Sixties Genres: Swords, Sandals and Spaghetti

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Over 2000 cinemas closed in Italy between 1955 and 1975 and as big-city venues began to monopolise imported and arthouse pictures, the remaining neighbourhood and small-town sites came to rely on genres with crossover appeal.

Peplum or "sword-and-sandal" movies including Pietro Francisci's La fatiche di Ercole (Hercules) (1958) - starring former Mr Universe, Steve Reeves - recalled both the silent superspectacles of the 1910s and the CinemaScope epics the Hollywood studios had been producing at Cinecittà. However, the resort to sex and special effects culminated in parodies like Duccio Tessari's Arrivani i Titani (The Titans) (1961). Yet these comic-book takes on myth and ancient history have retained a cult following.

Many peplum alumni moved into western all'italiano, among them Sergio Leone, whose Dollars trilogy (1964-66) and C'era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West) (1968) - starring Clint Eastwood and Henry Fonda respectively and scored by Ennio Morricone - transformed it from a lowbrow genre full of sado-macho violence to one that celebrated and subverted Hollywood (and the odd Japanese samurai) convention and, thus, brought the "spaghetti western" international kudos and critical respectability.

Moreover, Leone's knowingly stylised formula also inspired political, picaresque, macabre and comic variations in the Ringo, Django, Sartana and Trinity series.

David Parkinson