Transit to East Germany: The Distribution and Reception of Once Upon a Time in the West in the German Democratic Republic

This chapter examines the relocation, transition, and appropriation of the Spaghetti Western in a hitherto under-researched context: the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), prior to its unification with the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in 1990. It explores the selection, distribution and reception of Once Upon a Time in the West (C'era una volta il West, Sergio Leone, 1968) in the German Democratic Republic as a case study of how international cultural transfer causes objects of cultural production to be repositioned as they enter a new reception context. It also examines the ideological, economic, and sociological concerns underpinning the decisions of those who facilitated the movement of film across the political, cultural, and linguistic boundaries of nation states. In East Germany, the facilitators involved in the selection, censorship, dubbing, and promotion of films were mainly government administrators rather than film business professionals, because film was a state-controlled industry. The chapter focuses on the ‘official’ reception of the film on the basis of available censorship protocols and government policy papers, as well as print media sources.

Spaghetti Westerns and Asian Cinema: Perspectives on Global Cultural Flows

This chapter aims to undertake a consideration of Italian Westerns from the perspective of theories of cultural globalization, emphasising the fact that Italian Westerns never were exclusively an Italian product. It takes the Italian Western's iterative negotiation with Asian identities as a case study to chart multidimensional routes of cultural transfer. Deploying scholarly approaches around the ‘transnational’, it frames the Italian Western as a junction in a global network of cultural exchange, both borrowing from and influencing Asian cinematic discourses. Using The Warrior's Way (Sngmoo Lee, 2010) as a key example, the chapter considers the Italian Western's most significant legacy as its decoupling of the Western from its ideological and historical reference points, freeing the format up for myriad, heterogeneous cultural contexts.

Bounty Hunters, Yakuzas and Rōnins: Intercultural Transformations between the Italian Western and the Japanese Swordfight Film in the 1960s

This chapter presents a comparative analysis based on the assumption that the outlaw is a global figural stereotype in cinematic narratives that make use of semantic elements as well as syntactic formations of the Western genre. It argues that typical figures of the Italian Western and the Japanese sword film make equivalent claims on the outlaw narrative. In the Italian Western, bounty hunters and mercenaries are often ‘nihilistic heroes’ who, although they are not outlaws in a narrow sense of the word, often act like them in an ambivalent way. The sword film can be considered a subgenre of jidai-geki (the Japanese expression for historical period dramas). Typical figures in these films are rōnins (masterless samurais) and yakuzas (gamblers), who often act as bounty hunters and mercenaries. All these figures are modelled on the stereotype of the outlaw.

Spectacles of Insurgency: Witnessing the Revolution as Incoherent Text

This chapter presents the authors' response to Austin Fisher's analysis of the popular politics of the Spaghetti Western (Fisher 2011). Taking A Professional Gun (Il mercenario, Sergio Corbucci, 1968) as their key example, they argue that the ‘incoherence’ identified as a political weakness of this filone's ‘insurgency’ variant is rather a manifestation of decontextualised transnational bricolage that, by blurring the boundary between ‘text’ and ‘paratext’, allows us to appreciate the possibilities open to an audience for creative participation within revolutionary discourses. The film is therefore read as a temporal dislocation that exists within images of the Mexican Revolution, and as a conduit through which a plurality of fluid meanings open up for the fomenting of a revolutionary sensibility.

Pietro Germi, Hybridity and the Roots of the Italo-Western

This chapter examines Western tropes in Italian cinema's ‘neorealist’ phase. Taking as key case studies In the Name of the Law (In nome della legge, Pietro Germi, 1949) and The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo (Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo, Pietro Germi, 1952), it explores the complex ways in which Germi worked references to American genres into his work, thereby debunking approaches presupposing an Italian neorealism separated from ‘popular’ cinema, and demonstrating an oft-overlooked precursor to the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and 1970s. Identifying in Germi's two films a representational equivalence between the Italian South and the American West, the chapter charts a lineage of tales of banditry that blended the international and the local.

