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Published in 2005 by Exterminating Angel LLC PO Box 3463 Ashland OR 97520 www.exterminatingangel.com
Copyright © Alex Cox, 1978, 2005
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION LANDSCAPE & SOCIETY ANTAGONISTS
-
THE GOOD
THE UGLY THE BAD OBSESSIONS
- DEATH REVENGE MADNESS, SEX & RELIGION
TECHNIQUES
- VISUALS & ART DIRECTION SOUND & SCORING
SOURCES DECLINE, INFLUENCE & VALUE APPENDIX 1
- FILMOGRAPHY
APPENDIX 2
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
"I know death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take their exits..." The Duchess of Malfi Act IV
Scene II
INTRODUCTION
"You know, I've got something in common with Hawks, Ford, Hathaway, Sturges, Walsh, Andre de Toth, and Lang -We're all blind in the right eye!"
Sergio Corbucci Interviewed Image Et Son,
Paris,
January 1971
I wrote this book back in the late nineteen seventies, when I was a student at UCLA.
What I really wanted to do was to direct... but I was enrolled in
the critical studies programme, and so as to get my hands on 16mm equipment I quickly wrote the following, which was intended to be my thesis.
When I switched to production, I no longer needed a thesis, so I sent the text off to various publishers of film books.
It was almost printed
by one of them: but I made the mistake of listening to one of my UCLA professors, and getting an agent.
The agent fell out with the publisher,
due to the small amount of the money involved, and the book was never printed.
Now, thanks to the miracle of .pdf, you can read it at last.
Many years after their demise, Spaghetti Westerns are still popular.
I'm not sure whether this is nostalgia on the part of their ageing fans of old, or whether a new generation of fanatics has discovered them, via DVD.
Certainly Imagica's release of fifty-odd Italian Westerns
on DVD in Japan suggests there is a younger market for the things.
If I were to write a book about Spaghetti Westerns now, I'd make it a chronological history.
That would seem to make the most sense.
But
this book was written back in the days when critics and theorists tended to analise films based on the symbols they saw in them.
Hence
its categories, and its concentration of the apparent structure of the genre.
Spaghetti Westerns were made before 1964, and after 1973, but 10,000 WAYS TO DIE takes their lifespan as a single decade. I think.
This is fine,
1964 saw the Italian release of Sergio Leone's A FISTFUL
OF DOLLARS, the film whose huge success began the Italian Western "boom." And 1973 saw the completion of Leone's MY NAME IS NOBODY, an elegy not just to Spaghettis but to the Western itself.
By then, the genre was
dying, replaced by urban thrillers, kung fu action, and porn.
Until I finish the chronology - which may take a little while longer this is my written offering about the Spaghetti Western. original marked-up text that went to the publisher.
It's the
I doubt that it
provides enough context: sixties cinema was rich in mercenary anti-heroes existing outside society, and there must be connections between these films and EASY RIDER, say, which my book utterly fails to pursue.
Never mind.
It's a young man's book, of interest to young men, maybe,
and to young women, if any of you like these things (I don't blame you if you don't, since they are hideously sexist and thick-eared).
What follows is an enthusiast's celebration of an unusual genre.
Whether
the celebrations are justified; whether the Italian Western killed the genre, or kept it alive for an extra decade; and what this means, I'll address later, in my old man's book.
Alex Cox Tabernas October 2005
