinichita Studios in Rome, but also Quo Vadis, which we also talked about. And it just so happens that both of those productions were productions that a young Sergio Leone worked on in his early 20s. And it's on the set of a similar epic where we're going to pick back up with the star of our story. He's just been fired for the most Italian, or maybe Spanish, reason ever taking a long lunch.

Oh. The movie was Sodom and Gamora, directed by Robert Aldrich, and Leone was working as a second unit director. They were filming in Morocco. Robert Aldrich claims that one day he dropped in on Leone unannounced and was, quote, greeted with the sight of five to six thousand people, all of whom were taking a three-hour lunch break. I waited for three hours at the top of a sand dune.

Nothing happened. Then another three hours, still nothing. I called him over and said, get your air ticket and go back home, you're through. to which I said, Aldrich, you just waited for six hours without saying anything? What are we doing? Leone disputes this claim. He says he quit after the budget ballooned and he decided he could no longer, quote, continue to associate himself with such a disaster.

As we will learn, he is not a super reliable mailman. Keep that in mind. The truth is, the job had been a bit of a step backwards. So between 1949 and 59, Leone had worked as an assistant director or a second unit director on dozens of movies. He was a second unit director on Helen of Traylor. directed by Robert Wise, which also featured battle and action sequences directed by Raul Walsh. Hi Sierra and the Cagney movie, White Heat, you might remember.

Those were kind of his two big films. Now, Leonie saw Walsh as a master of the Western. He directed a number of Western films. But every time he tried to bring up the Western with Walsh, Walsh would say the Western is finished. And Leone was distraught. He was so depressed that they had to watch Masters, like Walsh and William Wiler, quote, sacrificed themselves to the taste of the moment by making Peplum films. He was obsessed with America. He's like, why aren't you guys making movies about America?

He said that he'd read everything he could about, quote, The Conquest of the West, and yet he was obliged to spend his time making films set in tattie versions of antiquity. While I organized chariot races, sea battles, and explosions on galleys, I was silently dreaming of Nevada and New Mexico. Fair, both beautiful. But there was no escaping the Peplum films. He stepped in to direct the last days of Pompeii when the original director got sick. And then he made his directorial debut in 1961 on the Colossus of Rhodes, another Peplum film. He's approaching his mid-30s. He's 13 years into a career that seems to be going kind of nowhere. He just got fired by a director he admired. And he was supposed to have a leg up. As I mentioned, Lizzie, he was a Nepo baby. His mom was an

actress. His dad made movies. His dad made a Western. So he's got no projects on the horizons, and he starts to flesh out a new story idea. He wants to do sort of the Magnificent Seven set in Rome. Until one night in 1963, he goes to a theater with his wife, Carla, and sees a movie that would change his life and the history of cinema. Akira Kurosawa's

Yojimbo. Oh, yes. Lizzie, have you ever seen Yozimbo? Yes, I have. The IMD logline reads, a crafty Ronan, as you know, played by Toshito Mifune, comes to a town divided by two criminal gangs and decides to play them against each other to free

the town. Now, Yombo, which I just rewatched for this episode, has a lot of elements of Western storytelling and Westerns themselves, including a standoff at high noon, basically, you know, at the end of a long street in the middle of this town. But unlike the typical Western, the lead is somewhat complex. He's a bit of an anti-hero. He doesn't have a name. Yozimbo means bodyguard. The samurai called himself Kuabatake Sanjuro, which means 30-year-old man, Mulberry Field. He just randomly chooses that name when he's looking at the window at one point in the movie. And New Yorker critic, Pauline Kale, was particularly enthusiastic about Jojimbo.

Which is unusual for Polly and Kale. Yeah, she felt that U.S. Westerns had gone stale. They were full of cliches that had been awarded the status of myths. She said that the new Westerns being released were either infatuated tributes to these myths or mature versions that clobbered the audience with the message that the myths we never believed in any way were false. She called out John Ford. She called out High Noon, which I like.

High Noon's good. She called out Henry Fonda. She also called out the Gunfighter, which I also liked. And she said, though, by her estimation, Jojimbo slashes the screen with action and liberates us from the pretensions of our serious westerns, which I think is true. Jojimbo also has a good sense of humor to it. Now, Sergio Leone was well aware of the myths of the American Westerns.

