Like many film fans, I grew up famil­iar with the term “Spaghet­ti west­ern,” but I’d near­ly reached adult­hood before fig­ur­ing out what, exact­ly, Amer­i­ca’s most pop­u­lar Ital­ian dish had to do with Amer­i­ca’s once-most pop­u­lar movie genre. But even if they don’t know the spe­cif­ic def­i­n­i­tion of a Spaghet­ti west­ern, those who enjoy them know a Spaghet­ti west­ern when they see one. Ser­gio Leone’s A Fist­ful of Dol­lars, For a Few Dol­lars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; Ser­gio Cor­buc­ci’s Min­neso­ta Clay and Djan­go; Enzo Bar­boni’s They Call Me Trin­i­ty and Trin­i­ty Is Still My Name — if a pic­ture belongs in that com­pa­ny, nobody doubts it.

You’ll notice that all those direc­tors have Ital­ian names, and indeed, west­ern all’i­tal­iana, the Ital­ian equiv­a­lent of “Spaghet­ti west­ern,” sim­ply means “Ital­ian-style west­ern.” These Ital­ian-pro­duced tales of the law­less 19th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can west, some­times fea­tur­ing fad­ing or ris­ing Hol­ly­wood stars (as with the young Clint East­wood, who would become iden­ti­fied with Leone’s “Man with No Name”), and often shot in the Span­ish desert, rode high from the mid-1960s to the ear­ly 70s, bring­ing a fresh sen­si­bil­i­ty and vis­cer­al impact which had for the most part drained out of the home­grown vari­ety.

Trust a genre-lov­ing auteur like Quentin Taran­ti­no (and one who made his very own Djan­go a few years back) to know Spaghet­ti west­erns inside and out. While even those of us who nev­er turn down the chance to enjoy a good Spaghet­ti west­ern might strug­gle to name ten of them, Taran­ti­no can eas­i­ly run down his per­son­al top twen­ty:

1. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Ser­gio Leone, 1966)
2. For a Few Dol­lars More (Ser­gio Leone, 1965)
3. Djan­go (Ser­gio Cor­buc­ci, 1966)
4. The Mer­ce­nary (Ser­gio Cor­buc­ci, 1966)
5. Once Upon a Time in the West (Ser­gio Leone, 1968)
6. A Fist­ful of Dol­lars (Ser­gio Leone, 1964)
7. Day of Anger (Toni­no Valerii, 1967)
8. Death Rides a Horse (Giulio Petroni, 1967)
9. Nava­jo Joe (Ser­gio Corbucci,1966)
10. The Return of Ringo (Duc­cio Tes­sar, 1965)
11. The Big Gun­down (Ser­gio Sol­li­ma, 1966)
12. A Pis­tol for Ringo (Duc­cio Tes­sari, 1965)
13. The Dirty Out­laws (Fran­co Ros­set­ti, 1967)
14. The Great Silence (Ser­gio Cor­buc­ci, 1968)
15. The Grand Duel (Gian­car­lo San­ti, 1972)
16. Shoot the Liv­ing, Pray for the Dead (Giuseppe Vari, 1971)
17. Tepepa (Giulio Petroni, 1968)
18. The Ugly Ones (Euge­nio Mar­tin, 1966)
19. Viva Djan­go! (Fer­di­nan­do Bal­di, 1967)
20. Machine Gun Killers (Pao­lo Bian­chi­ni, 1968)

You can watch all the trail­ers of these Spaghet­ti west­ern mas­ter­pieces in the playlist above, cre­at­ed by The Spaghet­ti West­ern Data­base. Some may now strike you as dis­arm­ing­ly straight­for­ward about bal­ly­hoo­ing the excite­ment promised by the fea­ture they adver­tise, and you may find oth­ers sur­pris­ing­ly fun­ny and more self-aware. While I defy any­one to watch the entire playlist of trail­ers with­out want­i­ng to dive into this sur­pris­ing­ly lit­tle-explored tra­di­tion, noth­ing gets me quite as excit­ed about watch­ing a movie — old or new, sub­tle or schlocky, genre or oth­er­wise — as Taran­ti­no’s con­ta­gious cinephil­ia.

via The Spaghet­ti West­ern Data­base

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Tarantino’s Top 20 Grindhouse/Exploitation Flicks: Night of the Liv­ing Dead, Hal­loween & More

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists the 12 Great­est Films of All Time: From Taxi Dri­ver to The Bad News Bears

Quentin Tarantino’s Hand­writ­ten List of the 11 “Great­est Movies”

Watch John Wayne Star in 25 Clas­sic West­erns: All Free Online

The Great Train Rob­bery: Where West­erns Began

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The his­to­ry books say that there were three Japan­ese film­mak­ers to emerge in the 1950s – Ken­ji Mizoguchi, Yasu­jiro Ozu and Aki­ra Kuro­sawa. Nev­er mind that Mizoguchi and Ozu made many of their best movies in the 1930s. Nev­er mind that mas­ter­ful, inno­v­a­tive direc­tors like Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshi­ta have been unfair­ly over­shad­owed by the bril­liance of these three greats.

Mizoguchi was an ear­ly mod­ernist who by the end of his career made med­i­ta­tive movies about how women suf­fer at the hands of men. His mas­ter­pieces like Uget­su and San­sho Dayu feel like Bud­dhist scroll paint­ings come to life. Ozu, “the most Japan­ese” of all film­mak­ers, made qui­et­ly mov­ing dra­mas about fam­i­lies, like Tokyo Sto­ry, but did so in a way that dis­card­ed such Hol­ly­wood prin­ci­ples as con­ti­nu­ity edit­ing and the 180 degree rule. Ozu was a qui­et rad­i­cal.

Com­pared to Ozu and Mizoguchi, Kurosawa’s movies are noisy, mas­cu­line and vital. Unlike Ozu, he didn’t chal­lenge Hol­ly­wood film form but improved on it. Born rough­ly a decade after the oth­er two film­mak­ers, Kuro­sawa spent his youth watch­ing West­ern movies, absorb­ing the lessons of his cin­e­mat­ic heroes like John Ford, Howard Hawks and Frank Capra. At his cre­ative height, in the 1950s and 60s, Kuro­sawa pro­duced mas­ter­piece after mas­ter­piece. Hol­ly­wood would remake or ref­er­ence Kuro­sawa con­stant­ly in the years that fol­lowed but few of those films had Kurosawa’s inven­tive­ness.

Tony Zhou, who has made a career of dis­sect­ing movies in his excel­lent video series Every Frame a Pic­ture, argues that the key to Kuro­sawa is move­ment. “A Kuro­sawa movie moves like no one else’s,” Zhou notes in his video. “Each one is a mas­ter class in dif­fer­ent types of motion and also ways to com­bine them.”

Kuro­sawa had an innate under­stand­ing that there is inher­ent dra­ma in the wind blow­ing in the trees. Like Andrei Tarkovsky and lat­er Ter­rence Mal­ick, he liked to place human dra­ma square­ly in the realm of nature. The rain falls, a fire rages and that move­ment makes an image com­pelling. He under­stood that graph­ic con­sid­er­a­tions out­weighed psy­cho­log­i­cal ones – he sim­pli­fied and exag­ger­at­ed a character’s move­ment with the frame to make char­ac­ter traits and emo­tions easy to reg­is­ter for the audi­ence. His cam­era move­ments were clear, moti­vat­ed and flu­id. Zhou com­pares Sev­en Samu­rai with The Avengers. You might have thought that The Avengers was unin­spired and soul­less but after watch­ing Zhou’s video, you’ll under­stand why – aside from the sil­ly plot and char­ac­ters – the movie was unin­spired and soul­less. The piece should be required view­ing for film­mak­ers every­where. You can watch it above.

And below you can see anoth­er video Zhou did on Kuro­sawa, focus­ing on his 1960 movie The Bad Sleep Well.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Kurosawa’s Rashomon Free Online, the Film That Intro­duced Japan­ese Cin­e­ma to the West

David Lynch Lists His Favorite Films & Direc­tors, Includ­ing Felli­ni, Wilder, Tati & Hitch­cock

Andrei Tarkovsky Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

Lis­ten to François Truffaut’s Big, 12-Hour Inter­view with Alfred Hitch­cock (1962)

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la Star in Japan­ese Whisky Com­mer­cials (1980)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.