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I am showing the Old West as it really was . . . Americans treat westerns with too much rhetoric.
-Sergio Leone (qtd. in "Hi-Ho, Denaro!" 57)
WHEN ITALIAN DIRECTOR SERGIO LEONE'S/4 Fistful of Dollars arrived in the United States in early 1967, the American film industry and the critics who observed it were in a state of ferment. Critics could sense that the American cinema was changing and that its old pieties and genres, often spoken of in the same breath, were in a vital sense dying out. Among them, the Western was perhaps the greatest barometer- the genre long seen as most uniquely American, most assuredly linked to the national character and mythology, seemed to be evolving into a new, rougher beast. And for critics, Sergio Leone's films were clearly part of the problem. Leone's Dollars trilogy, starting with A Fistful of Dollars (1964, US release: January 1967) and continuing with Fora Few Dollars More (1965, US release: May 1967) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966, US release: December, 1967), was neltherthe entirety nor the beginning of the "spaghetti Western" cycle in Italy,' but for Americans Leone's films represented the true beginning of the Italian invasion of their privileged cultural form (Liehm 186). Hindsight tempts one to simply question critics' judgment: after all, Leone's films have been vindicated by continued popular and critical interest, and their place in the now sturdy family tree of post-studio revisionist Westerns suggests their healthy influence on the evolution of the Western genre. Christopher Frayling, in his noted book on the Italian spaghetti Western, describes American critical reception of the spaghetti Western cycle as to "a large extent, confined to a sterile debate about the 'cultural roots' of the American/Hollywood Western." He remarks that few critics dared admit that they were, in fact, "bored with an exhausted Hollywood genre." Pauline Kael, he notes, was willing to acknowledge this critical ennui and thus appreciate how a film such as Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961) "could exploit Western conventions while debunking its morality" (39). This revisionist project, Frayling argues along with many others (e.g., Bondanella 255), was the key to Leone's success and, to some degree, to that of the spaghetti Western genre as a whole.
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