He had grown up imitating big Hollywood actors like Errol Flynn and Gary Cooper. And then at the end of World War II, real-life Americans arrived, and he was a bit disillusioned too. According to Leone, they were no longer the Americans of the West. They were soldiers like any other, with the sole difference that they were victorious soldiers. Men who are materialistic, possessive, keen on pleasure, and earthly goods, I could see nothing or almost nothing of the great prairies or of the demigods of my childhood. And I just get the sense that these soldiers were coming in and they were just hounding the Italian women and eating all their food.

And Leonie was thinking, we're all the, we're Shane, we're all the good guys from my childhood. You know, what's going on? They're in Kansas. Now, like Pauline Kale, Leonie fell in love. With Yosimbo. By the time he and his wife, Carla, returned home from the movie theater. He knew the movie he wanted to make next. It wasn't The Magnificent 7. It was Yosimbo. Well, kind of. And this is where the story gets a little complicated. Leone claims he wanted to remake the book slash movie that was the inspiration for Yosimbo,

which is a Dashal Hammett novel called The Glass Key, which had been made twice into movies in 35 and 42. And there are also similarities to another Dashel Hammett novel, Red Harvest. Some people claim that's incidental. I mean, all of these are a cheeky inversion of the, you know, no man can serve two masters sort of, you know, vibe from the Bible. Right. But Leonie decides, okay, I'm going to make an Italian Western adaptation of a Japanese samurai adaptation of an American film noir novel. And this is how we get spaghetti westerns.

It's great. Such a pasty. So there are a few versions of what happened next. We're going to focus on Leonie's retelling. Take it with a grain of salt. He says that he and his friend, writer and director, Dushio Tesari, wrote a treatment for this movie in five days. And then Leonie says he wrote the script in a script

in about two weeks. It's worth noting, there are six other writers credited on this movie, and some of them claim to have been much more involved, not just in the story and script, but even the initial idea to make an Italian Western version of Jojimbo. So we don't know necessarily if this was accepted.

Just let him do what he wants to do. Some people online, if you go on Reddit, will say that Leone did a shot-for-shot remake of Jojimbo with this debut film. I watched these movies back to back. I don't think that's an accurate description, but he did lift a lot from Kurosawa's movie, including the entire basic structure,

some key moments, definitely some key shots, but he made some important changes. So the location, so even though the time periods are actually roughly analogous, he changes it to the American West, he swaps in guns for swords, he beefs up certain roles, composites other. I think the villains, for example, in Leonie's film, which if you guys haven't put it,

together is a fistful of dollars, but we'll get there in a moment, are more focused. He adds references to Italian theater, the Old Testament, American Westerns. He reworks the entire Third Act showdown. That being said, one of Leonie's friends, Django director, Sergio Corbucci, who's one of the biggest directors of the Spaghetti Western era, remembers Leonie, quote, slaving away at a movieola machine and copying your Gimbo, changing only the settings and details of the dialogue, basically transcribing the movie. Can I ask a dumb question?

Please. As he's writing these obviously very American films, I'm assuming he does not speak English and he is writing them in Italian. He's writing them in Italian. Okay. Yep. These are all written in Italian. And we'll get to translations, et cetera, especially on Monday. Okay. I will leave it to our audience, watch these movies back to back to determine how much Leone ripped off Yosimbo. I would say I agree quite a bit, although I don't think it's shot for shot.

But what we do know is that the title Leone chose for his movie was cribbed from Kurosawa. Not the Magnificent Seven, but the magnificent stranger. So, Lizzie, if you've ever seen a fistful of dollars, you will know that the hero is the man with no name, or was later rebranded the man with no name. But originally, he did have a name. Joe. And Joe was going to be played by an actor named Richard Harrison, who you probably don't know. It was so close to Richard Harrison. It was not well known in the U.S.

It's not. He was not well known in the U.S., but he looked the part. He's handsome, blonde. He was very thick. He was very strong. He'd acted. He was a beefcake. He was a 50s beefcake.

Absolutely, through and through. And he'd been in a bunch of Italian sword and sandals movies, Medusa against the son of Hercules, the Saracens, Gladiator 7, the Invincible Gladiator. Gladiator 7. There was no Gladiators 1 through 6. It was just Gladiator 7, just to be clear. Now, these are B movies, kind of C movies at best. But Harrison was the producer's choice because he fit the budget.

