Thanks gents, and yes I DO feel better for having gotten it off my chest. There really is no point in discussing it with people like that slob I was referencing, who by the way is only one of several people I know personally who have gotten confused about the chicken <–> egg relationship between the ear cutting scene in DJANGO and RESERVOIR DOGS. It really is amazing how there is this impetus to automatically conclude that even though Sergio Corbucci made DJANGO in 1966 that he must have “ripped off” the ear cutting scene from RESERVOIR DOGS simply because it’s a better known film. I was actually having a similar back and forth with someone else online the other night about INFLUENCE versus POPULARITY or FAMILIARITY, and how it is indeed possible for lesser known forms to influence those which have come after them, even if you yourself have never heard of it. Most people seem to live with a kind of cultural tunnel vision that excludes those forms they are not familiar with, and the problem comes when people are challenged with ideas that they haven’t experienced for themselves. The more well-known the contemporary result the harder it is for certain brains to accept that a lesser known force from before may have been the catalyst for why we see what we see in the newer version.
It’s almost like I wish I could do a Woody Allen from ANNIE HALL where he pulls Marshall MaCluhan out from behind a counter to refute someone who has mis-interperated his work. I wish I could pull Quentin Tarentino out from behind something and have him say “No, I watched DJANGO a million times while I was a video clerk at that store and got the idea for the ear cutting from that movie & used it as an homage to Sergio Corbucci, whether or not you have heard his name before.”
I also agree with someone’s comment earlier in the thread that most Americanized viewers who are familiar with spaghetti as a separate idiom do indeed regard them as “campy B westerns”, though there are certain examples that rise to the occasion. One thesis idea I had been working on in my own essays is the role that ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST in particular played in the development of spaghetti westerns as this separate idiom. Yes THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY is maybe the finest example of the form and yes DJANGO did solidify that what Leone & Corbucci were getting at WAS in fact a new mode of expression. But it was ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST which “freed” the Italian/Spanish directors from working under the shadow of “conventional” westerns by proving that a bunch of Italians & Spaniards really could make a movie on the scale of THE SEARCHERS – and not only that but potentially even improve on the form by finding their own visual & contextural language by which to express these visions. Not that it’s a better movie but the vocabulary being used is different and yet the “impact” of the movie (when viewed patiently by those who are open to the possibilities) is on the same scale. It’s hard to deny that the results are 100% convincing, though it should be noted that having familiar players from the conventional side like Henry Fonda and Woody Strode is part of the formula that Sergio Leone was perfecting with that particular movie.
But the rejoinder of the thesis is that ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST then gave the Italians the freedom to go ahead and make more westerns without needing to worry about proving that they COULD match an effort churned out by Hollywood oriented talent, the most obvious result being that after 1970 or so you didn’t see the obligatory Brand Name Gringo Lead Actor as much. Instead you saw more Italians getting that lead spot, and the spaghetti idiom became more of a cottage industry like it was during the experimental years of 1964 - 1967; The Italians and Spaniards were making the movies for themselves as much as trying to get that share of the American market, and the end result were smaller, more personal films that didn’t bother with grandeur and mystique so much as fulfilling potboiler needs to sustain interest.
That’s why I mention ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST so prominently, and as an argument as to why it’s the perfect example to use, think of a similarly “epic” attempt that doesn’t use those Name Brand Gringo Leads, like say TEPAPA which is a wonderful movie but you get the feeling at one point when watching it that they had bitten off a bit more than they could chew, even with Orson Wells all darkened up with that boot polish makeup. He looks silly compared to Henry Fonda, spitting obscenely and saying lines like “People scare better when they’re dyin’”, which is one of the all time best western one-liners in the history of film as an art form. That such a line could have been written by an ITALIAN who had probably never even been to America is what escapes the grasp of boneheads like my colleague, who are so wrapped up in the implied literal meaning of the term “western” that they can’t possibly concede that anyone other than an American could ever possibly have anything of relevance to say about the genre.
Call it a kind of mild form of cultural xenophobia, where the idea of an outsider bettering those from your home block actually beating you at your own game is just incomprehensible, and might suggest that (gasp!) one’s own perception of the world needs to be re-evaluated. The safety factor of westerns as a genre was completely jettisoned by the spaghetti approach, and while theater goers may not have been savvy enough to get the drift the ultimate end product were the “conventional” western filmmakers utilizing this foreign, alien approach & adopting it as their own: There is a valid argument in stating that films like THE WILD BUNCH would never have been possible if Sergio Corbucci hadn’t made DJANGO, since violence or other “adult” themes that movie presented had always been SANITIZED in American made westerns – which for the most part were made for kids, or at least all ages audiences. The spaghetti era almost forced American/Hollywood filmmakers to take their hands off the handlebars of their cultural bicycle and learn how to crash without hurting themselves, which led to the revisionist period of American paranoia westerns with their existential themes and traditionally downbeat endings that eschewed the pop iconography of “Bonanza” or “The Big Valley”.
I’d even lobby that one of my favorite “conventional” westerns actually functions in the same manner as a spaghetti – THE WAR WAGON from 1967, which for sure is smarmy kitschy John Wayne formula entertainment, but the cartoonish “unreality” of the movie is hard to ignore, and in fact I have always felt that it was deliberately filmed to resemble a spaghetti western. More so than something like EL DORADO, which has more in common with “Bonanza” and a direct link to that 1950s “sanitized” approach that simply wasn’t possible after 1970 thanks to the reaction of filmmakers like Peckinpah, John Sturges (his HOUR OF THE GUN is another of my favorites: I’m a Doc Holliday freak and I readily admit it) and Robert Altman with MCCABE & MRS. MILLER, which looks like it was inspired by THE GREAT SILENCE more than anything else.
So from where I see things the influence goes back & forth, no artist works in a vacuum and the Italians and Americans were feeding off each other, up to a point that might be defined by the TRINITY films, where the two traditions branched off again; The Italians went for more “comedy” oriented approaches, and the Americans went existential, making westerns like DOC and DIRTY LITTLE BILLY that had their roots in the experimental year spaghettis like BLOOD AT SUNDOWN and THE BIG GUNDOWN. The great shame is that by the middle 1970s westerns if they were made at all in the US became exploitation films to a degree while the Italians lost their way with hybrid movies and slapstick dittyland from which there was only one final destination, which was probably KEOMA. After that the genre had come full circle and with THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES Clint Eastwood effectively put the western to bed until the early 1980s while the Italians turned to ripping off STAR WARS (Aldo Lada’s THE HUMANOID and Luigi Cozzi’s STARCRASH) and JAWS (Enzo’s THE LAST SHARK) … and then the cycle started all over again with the Italians bettering the resurgence of horror films (HALLOWEEN, FRIDAY THE 13TH) with the Argento/Fulci/Lenzi/Deodato era …
Which in closing is what actually led me to spaghetti westerns in the first place: Yes I was aware of the DOLLARS trilogy and Leone in general, but it was my fascination with and need to know more about the European horror movie talents that got me to start looking deeper into the well of spaghetti westerns: Leon Klimovsky, Mark Damon, Joe D’amato, Sara Bay, Helga Line, Gianni Garko, Antonio Margheriti, Georgio Ferroni, Jose Luis Merino, Jose Marie Elorietta etc. We here in the states usually associate a given talent with one or two specific genres (John Carpenter = horror, George Lucas = science fiction) but to the Italians & Spaniards in particular it was all the same big ball of wax no matter if the movie was a Peplum or a spaghetti western or a mob movie polizieschi or a giant rampaging shark movie. There is a multiplicity about European genre films that is very liberating to me that I just don’t get from ham-fisted Hollywood approaches, usually. It’s not being able to express why to people that just don’t get it and having them dismiss that which they have no concept of that rattles my cage.
RANT CONCLUDED