Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western

Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema

Austin Fisher

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781780767116
• eBook ISBN: 9780857737700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Ever more popular in the age of DVDs, eBay and online fandom, the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s have undergone a mainstream renaissance which has nevertheless left their intimate relationship to the troubled politics of 1960s Italy unexamined. Radical Frontiers reappraises the genre in relation to the revolutionary New Left and the events of 1968 to uncover the complexities of a cinematic milieu too often dismissed as formulaic and homogeneous. Establishing the backdrop of post-war Italy in which the Roman studio system actively blended Italian and American culture, Austin Fisher looks in detail at the works of Damiano Damiani, Sergio Sollima, Sergio Corbucci, Giulio Questi and Giulio Petroni and how these directors reformatted the Hollywood Western to yield new resonance for militant constituencies and radical groups. Radical Frontiers identifies the main variants of these militant Westerns, which brazenly endorsed violent peasant insurrection in the 'Mexico' of the popular imagination, turning the camera on the hitherto heroic colonialists of the West and exposing the brutal mechanisms of a society infested with latent fascism.
The ways in which the films' artistic failures reflect the ideological confusions of the radical groups is examined and the genre's legacy is reappraised, as the revolutionary energy of Italy's New Left becomes subsumed amidst the conflicting agendas of New Hollywood, blaxploitation and the 'grindhouse' revival of Tarantino, Rodriguez and Raimi. Reclaiming the Spaghetti Western from the domain of the merely cool and repositioning it within the spectrum of late-1960s radical cinema, Radical Frontiers analyses the genre's narrative and cinematographic inscriptions in their political context to uncover Far Left doctrines in these tales of outlaws and sheriffs, banditry and redemptive violence.

PART I

THE BACKDROP

1

Imagining America:
US Influence and American Mythology
in Post-War Italy

Late at night, a lone figure darts between pillars and doorways to a portentous backing track. Approaching footsteps from the shadows augur a meeting in the deserted street. The ‘gun’ drawn in anticipation, however, is make-believe, for I describe a scene not from Hollywood film noir, but from Un americano a Roma: an Italian comedy directed by Steno in 1954. Nando Moriconi (Alberto Sordi) is returning home from his local cinema where, jostling for position with equally wide-eyed children, he has just seen the latest Hopalong Cassidy Western. The thrill of Wild West shoot-outs and vast desert landscapes contrasts markedly with the tenements and narrow cobbled streets of the Roman district of Trastevere; yet Nando is immersed in his private world of Hollywood mythology, and projects his fantasies onto this familiar locale. The spell is abruptly broken when a policeman approaches and the music cuts out, since Nando’s ‘America’ is no more than a phantasm of the movie screen.

I open with this arresting and memorable vignette because it foregrounds cultural factors which would play key roles in the emergence and development of my central subject matter, and which form the basis of this chapter. Steno’s film – dubbed by David Ellwood ‘a milestone in the history of Italian identity’¹ – parodies and anticipates significant transformations brought about by Italy’s post-war alignment with the American sphere of influence. Simultaneously, however, it depicts this flow of transatlantic borrowing as a process of negotiation and reinterpretation, instead of mere imitation.

Nando Moriconi, though infatuated with the United States as a vibrant and modern alternative to a dreary post-war Europe, is not a passive member of the cinema audience, gazing longingly at America and its mythologies. Once he leaves the picture house he attempts to re-mould the semantic structures of Americana to formulate his own identity, with comic consequences. His incomprehension of US culture, for example, is ably symbolised by his meal of bread, milk, yoghurt and mustard, which he imagines is an American dish and which proves so inedible he is forced to turn back to the familiar spaghetti and wine. With such vivid symbolism, Un americano a Roma captures the disorientation discernible through much of Italy’s cultural output of the 1950s and 1960s, and I shall refer back to the emblematic scene on which this chapter begins at various points through the course of the book.

The films which will form the primary focus of this volume are ineluctably tied to these pre-existing processes of creative participation in the meanings of transatlantic formats. Though the notion of militant left-wing Italian Westerns may at first seem offbeat, eccentric or even downright ludicrous, this was an entirely logical, obvious and perhaps necessary conceit given the cultural-political conditions of the films’ time and place. Their anti-imperialist stances and intended rejection of Occidental capitalism ostensibly place them at odds with the very concept of the ‘West’. It is my contention, however, that they are in fact entwined in a dialogue with the traditions and ideologies of the Hollywood Western.