And let's talk about the budget. Italian cinematographer, Tonino Deli coli, had considered investing in the magnificent stranger, but he got cold feet. Important to note, he would eventually be the cinematographer for the good, the bad, and the ugly. So, Leone pitches the project to the Jolly Film Company, acting out every role for producer Franco Palagi, and he wins him over. So then the founders of that company, Georgio Pappi and Arrigo Colombo, decide to produce the Magnificent Stranger.

But Jolly Film had already made at least one in Italian Western before called Gun Fight in the Red Sands, which starred Richard Harrison. And these productions like to reuse their cast and crew as frequently as possible. Sure, it makes sense. Because then you can keep them on contract. By some accounts, this was the first Italian Western to play the genre straight since the parody films had kind of taken over in the 50s. And it also featured a score, Lizzie, by Eno Moricone.

and it was lensed by cinematographer Massimo da Lamano. But it's missing the grit, the style, the brutality that the Spaghetti Westerns will be known for. It's missing the Sergio Leone elements. So according to Tonino Valeri, an uncredited writer on The Magnificent Stranger, the producers didn't want Leone to direct. They had no faith in his abilities. Quote, he had a reputation for being manic on the set, not sure of himself, and full of costly ideas.

I think these things are all true. These movies needed to be made cheaply. Leone likes to do crazy things. But Palagi pushes for Leone and eventually the producers relent with some stipulations. They say first we're going to make a Western called Bullets Don't Argue. Then when we're done with that Western, which has more money than you, you're going to use all the same locations, all the same sets, most of the same crew, and as many of the actors as we can give you from that production, basically. Amazing. Why are they so stringent?

Okay, so the Italian film industry is experiencing a downturn. Annual ticket sales are dropping. movies like Sodom and Gnmora and Cleopatra flop. A big time. So American productions are like, we got to get the fuck out of Italy right now. We got to get Elizabeth Taylor out of here. She is costing us so much money.

Get her and her jets full of chili out of this country. According to historian Christopher Fraling, the trade papers were full of references to the crisis in the industry, a crisis of confidence where investors were concerned, of productivity, where distributors were concerned, and of creativity where popular filmmakers were concerned. There were too many cinemas

and not enough product to keep them going. They needed something new. But the Hollywood productions had left a lot behind. Spanish technicians trained to the highest Hollywood standards and studio space was suddenly available to these low-budget films. So this German production company that was behind the first two very culturally insensitive Winnetoo movies, Constantine film, which you probably recognize,

if you've watched Resident Evil recently, for example, they agree to help finance the magnificent stranger. Leonie's got six weeks to shoot it. He has a budget of roughly $200,000 and Richard Harrison. He's under contract at Jolly and he's going to cost roughly $20,000. But Leonie says, no.

He wants one of the heroes of his childhood. He wants Henry Fonda. Listen, we all love Italian food, but it turns out we should have been paying attention not just to what Italians eat, but also how they eat. Meals that last. longer, where nobody's rushed, just simple, healthy food that you can actually slow down and

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in the U.S. Bonus points, my daughter loves it too. Visit enjoybrami.com and find Brami at your nearest retailer and make sure you try all new Kubedi exclusively at your nearest whole foods. Brami, pasta perfecta. Now, Fonda had started in three John Ford Westerns in the 1940s that are very well regarded. The Oxbow incident, My Darling Clementine, which is an okay corral retailing, and Ford Apache. So, Leone sends an English translation of the script to Hollywood.

And I want to emphasize, I don't know how comprehensible this English translation was because of the comments that are about to follow. Yeah, there's no Google Translate that you can enter this into. Fonda's agent doesn't even show him the script. He just says there's absolutely no way my client is going to do this. He's out. So Leonie decides, okay, maybe I can get one of the actors from The Magnificent Seven, James Coburn and Charles Bronson. So he sends it to Charles Bronson.

And Bronson says, this script is terrible. I cannot. This script is terrible. He later said he didn't realize that the script doesn't matter. What matters is how Leonie's going to direct it. Right. But there's no way to know that, really, at that point. No.

