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Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the “Death of the Western” in American Film Criticism William McClain (bio) 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 A 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 For a Few Dollars More (1965, US release: May 1967) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966, US release: December, 1967), was neither the entirety nor the beginning of the “spaghetti Western” cycle in Italy,1 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. The term “sterile debate,” however, effaces the almost venomous hostility that greeted Leone’s Dollars trilogy in American critical circles. Critics found the Dollars films deeply problematic on a number of levels: their unusually graphic and cynical violence, their ambivalent relationship to historical and generic “realism,” and their relationship to the history of the Western genre as a whole. However, film critics of the time were not merely displeased by these films’ perceived aesthetic flaws: they were bitterly resistant to what they saw as an existential threat to the Western genre and to some extent their understanding of the American cinema as a whole, for in Leone’s films critics found echoes, and perhaps causes, of deeply disturbing trends in domestic film culture—trends that would later culminate in what would be dubbed the “New Hollywood.” However, Leone’s films [End Page 52] seem to have had a uniquely distasteful element for American critics of the late 1960s beyond their place in broader shifts in American film culture, for whereas films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) split critics into hotly contentious camps, the Dollars films were simply generally excoriated. Our goal here is not to say that critics of the period were defending critical good taste against the barbarians at the gates or that they somehow didn’t “get it.” Rather, we seek an understanding of a moment in the history of the American popular critical institutions wherein critics attempted to resist aesthetic change, refused to acknowledge emerging artistic norms as legitimate, and in so doing attempted to defend the Western genre as an institution against Leone’s illegitimate revisionism and the wider developments it typified. Ultimately, this holding action reveals not only a great deal about the Western but also potential insights into the nature...
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