In order to analyse the complexities of this argument beyond reductive notions of imitation or rejection, it is essential that I chart both the cinematic and the wider cultural milieus which fostered these films. It is for this reason that the following two chapters assess their historical, political and cultural antecedents before I embark on the more textual and cinematic analysis at the book’s core. My intention is that, through this methodology, these two chapters will allow the reader to arrive at the cultural ‘moment’ of the films’ production and release, firstly through assessing the fraught debates surrounding ‘Americanisation’ in post-war Italy. I shall then refine this issue to focus on the cinema industry and then, in Chapter Two, specifically on the Western genre, to chart the myriad processes of transcultural borrowing which meet in the films of Damiani, Sollima et al.

‘Americanisation’ in Post-War Italy

By the 1950s, Gertrude Stein’s 1935 declaration that ‘the twentieth century has become the American century’² had a prescience which was all too apparent to many cultural critics in Europe. The growing hegemony of the United States had been preoccupying intellectuals for decades (William Stead, for example, published The Americanization of the World as early as 1902). In the post-war years, however, concerns over the degradation of traditional culture brought about by US-led modernity intensified considerably. The influx of Hollywood films, the perceived pell-mell adoption by youth culture of transatlantic fashions and the continued presence of US troops on European soil led many to express a sense that indigenous culture was being overwhelmed. Intellectuals from across the political spectrum – notably Orwell, Leavis, Marcuse and Sartre – engaged in earnest condemnations of American cultural imperialism, as US hegemony in the West became ever more apparent in the 1950s. A dystopian vision of a conformist mass culture sweeping away European traditions, foretold by Orwell renaming Britain ‘Airstrip One’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four,³ was dubbed ‘admass’ by JB Priestley. Palpable in both terms is a sense of horror at the standardisation awaiting the world in the second half of ‘the American century’.

Seminal theorists of early British cultural studies such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and EP Thompson were among the most vociferous of these critics. Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, in studying the ‘candy-floss world’⁴ of mass consumerism, laments the debasement of working-class culture caused by the ‘spiritual dry-rot’ of homogeneous Americanisation. His despair at British youth, whose ‘clothes […] hairstyles […] facial expressions all indicate [they] are living […] in a mythworld compounded of a few simple elements which they take to be those of American life’,⁵ demonstrates Nando Moriconi’s affectations to be signs of the times well beyond the borders of Italy.

These most rigorous of British critiques came chiefly from within the broad church of socialist thinking that formed the nascent New Left (Thompson, for example, was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain until 1956, while Hoggart was a member of the Labour Party). In Italy, however, the foremost contemporaneous and analogous stance came specifically from the Italian Communist Party (PCI). This, indeed, reflected the PCI’s considerably more influential status amongst national Communist parties as a mass movement, which broadly spoke for the political Left in national discourse prior to the mid 1960s.⁶ The PCI’s post-war ethos drew largely from the writings of the party’s founder Antonio Gramsci and from the legacy of the wartime Resistance to Nazism, but was also built on a vehement opposition to American influence. In 1948, a hard-line attitude towards American culture was announced by deputy leader Pietro Secchia:

The great American trusts send us not only their riflemen, their spies, their agents, and organizers of sabotage and betrayal, but inundate our country with their books, their films, and their lowbrow ideological rubbish that should serve to weaken, disorient, and corrupt our people.⁷

‘Americanisation’ (that is, the emulation and adoption of habits and values associated with the USA) thus became a distinctly pejorative term in post-war Europe, implying pollution and corruption. Rob Kroes defines it as a word which ‘normally serves in a discourse of rejection to point to the variety of processes through which America exerts its dismal influence on European cultures. [This view] reduces the complex processes of cultural influence […] to the stark binary form’.⁸ The issue, indeed, was not as clear-cut as Hoggart or Secchia supposed. Even within the PCI itself, the wider membership engaged in debates surrounding the political implications of US-led consumerism and mass culture for much of the 1950s. As we shall see, they did not universally accord with the leadership’s hostility.

US Influence and Italy’s ‘Economic Miracle’

David Forgacs suggests that ‘Americanisation is, in part at least, a symptom of anxieties about one’s own national identity’.⁹ It follows that countries lacking a strong national culture are among the most susceptible to the superimposition of American imports, and post-war Italy was a case in point. Shortly after the War, former Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti described the unified state of Italy as ‘the eggshell holding the national Humpty Dumpty together, a make-believe country that never obtained the complete […] support of all its incredulous citizens’.¹⁰ Despite the concerted efforts of the Fascist regime to shift loyalties from the family to the state, regional identity remained the dominant pole of attraction for many, especially in the South, and a unified national culture was largely absent outside the Catholic Church and the national football team. In 1956, local dialects were the prevalent form of everyday communication for 82 per cent of the population¹¹ and Italy did not possess a genuinely ‘national’ press.¹²