Coburn apparently actually said yes, but the lowest price he would do it for was $25,000. And the producer said no way. We can get Richard Harrison for 20. It's not worth it. Leone may have then considered Cliff Robertson, who we've discussed before, Uncle Ben, in the Toby McGuire Spider-Man trilogy,

the Sam Ramey trilogy. He was actually at this point more of a television actor, more known as a television actor, but he was also considered too expensive. They also said, just use Rod Cameron. The Star of Bullets Don't Argue, which we just shot. He'll do the movies back to back, but he was too expensive. Also, he was in his mid-50s.

Yeah, you need someone a little more spry. They then thought about Rory Calhoun, who'd done 79 episodes as the lead of the Texan, a Western TV show, but he turned down the part. So nobody wants to do this movie. And then finally, someone sends a reel of the American TV Western, Raw Hyde, to the William Morris Agency in Rome. An agent there, Claudia Sartori, passes it along to Jolly Films and says there's a young, lanky actor that you guys might want to consider. I just love the idea of, like, the most stylish agent at the William Morris Agency in Rome being like, I have to watch this reel of Rahad.

It's also so boring as we'll get you. I know. I've seen Rawhide. I've seen it. Lizzie, which actor is she speaking of? Clint Eastwood. Clint, Flint, Eastwood. Very handsome. God, he is really handsome, though.

I forgot. When I started watching this, that was like, damn. And Sergio Leone said, no, thank you. And Sartori pushed back, and she said, you have to be realistic, Sergio, if you ever want to get your movie made. So they sit down and they put the reel on. Look at how he squints. The episode is called Incident of the Black Sheep.

It is the seventh episode of the fourth season. If you guys want to watch it, I believe it's available on Pluto TV online. That's where I watched it. Halfway through, Sergio walked out. And halfway through, I turned it off. Apparently, he said, this man with a vacant look on his face in an unwatchable film about cows,

to be fair, he has a vacant look on his face and it is an unwatchable episode of television about cows. Yeah, most of raw. It's so boring. It's just a soap opera without that much drama. I know, but great theme song. It does have a great theme song, which Mordecauio is, like, riffing off of, you know,

in these movies. And also, it's all tied together, folks. That'll come back on next week's episode. I'm excited. So Sartori told Leone, Eastwood was on his way up in America. Maybe by the time this film is over, he'll be worth a lot more. I don't think this was actually true. By the time they watched this reel, Ralehide's Nielsen ratings had peaked and were actually in decline. And Eastwood had basically no success to speak of in the feature film world. And how old was he? He was already in his 30s. Okay, that's what I thought, because he looks older by the time he's in these. Yeah, by the time he landed Rahide, he was almost 30, and he actually felt like the part was too young for him. And he's clean-shaven in Rahide, too.

So he doesn't have the right look. But it does seem like he's playing almost a teenager, in a sense, in Rahide, the way his character acts. So I understand why he didn't want to do this. It's also been said that they wanted Eric Fleming, his co-star, who's older than him, on Rahite for the part, but that Fleming turned down the role. And I should also mention that Richard Harrison has many. a time claimed that he actually turned down the role in a fistful of dollars in Magnificent Stranger and that he recommended Eastwood. I could not find anything to verify that beyond Richard Harrison's claim. And the main story I've seen has been the Claudia Sartori William Morris

version. But it's possible that all of these things are true. The point is, unlike his character in The Magnificent Stranger, Eastwood came cheap. So he was an easy yes for the producer. So like, Great, get this American in here. But not for Leone and not for Eastwood. On the one hand, he felt stifled by Rahide, creatively and professionally. He complained that his TV contract prevented him from accepting movie roles. And for years, he was basically shooting six days a week making this show. And he was really bored of the clean-cut image.

He claims to have also had the same idea as Leone when he'd seen Yojimbo thinking that this would make a great Western. But even so, when his agent first pissed the idea, Eastwood was planning to enjoy a month off of work. So the last thing he wanted to do was go to Rome to film a Western in Italy. But his agent said, look, I promised the agent in Rome that you'd at least read the script. So he sits down, he reads the script and he says, this is either going to work well or it's going to be awful. Turns out it was both. So the Magnificent Stranger was filmed in the spring and early summer of 1964 in Spain and Italy. We are going to give this movie its own episode, so I'm not going to go into the details. But it was a bumpy ride. A couple of highlights. There were cash flow issues. No surprise.

