Franco Nero said in an interview that this was much more like American Westerns and he was right. Unfortunately, I think many that have grown to think of Rodriguez's Mariachi trilogy, or, heaven forbid Tarantino's Django trash, may think that a Spaghetti Western is so purely because of its style. If so, this one won't disappoint you. It is stylistically well done.
But that's not what made Spaghetti Westerns what they were. Before the death of the Hollywood "Production Code", there was a BIG difference in terms of the subtext, the message of the movie. American Westerns of the '50s were terrorist morality tales, where the sheriff is the good guy, clean shaved, and Mexicans and Indians are terrorists out to be subdued by the morally righteous Yankees. The radical left in Italy systematically deconstructed that with protagonists that seldom saw a razor, were morally ambiguous, and the tin star was, as so directly put by the sheriff in "Sartana the Gravedigger", "just for show". In many in the genre the pillars of society are the most violent and morally corrupt individuals in the picture. Gringo intervention in Mexico is a analogy for the Viet Nam war. Only Sam Peckinpah did that within the American system. His "Major Dundee" deliberately deconstructs the worst colonial assumptions of "Rio Grande", particularly in the final scenes.
This is the opposite of that. Here, a Mexican revolutionary pleads with the heroes to help the cause because "you two are Americans. You're both free. You went through this already. You understand". While that might seem, on the face of it, to be the poor struggling against the system, it's embracing the colonial assumption of the US as the world's policeman, and recreating that moral righteousness. In that sense this is much more in the vein of a Ford movie than a Damiani Western. So, for me, this isn't a Spaghetti Western for the same reason Tarantino's are not, though this one is not nearly so vacuous. A real Spaghetti Western is the product of a mentality which promoted leftist struggle of the poor against their oppressors. Jean Pierre Gorin, Jean- Luc Goddard's creative partner, put it best- "every Marxist on the block wanted to make a Western". None of them would have made this one.
But that's not what made Spaghetti Westerns what they were. Before the death of the Hollywood "Production Code", there was a BIG difference in terms of the subtext, the message of the movie. American Westerns of the '50s were terrorist morality tales, where the sheriff is the good guy, clean shaved, and Mexicans and Indians are terrorists out to be subdued by the morally righteous Yankees. The radical left in Italy systematically deconstructed that with protagonists that seldom saw a razor, were morally ambiguous, and the tin star was, as so directly put by the sheriff in "Sartana the Gravedigger", "just for show". In many in the genre the pillars of society are the most violent and morally corrupt individuals in the picture. Gringo intervention in Mexico is a analogy for the Viet Nam war. Only Sam Peckinpah did that within the American system. His "Major Dundee" deliberately deconstructs the worst colonial assumptions of "Rio Grande", particularly in the final scenes.
This is the opposite of that. Here, a Mexican revolutionary pleads with the heroes to help the cause because "you two are Americans. You're both free. You went through this already. You understand". While that might seem, on the face of it, to be the poor struggling against the system, it's embracing the colonial assumption of the US as the world's policeman, and recreating that moral righteousness. In that sense this is much more in the vein of a Ford movie than a Damiani Western. So, for me, this isn't a Spaghetti Western for the same reason Tarantino's are not, though this one is not nearly so vacuous. A real Spaghetti Western is the product of a mentality which promoted leftist struggle of the poor against their oppressors. Jean Pierre Gorin, Jean- Luc Goddard's creative partner, put it best- "every Marxist on the block wanted to make a Western". None of them would have made this one.