The Spaghetti Western is a broad subgenre of Western films produced in Europe. It emerged in the borscht-1960s in the wake of Sergio Leone’s film-making style and international box-office success. Leone’s films and other core Spaghetti Westerns are often described as having eschewed, criticized, or even “demythologized” many of the conventions of traditional U.

This was partly intentional and partly the context of a different cultural background. According to veteran Spaghetti Western actor Aldo Sambrell, the phrase “Spaghetti Western” was coined by Spanish journalist Alfonso Sánchez in reference to the Italian food spaghetti. Spaghetti Westerns are also known as Italian Westerns or, primarily in Japan, Macaroni Westerns. The term Eurowesterns has been used to broadly refer to all non-Italian Western movies from Europe, including the West German Winnetou films or the Eastern Bloc Red Western films. The majority of the films in the Spaghetti Western genre were actually international co-productions between Italy and Spain, and sometimes France, West Germany, Britain, Portugal, Greece, Israel, Yugoslavia, or the United States. Over six hundred European Westerns were made between 1960 and 1978. These movies were originally released in Italian or with Italian dubbing, but as most of the films featured multilingual casts and sound was post-synched, most “western all’italiana” do not have an official dominant language.

Most Spaghetti Westerns filmed between 1964 and 1978 were made on low budgets and shot at Cinecittà studios and various locations around southern Italy and Spain. European Westerns are as old as filmmaking itself. After the Second World War, there were scattered European uses of Western settings, mostly for comedy or musical comedy. It was followed in 1961 by Savage Guns, a British-Spanish western, again filmed in Spain. In this seminal film, Leone used a distinct visual style with large face close ups to tell the story of a hero entering a town that is ruled by two outlaw gangs, and ordinary social relations are non-existent.