At one point, Eastwood walked off set and told everybody they could find him at the airport, which Leonie couldn't even understand because Eastwood didn't speak Italian and Leonie didn't speak English. It was an international production. There were four versions of the script, English, Italian, German, and Spanish. And this was one reason that the film was shot silent and dubbed later. Okay. Now, some who saw the Daily thought the shoot was going terribly and that Leonie didn't know what he was doing. Others actually thought Eastwood's performance was really good.

But what was clear to everyone was that Leonie was not making your typical hobo or even Italian Western. Lizzie, he directed by physically acting out everybody's parts. To be fair, if you don't speak the same language, you don't really have many other options there. How are you supposed to communicate what you want them to do? But that's why I think so much of this movie is based on pretty cool physicality and like physical humor and, you know, stylized camera movements.

Because Leonie's only able to communicate through physical movement. Right. And also, you know, obviously we've heard time and time. again, actors do not like line readings, and I totally understand. He was not given those. No, he can't. He can't. But, like, this completely makes sense. And also, when you think back to, you know, the traditions of Italian theater, you have

things like Comedia del Arte, which is, of course, entirely movement-based. So it makes a lot of sense that this is the way that you could communicate this. He also did not care about or perhaps was not aware of the Hayes Code. Or both. Yeah, that a character who was shot by a gun couldn't be shown in the same frame as the gun going off. Leone was like, put the gun in the shot. It's going to be great.

So that was one signature's part of his style. These elements would all collalesce with all the camera movements, but he wasn't working alone. There are a lot of important contributions from other people, including Clint Eastwood, who insisted on cutting his dialogue down as much as possible to make his character more mysterious. I think that's a really strong element to this script. Yes.

Keanu Reeves would famously do that with John Wick, years and years and years later. Yeah. Cinematographer Massimo Dalamano helped Leonie execute the extreme wide shots and close-ups he'd become known for. I mean, what I love about this movie, and to be fair, I also watched How the West was One, which comes into our Monday episode, and has some incredible wide angle cinematography and really moves its camera in a dynamic way. But a lot of Westerns, I think, had been kind of locked into these kind of John Ford, static wides, slash then, like, medium shots, cowboys, shots, you know, ankles and up of your actors. and there wasn't a lot of variability to it, and Leonie's really pushing it beyond that. And also, when you think about even just the way

that most films had been shot prior to that, like we talked about this a little bit with Rock Hudson versus James Dean on Giant, it was more common to have those sort of, you know, medium shots versus like all these kind of crazy close-ups cutting around everywhere, someone's eyeball, someone's gun. Like, that was not being done. Yeah.

There's an extremely striking red-and-black opening title sequence to this film that is repeated more or less in the good of the bad than the ugly, done by artist Sihino Lardani. And of course, Lizzie, Eno Morricone gave the project the iconic whistle that would become synonymous

with the man with no name and the spaghetti western genre in general. Now, Morricone was not Leonie's first choice. He actually wanted to hire Franco Lavanino, who he'd worked with on the Colossus of Rhodes. But Jolly said, And Morricone is already scoring Bullets Don't argue. We're just going to roll him over under your movie.

He's practically free. And Morricone had to remind Leone, we went to school together as kids. Leone had not remembered that until they were adults. But of course, it was an uncredited collaborator who had the biggest impact on the film, Akira Kurosawa. So, Leone claims he had always intended to credit Yozimbo. In fact, according to one of his biographies, three quarters of the way through the shoot, the Jolly film producers sent word to the production that they should, quote, refrain under any circumstances

from mentioning the word, Yosimbo. According to Eastwood, quote, the rights had not yet been cleared, meaning there was an intention to clear the rights. Now, we don't know what happened. It's possible that Jolly Film didn't want to pay the $10,000 needed to get the remake rights. That's what Leone thinks.

It's possible that they attempted to, but were unable to contact Toho. It's possible they just said, screw it. We don't think this is going to be a problem because this movie's only going to play in Italy at the end of the day. According to Tonino Valeri, who worked at Jolly, he had an invoice for a screening of Yosimbo that Leone had held for the producers

during which he reportedly said, I want to remake this movie for you. So to be clear, they were always remaking Yosimbo. Right. That's not in dispute here. Whatever the case, the rights were never cleared. And a Toho executive, Sanzumi Fujimoto, saw a cut of Leone's film. And then Sergio Leone received a letter from Akira Kurosawa.

