In 1964, Italian director, Sergio Leone (a relative unknown in America) released the film, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), which broke Italian box office records (Jameson 2009). After the success of the film in Italy, the American film company, United Artists purchased the rights to the film and released it in the United States in 1967. At the time of its release, the golden age of the Western genre seemed to be coming to an end (Prince 2014). Sergio Leone and A Fistful of Dollars (1964), as well as the two sequels that would follow breathed new life into the Western genre, created the sub-genre Spaghetti Western, and would change the face of Western cinema forever. Before we continue, in order to prevent confusion we will be splitting Western cinema into two categories, the Modern and Classical. The Modern, or revisionist Western are films made after 1964 (Dollars Trilogy (1964-66), The Wild Bunch (1969), Unforgiven (1992)), and Classical would be those Westerns made in American prior to 1964 (Stagecoach (1939), The Searchers (1956), Shane (1953)). Although Spaghetti Western became a popular title for films associated with Leone, we will be focusing on how Leone changed the Western genre; and Spaghetti Western was just a name given to films produced, and filmed in Italy. It was a way to differentiate between classic American Westerns and this new Modern Western (Fridlund, 2006, p.4).
There are many aspects that distinguish a Modern Western from a Classic Western film. This paper will focus on the three most defining aspects of the Modern Western: the violence, the characters, and the stories themselves. The first aspect we will examine are the characters that populate this Modern Western. .
Characters.
Prior to the introduction of the Modern Western, Classic Westerns consisted of two types of characters, the obviously good and the obviously bad. The 'good' were generally depicted as civilized, god fearing white folk; whereas the bad were either outlaws, or Indians.
