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Spaghetti Westerns
Spaghetti
Westerns is a nickname for a broad sub-genre of Western film that emerged
in the mid-1960s, so named because most of them were produced by Italian
studios. Originally they had in common the Italian language, low budgets,
and a recognizable highly fluid, violent, minimalist cinematography
that eschewed (some said "demythologized") many of the conventions
of earlier Westerns—partly intentionally, partly as a result of
the work being done in a different cultural background and with limited
funds. The term was originally used disparagingly, but by the 1980s
many of these films came to be held in high regard, particularly because
it was hard to ignore the influence they had in redefining the entire
idea of a western up to that point.
The best-known and perhaps archetypal spaghetti Westerns were the so-called Man With No Name trilogy (or Dollars Trilogy) directed by Sergio Leone, starring the American TV actor Clint Eastwood and with musical scores composed by Ennio Morricone (all of whom are now synonymous with the genre): A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The last is one of the most famed Westerns of all time (although, atypically for the genre, it had a relatively high budget in excess of one million USD).
Many of the films were shot in the Spanish desert region of Almería, which greatly resembles the landscape of the American Southwest. (A few were shot in Sardinia.) Because of the desert setting and the readily available southern Spanish extras, a usual theme in Spaghetti Westerns is the Mexican Revolution, Mexican bandits and the border zone between Mexico and the USA.
Spaghetti westerns are known as "macaroni westerns" in Japan.