Signor Leone, I have just had the chance to see your film. It is a very fine film. And that seems to be where Leone stopped reading. He couldn't believe it. Akira Kurosawa had watched his movie. He thought it was very fine. He showed it to everybody. And they said, Sergio, that's not the important part of the letter.

Because Kurosawa continued to say, it is a very fine film, but it is my film. Since Japan is a signatory of the Burn Convention on International Copyright, you must pay me. And so Jolly Film and Leone were sued for plagiarism. Oh, no. Jolly's lawyers decided to counterattack. They used a dictionary of literature to find a prominent Italian play, Alicino, which was written in the 19th century, so before Yosimbo, and they said,

uh, Kurosala actually ripped off an Italian author to make his movie. So this is like the My Big Fat Greek Wedding argument of every word has a Greek origin. That's right. It did not work, and it led to a negotiation. Kurosawa and his co-writer, Kikushima, were granted exclusive rights to distribute the film in Japan, Formosa, which is now Taiwan, and South Korea. Plus, they got 15% of the worldwide box office receipts. Whoa. I've read some people say that Kurosawa made more money on this movie than he had on his own movies.

Probably, just because of the profit margin. There were bigger problems, though, Lizzie. Italian cinema operators thought the Western was dead. According to Leone, one Roman businessman who owned a chain of at least 50 cinemas didn't even want to attend a private screening of The Magnificent Stranger. Critics were ignoring these movies. They had stolen titles. They were considered B movies, even in Italy.

So they mixed it up. They renamed the Magnificent Stranger a fistful of dollars, And in order to try to trick Italian audiences into thinking this was a foreign import from America, Sergio Leone's name for this movie was changed to Bob Robertson. Which would be Robert Robertson, right away. They basically say, if we can Americanize this, we can make Italian audiences think it's exotic, a real American Western that we're bringing here to Italy. Robert Robertson's famous American Western.

It's the same thing as an American being like, oh my God, this French Cologne that's actually just like Target rebranded, for example. In August of 1964, a fistful of dollars opened in Florence. It actually beat Bullets Don't argue to the box office. It was shot after and came out before by two months. And Lizzie, wow. It was a sleeper hit. According to some sources, it made over $4 million in Italy alone,

on a budget of $200,000. Whoa. But because of the lawsuit involving Kurosawa, the U.S. release would be delayed for two and a half years. So over in the United States, Clint Eastwood is wondering, what the hell happened to that movie I shot in Italy? When is this going to come out?

He opens up variety, and there's an article declaring the Western dead, except for this little movie in Italy, starring Clint Eastwood, called A Fistful of Dollars. And Clint says, I didn't act in a movie called a fistful of dollars.

Nobody told him anything. Nobody told him about the title change. Now, Leone made little more, apparently, on a fistful of dollars than a fistful of dollars due to the Curisawa lawsuit and perhaps some proto-sorial shenanigans, and we'll get into that more on Monday.

But when the U.S. trailer for the movie finally ran ahead of its January 1967 release, it ended with two lines. A fistful of dollars is the first motion picture of its kind. It won't be the last. And that was absolutely true. So, Leone rushed a sequel into production. He even sent an Italian dubbed reel because they didn't have the English dubbed real yet.

They wouldn't have an English dub real until 66. Wow. So he sends this Italian dubbed reel to Hollywood for Eastwood to screen to convince him to come back. So Eastwood is watching this at CBS. He's watching himself do Italian dialogue to decide. But of course he can see. Yeah. This movie has style. This movie's working. Also, he doesn't have a lot of other offers coming in because no one in the United States has seen this movie. So he comes back for a few dollars more, which is released in Italy in 1965. These movies are back to back. Oh, my God.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It was 66, right? Oh, no. This movie becomes the highest grossing Italian film of all time at the time. And we are now in a gold rush. The popularity of Italian westerns prior to Leonie's breakout

had created hundreds of jobs in the film industry, including a bunch of young assistant directors looking to make the directorial debut and here's their chance. So you've got directors like N. Joe G. Castellari who pumps out any gun can play, Payment and blood, kill them all and come back alone in just 1967 and 1968. The titles are amazing.

