I agree 100% with you Colonel. I gravitated away from the Wayne westerns to more violent and gritty movies. Having Clint and Lee in some of the best of the genre helped immensely.
I also got into SW’s when my then roommate in college mentioned OUATITW. I managed to catch it in it’s entirety on AMC about 15 years ago and I was impressed.
I grew up on B westerns and got tired of seeing the villain get a flesh wound, a few fists in the mouth or just go to jail. In the SWs the villain got his just deserts. The music was the other key element that got me excited about the genre along with the great anti-heroes, the landscape and the authentic looking towns and haciendas. The entire look was different and exciting compared to the dull American films I had seen for years.
The music was definitely what got me in. Like so many in here I was first came in contact with the Leone-westerns, and especially the final long lasting duel scenes with the fantastic intensity made even more intense by the fabolous music simply blew me away.
In fact I will go so far as to say that if those movies hadn’t had that fine scores I would probably be spitting at spaghetti western fans in the streets today … Ah well you get the meaning.
Later I have of course learned to love the finer aspects of the spaghetti western itself also, but the love originates in the music, and a great score will usually always win me over even if the spaghetti western is only mediocre…
Same for me
For me it was the landscape, which I later re-discovered with the wide screen versions of the movies. I like the loner out in the west making his living in a way we never would. Arriving somewhere, doing his thing and riding away again.
Although I also like the American westerns, the Italian western has more to offer to me. The main characters are more mysterious and mystic. Next to that the actions are exaggerated and brutal, the humor sarcastic, the Music fantastic as mentioned a lot before, and the hero is able to come back after a torture.
It all works out very fine for the westerns.
Of course the music in SWs tries to enhance the feelings and atmosphere these movies want to create
The music is not a separate thing in these films
The bleak ‘world outlook’ is to me a very important aspect of SWs
Some people might take these films a little more seriously, while others just like them for nostalgia or that Clint and Van Cleef are cool or whatever
the music
sounds of the guns
the characters
the highs bodycounts
the funny moments