Page "Spaghetti Western" Paragraph 9

Christopher Frayling, in his noted book on the Italian 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.

" Frayling and other film scholars such as Bondanella argue that this revisionism was the key to Leone's success and, to some degree, to that of the spaghetti Western genre as a whole.

In the May / June 2012 issue of Film Comment, J. Hoberman calls the spaghetti Western the " greatest genre ever.

" On Leone, specifically, he writes: " Leone country was totally distinctive ... the mood was voluptuously elegiac ; the use of space was tonic.

Epic vistas were joltingly juxtaposed with mega-close-ups.

You knew you were in Leoneland the moment a huge, unshaven face lolled across the wide, wide screen and the twanging, banshee-shreik them rose on the soundtrack like a vamp for the Last Judgement.