A Fistful of "Spaghetti Western" Studies

BFI Researcher's Tales: Sir Christopher Frayling on Spaghetti Westerns 
(Frayling is author of Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans From Karl May to Sergio Leone [London: I.B.Tauris, 1981, 1998]; Sergio Leone: Something To Do With Death [London: Faber and Faber, 2000]; and
Sergio Leone: Once Upon a Time in Italy [London: Thames and Hudson, 2005]).

It was the spaghetti Westerns… that first eliminated the morality-play dimension and turned the Western into pure violent reverie [...] What made these [...] popular was that they stripped the Western form of its cultural burden of morality. They discarded its civility along with its hypocrisy. In a sense, they liberated the form: what the Western hero stood for was left out, and what he embodied (strength and gun power) was retained. Abroad, that was probably what he had represented all along.

Pauline Kael, Killing Time, in Karl French (ed.), Screen Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 1974), pp. 171-178: 172.

Today, to accompany its list of links to openly accessible scholarly studies of the Spaghetti (or Italian, or Euro) Western, and related topics, the normally garrulous Film Studies For Free was going to treat its readers to an improbable, digital impersonation of  Clint Eastwood's performance as the Man With No Name in what is often called "The Dollars Trilogy" directed by Sergio Leone.

Sadly, no dice: while it looks good in a poncho, not only does FSFF fall short in performing moral ambiguity, but it's also fairly hopeless when it comes to capturing taciturnity. 

Dammit. 

Do please enjoy the links, anyway. Grazie.

• Spaghetti Western Database

• Jenna Bond, 'Homosexuality and the Italian Spaghetti Western', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 11, November 2007

• Mark Brownrigg, 'Chapter 4: Music and the Western', Film Music and Film Genre, PhD Thesis, University of Stirling, 2003

• Timothy Campbell, 'The Corrupting Sea, Technology and Devalued Life in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns', California Italian Studies Journal 1.1, 2010

• Rolando Caputo, 'Aldrich, Leone and Vera Cruz: style and substance over the border', Screening the Past, June 30, 2000

• Paul Coughlin, '[Review of] Christopher Frayling, Sergio Leone: something to do with death. London: Faber and Faber., 2000', Screening the Past, November 1, 2000

• Vera Dika, 'An East German Indianerfilm: the bear in sheep's clothing', Jump Cut, No. 50, Spring 2008

• Chris Durham, 'Absent Heroism: Reconsidering Clint Eastwood's Star Persona', Scope, Issue 7, 2007

• Robert J. Edmonstone, 'Beyond “Brutality”: Understanding the Italian Filone’s Violent Excesses', PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008

• Daniel Edwards, 'Sergio Leone', Senses of Cinema, 2002

• Austin Fisher, 'A Marxist's Gotta Do What a Marxist's Gotta Do: Political Violence on the Italian Frontier', Scope,  Issue 15, November 2009

• Brad D. Foster, 'Constructing Heroic Identities: Masculinity and the Western Film', Masters Thesis, Oregon State University, July 2007

• Luis M. García Mainar, 'Authorship and Identity in the Cinema of Clint Eastwood', ATLANTIS 29.2 (December 2007)

• Howard Hughes, Excerpts from Aim from the Heart: The Films of Clint Eastwood (London: IB Tauris, 2009)

• Emily Anne Kausalik, A Fistful of Drama: Musical Form in the Dollars Trilogy, Masters Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2008

• Kyle Keough, 'Cowboys and Shoguns: The American Western, Japanese Jidaigeki, and Cross-Cultural Exchange', DigitalCommons@University of Rhode Island, 2008

• Evert Jan van Leeuven, 'Gothic Eurowesterns: A Grotesque Perspective on a Hollywood Myth',  BRight Lights Film Journal, Issue 60, May 2008

• Scott MacKenzie, 'Closing arias: Operatic montage in the closing sequences of the trilogies of Coppola and Leone', P.O.V. 'The Art of Film Editing', edited by Richard Raskin, Number 6 December 1998 - (scroll down in large PDF)

• John Nudge, 'Wild East Productions: Spaghetti Westerns', first published in Imagesjournal.com, 1998

• Walter Przybylowski, 'The European Western', Dialogues, Vol. 5, Fall 2006

• Richard Raskin, 'Jack Elam and the Fly in Once Upon a Time in the West', P.O.V. No.24 - The Western, December 2007

• Alireza Vahdani, 'European Western vs. American Western', Offscreen Journal,  January 31, 2010

• Jeannette Vaught, 'Deserting the Desert, Salvaging the Southland: The Re-Location of the American Hero and Cultural Identity in 1970s Outlaw Movies', TPP VII (2009): 9-28

• Tony Williams, 'A Fistful of Dollars', Senses of Cinema , Issue 28, 2003