He took a small but pivotal role as Andy Warhol in Basquiat, artist / director Julian Schnabel's 1996 biopic of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and co-starred in Giovanni Veronesi's Spaghetti Western Il Mio West ( 1998, released as Gunslinger's Revenge in the US in 2005 ) as the most feared gunfighter in the region.

Category: Spaghetti Western actors

On the heels of the Sword and Sandal craze, a related genre, the Spaghetti Western arose and was popular both in Italy and elsewhere.

The shoot-out that ends Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western " Dollars " trilogy is a notable example of how these elements work together to produce an effect: The shot selection goes from very wide to very close and tense ; the length of shots decreases as the sequence progresses towards its end ; the music builds.

Spaghetti Western is a nickname for a broad sub-genre of Western films that emerged in the mid-1960s in the wake of Sergio Leone's film-making style and international box-office success.

The term Eurowesterns may be used to also include Western movies that were produced in Europe but not called Spaghetti Westerns, like the West German Winnetou films or Ostern Westerns.

The typical Spaghetti Western team was made up of an Italian director, Italo-Spanish technical staff, and a cast of Italian, Spanish, German and American actors, sometimes a fading Hollywood star and sometimes a rising one like the young Clint Eastwood in three of Sergio Leone's films.

Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars and the following films in his Dollars trilogy created the Spaghetti Western as a novel kind of Western.

In the last phase of the Spaghetti Western, with the Trinity films, the Leone legacy had been transformed almost beyond recognition, as ( low ) comedy reigned and terror and deadly violence gave way to harmless brawling.

Since there is no real consensus about where to draw the exact line between Spaghetti Westerns and other Eurowesterns ( or other Westerns in general ) one cannot say which one of the films mentioned so far really was the first Spaghetti Western.

The Spaghetti Western was born, flourished and faded in a highly commercial production environment.

Most succeeding Spaghetti Westerns tried to get a ragged, laconic hero with superhuman weapon skill, preferable one that looked like Clint Eastwood – Franco Nero, John Garko and Terence Hill started out that way ; Anthony Steffen and others stayed that way all their Spaghetti Western career.

In the beginning some films mixed some of these new devices ( more or less uneasily ) with the borrowed US Western devices typical for most of the 1963 – 64 Spaghetti Westerns.

Likewise, after 1965 when Leone's second Western For a Few Dollars More brought a still larger box office bonanza, bounty killer suddenly became the choice profession of Spaghetti Western heroes in films like Arizona Colt, Vengeance is Mine, 10. 000 Dollars Blood Money, The Ugly Ones, Cry for Revenge, Any Gun Can Play.

An indication the great influence of this film on the Spaghetti Western production is Django lent his name to the hero in a plentiful of succeeding westerns ..

Spaghetti Western old hand Franco Nero also made a stab at it with Cipolla Colt and Tomas Milian plays an outrageous " quick " bounty hunter modelled on Charlie Chaplin (!

By the mid-seventies a few productions – like Keoma and Four of the Apocalypse tried to revive the pre-Trinity formulas but basically the Spaghetti Western was dead as an active genre.

One " cult " Spaghetti Western that also has drawn attention from critics is Giulio Questi's Django Kill.

His Spaghetti Western equivalent would be the Western oeuvre of Demofilo Fidani.

The most popular Spaghetti Westerns were those of Sergio Leone, whose Dollars Trilogy ( A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly ), featuring Clint Eastwood and scores by Ennio Morricone, came to define the genre along with Once Upon a Time in the West.

Also considered Spaghetti Westerns is a film genre which combined traditional western ambiance with a Commedia all ' italiana-type comedy ; films including They Call Me Trinity and Trinity Is STILL My Name !, which featured Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, the stage names of Carlo Pedersoli and Mario Girotti.

Sergio Leone (; January 3, 1929 – April 30, 1989 ) was an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter most associated with the " Spaghetti Western " genre.

The Peplum ( or pepla plural ), also known as sword-and-sandal, also fusto ( after an Italian word for ' he-man ') is a genre of largely Italian-made historical or Biblical epics ( costume dramas ) that dominated the Italian film industry from 1958 to 1965, eventually being replaced in 1965 by the " Spaghetti Western ".

After the peplum gave way to the Spaghetti Western and Eurospy films in 1965, the genre lay dormant for close to 20 years.

Released in Italy in 1964 and then in the United States in 1967, it initiated the popularity of the Spaghetti Western film genre.

For 10 movies in the 1960s, German composer Martin Böttcher wrote landmark film scores, whose success also helped the movies ' international success and influenced the Italian movie industry to make Western movies of their own and create a whole new genre, the Spaghetti western ( whose most successful composer Ennio Morricone came to fame just after Martin Böttcher ).

The episodes focus on music and dancing as much as they do on the stories, with each one featuring a different music genre ( such as big band, reggae, Spaghetti Western, polka, Motown, disco and salsa ) and four new songs, usually with at least one rearrangement of a well-known or traditional song.

This was also the time when every other hero or villain in Spaghetti Westerns started carrying a musical watch, after its ingenious use in For a Few Dollars More.

In the preceding years there was a deluge of Spaghetti Westerns with a pair of heroes with ( most often ) conflicting motives.

Beside the first three Spaghetti Westerns by Leone, a most influential film was Sergio Corbucci's Django starring Franco Nero.

Some critics deplore these post-Trinity films as a degeneration of the " real " Spaghetti Westerns, and it is true that Hill's and Spencer's skilful use of body language was a hard act to follow.

However, in response to the growing commercial success of various shades of sex films there was a greater exposure of naked skin in some Spaghetti Westerns, among others Dead Men Ride and Heads or Tails.

In the United States around the end of the 19th century, spaghetti was offered in restaurants as Spaghetti Italienne ( which likely consisted of noodles cooked past al dente, and a mild tomato sauce flavored with easily found spices and vegetables such as cloves, bay leaves, and garlic ) and it wasn't until decades later that it came to be commonly prepared with oregano or basil.

Spaghetti Westerns laid the groundwork for Sholay in 1975 after which it was called as curry western.

A very early example was a short piece on the " Swiss Spaghetti Harvest " that appeared as an April fools ' joke on the British television program Panorama in 1957.

In 2008, the " Spaghetti Bowl " interchange with Interstate 80 and U. S. Route 46 was improved, costing $ 70 million.

* Until recently, a free-speech zone on the Cumberland County courthouse lawn was the site of several unofficial displays, including a statue of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, an Iraq and Afghanistan Soldier's Memorial, a miniature Statue of Liberty, chainsaw carvings of a nativity scene, Jesus carrying the cross, and monkeys and bears.

Clint Eastwood was among the first of many American actors to adopt this persona, which he used to great effect in his Western roles, especially the Spaghetti Westerns made with Sergio Leone, where he played a similar " Man with No Name " character like Mifune did in Yojimbo.

He was also active in business as a partner and vice president of Papa Luigi Spaghetti Dens, a San Francisco based franchise company formed by Joe Kearns and James Braly.

Another new menu item, " Meat & Spaghetti in Tomato Sauce " was added in 1943.

Leo's Spaghetti bar and gelateria was opened for the Olympics in 1956 by an Italian migrant as one of Melbourne's first Italian restaurants and quickly became a Melbourne establishment.

" Attitude " was covered by Guns N ' Roses on The Spaghetti Incident?

" The art was parodied by several groups including one-time A & M band Soul Asylum and by comedian Pat Cooper for his album Spaghetti Sauce and Other Delights.

Upon inspection, it was found that Spaghetti Junction itself was in need of repair work because salt and grit had weakened the joints in the structure.