Added to this, the rapid modernisation of the economy in the 1950s arrived late when compared to northern European nations such as Britain or Germany so that Italy became simultaneously an underdeveloped and an industrialised nation.¹³ Stephen Gundle argues that Italy was the most receptive European country to American imports precisely because uneven economic development, combined with rapid industrialisation in the 1950s, coincided with this absence of a genuine secular culture common to all.¹⁴ This left a considerable void in the field of mass communications media, and weakened the nation’s ability to filter foreign imports. Moreover, postwar Christian Democrat (DC) governments were content to see this void filled by American models, not least because of the covert role these played in discrediting their rivals, the PCI.

American cinema in particular had been a source of fascination for Italian audiences since the 1920s, but in the immediate post-war period this intensified considerably. The Americans – an occupying force in a devastated country – monopolised the market and implemented the Motion Picture Export Association of America’s ‘dumping’ policy, releasing a six year backlog of Hollywood films. In the first year after the Fascist embargo on Hollywood output was lifted (1946), foreign (mostly American) imports received 87 per cent of box-office receipts.¹⁵ US films, actors and lifestyles thus became increasingly integrated into the popular Italian psyche, and this influx was purposefully tailored. Of all the Western European nations Italy, as a liminal economy with a strong left-wing sub-culture, was both a potential bridgehead and a key focus for US anxiety over encroaching communist influence. This, as well the lure of a lucrative export market, motivated the USA to play an active role in the nation’s processes of modernisation since, conversely, the potentialities of renewed European prosperity as a Cold War weapon were tangible. The domestic market thus became replete with films expounding the virtues of the American lifestyle in time for the DC’s 1948 election victory over the PCI.¹⁶ In 1949, the government opted to join NATO, committing Italy to play a central role in supporting US foreign policy. The country’s subsequent modernisation along American lines, in part facilitated by the European Recovery Programme (ERP), provided the USA with the propaganda victory it had sought in its efforts to create a free market economy in Western Europe.

The arrival of television in Italy in 1954 was a watershed in the fostering of consumer aspiration, fundamentally advancing the nation’s linguistic unification and heralding the start, in the domestic sphere, of what would become known as the ‘Economic Miracle’. The state broadcaster RAI followed a strict Catholic moral code and a DC party line, while enticing glimpses of the outside world presented Italians with a life of consumerism based broadly around the ‘American Dream’. This was at its most pronounced in such programmes as the hugely popular quiz show Lascia o raddoppia?, and the daily half hour advertisement slot Carosello. Paolo Scrivano records that the first TV sets to appear were labelled ‘American’, thus linking post-war symbols of modernity with the transatlantic brand and its aspirational subtext.¹⁷

As had previously been the case elsewhere, television was at first, like cinema, a collective form of entertainment. Bars, clubs and even the PCI’s Case del popolo (‘houses of the people’) purchased sets. In the five years between 1956 and 1961, however, the number of television licences in Italy increased more than sevenfold.¹⁸ Though still far behind the UK,¹⁹ let alone the USA, this statistic demonstrates the rate at which American models of consumption were becoming steadily more domesticated during the Economic Miracle. On the face of it these processes saw Italians become healthier, more prosperous and more cosmopolitan.²⁰ Car ownership helped to break down regional barriers, as the nation’s post-war development broadly signalled a transition from an agrarian economy to an urbanised, mobile and industrial one with a global outlook.

The economic, political and cultural influences of the USA have therefore long been recognised as the most important factors in the transformation of post-war Italy, and the nation’s rapid development of the 1950s indeed owed much to American models of modernity. Recent analysis, however, has highlighted the extent to which neither the reach nor the exact nature of this phenomenon are easily defined. In analysing the trends characteristic of Italian domestic life during the Economic Miracle, Scrivano writes:

A multifaceted process characterized by contradictory meanings, Americanization took various forms and developed in highly differentiated ways. Indeed, it is difficult to gauge the extent to which American models were ever simply adopted: closer analysis reveals that such influences were subject to repeated misinterpretation, negotiation and even resistance.²¹

That this was a relationship of ambiguity more than one of linear displacement is illustrated by the limitations of the economic transformation fostered by the so-called ‘Miracle’. To be sure, American imports had a significant impact on every stratum of Italian society but, as Scrivano concludes, ‘modernization and Americanization did not necessarily coincide’.²²

The economic realities of the era indeed depict a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: THE BACKDROP
• PART II: THE FILMS
• PART III: THE LEGACY
• APPENDICES
• Notes
• Bibliography