Have you ever heard of Western all’Italiana? Perhaps Spaghetti Western rings a bell?

The San Diego Italian Film Festival (SDIFF) will offer a free miniseries at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park every first Thursday of the month at 7:00 pm.

• June 5^th – Per un pugno di dollari
• July 3^rd – Per qualche dollaro in piu’
• August 7^th – Il buono, il brutto e il cattivo 

From the SD Italian Film Festival website:
In the early 60’s, a then obscure director, Sergio Leone, was given $200,000 and a load of leftover film stock and told to make a Western. With a script based on Akira Kurosawa’s samurai epic Yojimbo, an American TV actor named Clint Eastwood, a music composer named Ennio Morricone, and a cameraman named Massimo Dallamano, Leone made Per un Pugno di Dollari — A Fistful of Dollars. This violent, cynical and visually stunning film introduced The Man with No Name, the anti-heroic gunslinger for whom money is the only motivation and the villains are merely obstacles to be removed. Many later films followed this formula of the lone gunman in pursuit of money to the exclusion of all else. Leone’s unique style, artistic camera angles, extension of time and raw, explosive violence presented a skewed view of the West, making his film different from any earlier Western.

If Sergio Leone defined the style of the Spaghetti Western, Morricone invented its music. His hoof beat rhythms, whistling themes, and the use of the human voice as an instrument became the standard for the scores to follow. Morricone’s simple, haunting tunes did more than merely fill the gaps between passages of dialogue. They became an audible presence — punctuating action, accelerating a chase scene, or driving a showdown to its conclusion.

 

 

A Fistful of Dollars on IMDb        
For a Few Dollars More on IMDb             
The Good the Bad and the Ugly   on IMDb