The Quiet Man Gets Noisy: Sergio Leone, the Italian Western and Ireland1

This chapter questions conceptions of ‘authenticity’ by looking at how Italian Westerns responded to well-established ethnic images within Hollywood Westerns, which were themselves ‘inauthentic’ in the first place: those of ‘Irishness’. As Italians forged their own interpretation of the Western myth, transposing numerous elements from Hollywood while cutting the genre adrift from its nation-building imperative, it asks, in what form did the Hollywood genre's ubiquitous negotiation with a stereotyped Irish ethnicity survive, and what significance did this hold in this cultural moment? Taking Sergio Leone's Duck, You Sucker! (Giù la testa, 1971) as a key case study, it charts the labyrinthine intertextual journey through Hollywood's representations of Irish culture on which Leone and his crew embarked The chapter concludes that in the Italian Western, ‘Irishness’ exists as part of a larger signifying structure surrounding a reworked, magnified and updated cinematic imaginary, rather than a purposeful reference to contemporary events in Ireland.

For a Few Comic Strips More: Reinterpreting the Spaghetti Western through the Comic Book

In Christopher Frayling's book Spaghetti Westerns (1981), he highlights how the character of the Spaghetti Western has since become subsumed into later Western comic books, evidenced through the Lee Van Cleef-like bounty hunter featured in Morris and Goscinny's bande dessinée (French comic) Lucky Luke: The Bounty Hunter (1972). Drawing upon this relationship, this chapter will take a similar approach to Frayling, who mediates between comic book influences upon the Spaghetti Western and the later reciprocal impact of these Westerns upon the comic book. It begins by demystifying some of the tacit references to the comic-like qualities of the Italian Westerns. This provides context for the exploration of the impact of these films upon the Western comic book, primarily achieved through a case study of the bande dessinée series, Blueberry (1963–2005), by Jean-Michel Charlier and Jean Giraud. In a collection that looks to map the relocation and appropriation of the Spaghetti Western, the chapter reinterprets these Italian productions through the comic book.

Cowboys and Indians: Transnational Borrowings in the Indian Masala Western

This chapter investigates the cultural politics of transnational borrowings through an analysis of the ‘Masala Western’ — a cycle of Indian films that began in the early 1970s which borrowed and recombined tropes from American Westerns, Italian Westerns, Japanese sword films, and the South Asian ‘dacoit’ (bandit) films, among other inflences. While the genre is more often referred to as the ‘Curry Western’, Masala — the South Asian term for spice mix — more clearly evokes the cultural mixing and blending at the heart of this phenomenon. The chapter will examine the Masala Western utilising a memetic model of cultural hybridization.

Emancipation all’italiana: Giuseppe Colizzi and the Representation of African Americans in Italian Westerns

This chapter offers an alternative take on representations of ethnicity in the Spaghetti Western. In particular, it examines its representations of African Americans, and asks what this might tell us about the politics of race in Italy and the USA in the 1960s. It focuses on the content of two Italian Westerns directed by Giuseppe Colizzi: Ace High (I quattro dell'Ave Maria, 1968) and Boot Hill (La collina degli stivali, 1969). It argues that local historical, cultural, and political circumstances resulted in the Italian Western introducing progressive representations of African Americans out West that prefigured the appearance of similarly progressive representations in American Western.

Malaysian Pirates, American Cowboys and the Marginalised Outlaw: Constructing Other-ed Adventurers in Italian Film

This chapter examines the ways in which a hero of the nineteenth century — a Malaysian pirate who, in his rescuing of the imperially downtrodden, the exploited, and the betrayed, spoke in actions and words with anti-imperialist flourish — became reimagined as a twentieth-century, post-war anti-hero by a director of westerns all'italiana who had, in his own films, fashioned a bandit, a ‘noble savage’, who opened the eyes of a Texas ranger to the corruption of the aristocracy and Orientalist assumptions. The first section introduces the nineteenth-century Italian children's author Emilio Salgari, and the hero of his most famous and well-loved novels: the pirate Sandokan. The second section analyzes Sergio Sollima's radical westerns, focusing on the protagonist of La resa dei conti and Corri, uomo, corri: Cuchillo, played by the Cuban-American-Italian actor Tomás Milián. The final section examines the ways in which Sollima melds his vision of the anarchic borderlands of the USA and Mexico with his imagining of the primitive wilds of Southeast Asia in his 1970s television series and films, bringing Sandokan, Salgari, and Sollima together.