And yes, Lizzie, there are a lot of cash grabs. There are a lot of releases that included the word dollar since that worked for this. Another name that everyone tried to cash in on was Ringo. So there was a movie called A Pistol for Ringo, written and directed by Dutio Tesari, which, again, just to the names, he's billed as Montgomery Wood in these movies. So, like, they all go by American names. He then did a follow-up which was called The Return of Ringo, which was neither an actual sequel to a pistol for Ringo nor following the same character, but the name Ringo worked. Then somebody else said, okay, great.

And they made a comedy called Two Sons of Ringo, which followed characters named Franco and Sicio, pretending to be gunmen named Django and Gringo. So again, no Ringo in here. There was Ringo del Nebraska, also released as Savage Ringo in which the hero's name was changed from Nebraska to Ringo in post-production through the dubbing. There was three bullets for Ringo, Ringo the Lone Rider. There were literally dozens. I read almost 30 Ringo titled films that were not about the same character. But the Tessari films they were based on were actually pretty thoughtfully and skillfully made, as were the films by Leoné's old friend, Sergio Corbucci.

You probably know the name Django. Yes, of course. Yeah, that was his most famous film in 1966. He'd also directed some Sword and Sandal movies before moving into westerns. He had actually done an Italian western called The Grand Canyon Massacre, which starred James Mitcham and had nothing to do with Grand Canyon, which was released in May of 1964 three months before a fistful of dollars. So you could argue that Kodibuchi actually was the first spaghetti Western, you know, director,

although the name wouldn't be coined for years. And he took Leonie's violence to a new level in many ways, if you guys have seen Django, for example. He was, I think he was even more violent than Leone. Franco Giroldi, a former film critic who'd worked second unit on a fistful of dollars, got in the action. He made seven guns for the McGrathes. He followed it up with three more, and he worked under the pseudonyms Frank Garfield and Frank Preston.

I want the job of giving these Italian men the American names. It's like porn director names. Yeah, it's really working. Some of these movies actually got pretty serious and pretty political, as we'll discuss on Monday. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is as much as Civil War film as it is in Westerns in many ways. The point is, this cohort of writers and directors are using this genre, which just started to be referred to as spaghetti Western to experiment. Now, apparently, Leone did not understand why they were being called Spaghetti Westerns. He actually thought maybe the spaghetti was a replacement for the lasso, like visually,

like, oh, it's like, instead of spaghetti, a lasso, it's spaghetti. Sir. He said he didn't mind it. He actually said he didn't think Americans were using it in a malicious way, even though a lot of them were. So the truth is, a lot of American critics and journalists were quick to embrace the name and very slow to embrace the genre. And the big criticism, Lizzie, was the violence. They said it was two graphic. In its review for a few dollars more, the New York Times wrote, there is nothing wholesome about killing men for bounty, nothing funny about seeing them die, no matter how much the audience may sit there and burble and laugh. And for a few dollars more, I don't think it's the best film of the three. I do think that's the good, the bad, and the ugly.

It might be my favorite of the three movies. And if you've never seen it, Lizzie, I cannot recommend it enough. Lee Van Cleef, who plays The Bad and the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, he actually plays a very heroic character. And it was the first time in his career that he played a heroic character as a lead. And he has a really wonderfully emotional arc. And the shootout, the final shootout is much more emotional than the final shootouts in either a fistful of dollars

or the good, the bad, and the ugly. And it features some of the best Morricone music as well. I highly recommend it. But anyway, these reviews were not great. And I think they miss the Keystone inspiration for Leonie, which is the work of Dashel Hammondi, Hamit. I think one of the reasons that these spaghetti westerns work so well, especially Leonis, is that they are riddled with double crosses, betrayals. They're very complex.

Which, to me, feels much more akin to film noir, gumshoe detective novels and movies than it does to classic westerns. And I feel like that's an influence that's often missed in the discussions of these. Like, to me, a fistful of dollars at times feels more like the Maltese Falcon. And he feels more like Humphrey Bogart, you know what I mean, than he does like John Wayne in some of these movies. Even the good, the bad, and the ugly, the number of times that people change allegiances or make different deals, it's crazy. I mean, like, you really have to pay attention. It definitely feels like a dashal hamlet. So between 1960 and 1978, according to, I believe, a reliable source I found. Over 600 European westerns were made. Nearly 500 in Italy alone. Most shot between

1964 and 78. But the genre really hit its peak in 1967 and 1968. Around this time, the Italian film industry was pumping out, you know, high 60, 70 Italian westerns a year. And a lot of the American stars that Leone had approached for a fistful of dollars did end up working in the genre. Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Henry Silva, James Coburn, not to mention, Bert Reynolds, plays a Navajo Joe, if you guys haven't seen it. Oh, dear. And Richard Harrison, who did start starring in Spaghetti Westerns. He did $100,000 for Ringo the year after a fistful of dollars was made. $18 for Ringo.

