Fisher, Austin (2009). “A Marxist’s Gotta Do What a Marxist’s Gotta Do: Political Violence on the Italian Frontier”. Scope: an Online Journal of Film and Television Studies (15).

1960s Italian Westerns are commonly viewed as postmodern undertakings, emptying the genre of ideological undertones and leaving stylised violence in their place. Indeed, the “Spaghetti” Western arose from processes of transatlantic borrowing in post-war Italy which, while emulating American models of modernity, appropriated and re-formulated symbols of US popular culture. From this hybrid genre in turn emerged a sub-category endorsing armed insurrection against Occidental capitalism; nowhere, it would seem, could the appellation ‘Western’ be more incongruously employed.

This article, however, asserts that this militant sub-genre merely adapted the preoccupations of the Hollywood paradigm, identifying therein appropriate means for disseminating such ideologies. Violence was an issue inherent both to the Western and to contemporary Italy, when radical protests and terrorism preoccupied the nation. If the Italian Western indeed drained the genre’s brutality of all meaning, this is not a charge that can be levelled at Damiano Damiani and Sergio Corbucci; such films as ¿Quien sabe? and Compañeros instead constitute populist manifestations of contemporary militant debates concerning armed insurrection. That such transposition was effected with little thematic subversion displays the ideological malleability of what Robert Warshow called the Western’s “serious orientation to the problem of violence”.

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