A fistful of Ringo's for your dollars. Now, all three of Lione's Eastwood films were released in the United States in 1967 because of the Kurosawa lawsuit delay. January, then mid-year, and then the good, the bad, and the ugly on December 29th, which is crazy, a whole trilogy in one year. Yeah. Production then dipped in the early 70s. It popped up again with some self-parody films and then died off kind of by the late 70s.

Leonie's last spaghetti western, Duck You Sucker, released in 1971, was actually a film he never intended to direct, but we'll cover that movie another day. Despite kicking off the craze, Leonie was far from the most prolific of the spaghetti western directors. Lizzie, do you know how many spaghetti westerns Sergio Leone actually directed? No, five, six? Five, very good. He did a fistful of dollars for a few dollars more, the good, the bad, and the ugly. He then did once upon a time in the West. Right.

And then Duck You Sucker in 1971. So he did five between 64 and 71. Far short of, for example, Sergio Corbucci, who did 13. Wow. And yet, Leone's five films brought in more money combined than the Western filmography of any other Italian Western director, over 14 billion lira at the time. And Lizzie, that brings us to the end.

of our primer on spaghetti westerns and how the craze started and sets us up for the culminating film of Sergio Leone's career as a spaghetti western director, the good, the bad and the ugly, which is a crazy story. And I am so excited to get into on Monday, the writing of this story, the shooting of this story, the dubbing of this movie. It's just a wild ride. But I have to ask you, in the history of spaghetti westerns, what went right? I know we don't normally do this on primers, but I thought it throw out to you? No, that's fine. All art is iterative. I think everything comes from somewhere. And I love the fact that Sergio Leone saw Yo Gimbo and said, I could do that, but different, but Italian and a Western. And it's not that that is such an unusual idea, because, you know, you can watch Yo Gimbo and I think

see that it is very much within a Western format to a certain degree. or that there's elements of the Western present in Yojimbo. But it's the way that he did it. It's the style. It's how much of himself he made it. And so I think that's what went right, is that he saw something he loved and he thought, I can do it, but I can do it my way.

And then he did. And I love that. Yeah, I think, you know, and the things that he's experimenting with, the point of view shot, you know, of the villain at the end, is he looks up to the sky. and then, you know, falls into the well,

which he'll repeat in the good, the bad, and the ugly. The way in which he frames the gun on the hip with the other character in the distance and the hand coming down over it. What I've read is that Leonie was not a very literary person, as we'll get into on Monday, perhaps not a very well-read individual, but he has a deep knowledge of art,

and he uses a lot of classical art references in his films, and you can tell he's just a visual master. And that, you know, had he not been a director, maybe he would have been a painter, you know, maybe he would have been something else. Because compositionally, it's beautiful. He's unparalleled, in my opinion. I do think he's one of the greatest directors of all time.

I don't think he gets his due. I think that he and Morikone as a duo are up there with Williams and Lucas or Williams and Spielberg, you know, take your pick. The harmony between the music that Morricone makes for these movies and the way that Leone moves is, camera, his limited use of dialogue is really helpful, I think, in that way. Yeah, which I'm sure may have been, you know, out of necessity to start with. But yes, it's great. I mean, yeah, if you talk about the

composition, we'll talk about this on Monday as well, but there are shots in the good, the bad, and the ugly that you could frame and put up on a wall and they would be worthy of a museum. Yes. Lee Van Cleef entering the home of the family right before he, as they're getting ready to eat dinner. It's really incredible. It's worth every minute. All right. Well, thank you so much, And we have to say a huge thank you to Brami for sponsoring today's episode. If today's deep dive into Sergio Leone and the beginnings of the spaghetti Western genre had you craving for something with a little more character, Brahmi's got you covered. Pasta made in Italy from only two old world ingredients with more protein and fiber and absolutely

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That's enjoybrami.com. Brami, eat well, live well. And until Monday, bye. What's Italian for buy? We should probably have said that. Arrivederce. Arrivederce. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer.