Alex Cox at the Venice Film Festival in 2007

My obsession with the spaghetti western started early. Mostly, I blame my schooling. While it’s thought that girls do better, academically and socially, if educated separately from boys, the awful corollary of this is that boys would be educated separately from girls. And that – as I discovered when attending a single-sex grammar on the Wirral in the mid-1960s, where arbitrary violence and crazed sadists ruled the playground – is a horrible thing.

Had I gone to a mixed-sex school, in a richer, more emotionally balanced environment, maybe I’d have developed a different cinematic outlook, a more nuanced and finely tuned take on things. But things work out the way they do, and my interests as a filmgoer tended towards this mad-boy stuff. Sure, I could appreciate a film such as Tony Richardson’s Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962), with its northern anti-hero who refused to play by the rules. But the world I knew best had more in common with the psychos and testosterone freaks depicted in the new Italian, or spaghetti, westerns that emerged during this period.

By this time, the American western had deteriorated drastically. A once fine and vigorous film genre – a uniquely American art form – was on its last legs. The great American westerns, films such as John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and Fort Apache (1948), mixed both pessimism and optimism in a heady stew; later, in the 1950s, the form was undercut by “political” westerns such as High Noon (1952), a parable of the McCarthy period starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, and Run of the Arrow (1957), in which the hero was an Irish-Confederate-renegade-Sioux and the villain a US cavalry officer.

Having created its own myth and thoroughly critiqued it, where could the western go from here? Into retreat, it seemed to me as a lad; all I saw at the cinema were ponderous Technicolor bores, usually starring John Wayne and directed by some superannuated Hollywood hack. Wayne, like his master, John Ford, had become both a film director and a political reactionary. Both made films in support of the US war in Vietnam: Wayne’s was a maudlin drama, The Green Berets (1968); Ford’s an unscreenable documentary, Vietnam! Vietnam! (1971). In these men’s minds, defending the Alamo from the Mexicans and rolling back communism in south-east Asia were the same thing. Television westerns were even worse, banal soap operas about patriarchal ranchers and their clans such as Bonanza, The Virginian and The High Chaparral.

Then the Italians rode into town. For them, westerns were a great fantasy world, something they had enjoyed in films or comic books. Yet their take on the wild west was something quite different. Hollywood had chosen to manufacture a certain type of product, pretending this was what the audience wanted: it was sentimental, propagandistic, authoritarian stuff. The Italian directors made cynical – ironic would be too mild a word – popular action films, sometimes about gladiators, sometimes about spies. All featured the kind of infantile male violence that greatly appealed to teenage boys such as me and my classmates. The fact that the Italian westerns tended to receive an X certificate – and were, therefore, banned to all under 16 – made the thrill even bigger to 13- and 14-year-old boys.

Beyond the violence, the Italian directors shared a sense of radicalism, of anarchy, of a moribund fantasy world being turned on its head to reveal terrible truths, social and political. Francesco Rosi made great political histories, The Mattei Affair (1972) and Lucky Luciano (1973), and Bernardo Bertolucci depicted fascist Italy in The Conformist (1970). Others made the western their political battleground. Damiano Damiani’s Quién Sabe (1966, also known as A Bullet for the General), was a western about covert US intervention in Latin America; Sergio Corbucci turned out a string of tirades against polite society disguised as cowboy films, where priests and pacifists are apt to be shot, or have their ears cut off, as in Django (1965). In The Big Silence (1968), Corbucci presciently depicts a banker as the devil incarnate. And, more than two decades before Stone’s JFK, Sergio Leone’s assistant Tonino Valerii made The Price of Power (1969), a western set in Dallas about a presidential assassination. I was very fond of this stuff though, in general, the critics were not. Many silly column inches were devoted to the notion that there was something “wrong” in Italians even attempting to make westerns.

These strange movies tended to turn up in smaller cinemas, on double bills with Italian action films or melodramas about nuns who were walled up alive in convents. Some didn’t get here at all. Corbucci’s Django, the story of a shell-shocked civil war veteran whose efforts to become an arms dealer end in disaster, was said to have been refused a certificate by the British censor. It was never made clear why, though it might have been something to do with a black-caped Franco Nero machine-gunning hordes of red-hooded Klansmen in a sea of mud.

This was enough to make me thirst for more. As an exchange student in the late 1960s I spent time in Paris, where this and many other interesting films weren’t banned, and pursued obscure Italian westerns from cinema to cinema. I didn’t manage to track down Django while I was there but I saw Carlo Lizzani’s Requiescant (1967), with its deranged priest-killer-hero, and its cameo by Pier Paolo Pasolini as a warrior-priest (the great communist filmmaker was paid in kind, with a Ferrari).

Even the worst of these films had some merit (there was never an entirely bad western, after all). Even the 50 or so super-cheap sequels inspired by Django, often shot in gravel pits outside Rome, might feature a good fight scene, or a bizarre villainous character. And the better ones – shot in the desert of Tabernas, in Almeria, in Guadix or Burgos – had a magnificent visual aspect. Like Ford’s pilgrimages to Monument Valley, these location visits to the wilder and more beautiful parts of Spain gave small stories a giant background. Sergio Leone’s genius was this integration of the massive and the miniature, ideally within a single shot: as in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), when a sweeping tracking shot takes us from a lone gravestone to the revelation of a vast graveyard.

At this stage in my life, I didn’t expect to be a filmmaker. Yet I still learnt by watching these films. I acquired information, a cinematic shorthand, that would be helpful later on. I also learnt the importance of hiring a great designer and, if possible, providing them with a good budget. It seemed to me that Carlo Simi’s sets and costume designs were the most crucial part of the spaghetti western – he came up with Clint Eastwood’s serape, and the long duster coats worn by Henry Fonda and every western bad guy since 1968 – even more so than the violence or the epic performances or Ennio Morricone’s remarkable scores.

Simi designed westerns big and small but for Leone he would build structures with an epic nature that matched the landscape: the ranch house in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), a huge incongruous home in the middle of nothingness; the half-built town of Flagstone, also from that film, a handful of brave buildings beside the railroad in an endless plain, or the Bank of El Paso in For a Few Dollars More (1965), which imitated the chalk-white desert buttes surrounding it.

In the early 1970s, I took the train to Almeria in southern Spain to check out Simi’s structures. These were working film locations – they hadn’t yet become tourist attractions – and I watched from a hill as Ken Russell and his crew filmed exteriors for Valentino on Simi’s “El Paso” set. I camped out in Simi’s ranch house, across the highway from a new “old” town, recently constructed for a Charles Bronson film. I remember thinking that Bronson clearly wasn’t a tall fellow, as all the doors seemed to have been built three-quarter size.

I finally caught up with Django – also designed by Simi – when I was a graduate film student at University of California, Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. The film had a US distributor but a very limited release. As I worked in the film and TV archive, I was able to borrow a print from the distributor and watch it on a flatbed editing machine. Relentless, surrealistically cruel and crazy, it is a film I’ve seen several times; it never disappoints.

Somehow I’d ended up in the critical studies department at UCLA, even though I knew by now I wanted to be in “production”, a different department in the same building, where the students had more access to camera and editing equipment.

So I tried to accelerate my progress through the critical studies course (and thus my departmental switch) by writing my thesis. My subject? The Italian western. Back then, “serious” film academia tended towards something called semiotics and if you wrote a book about anything to do with film you were expected to break the damn thing up into sections and subsections about the various symbols, signs and meanings that other academics had decided were crucial. My attempt at a spaghetti western book, called 10,000 Ways to Die, was overshadowed by all this and didn’t amount to very much. It wasn’t published.

Thirty years on, however, a new version of the book is set for release. It is written as a brief history of the form, with reviews of what I think are interesting or important films, in chronological order. The chronological part was of most interest to me; I also watched the films, as far as I could, in the order in which they were made. In that way, I thought, it would be possible to detect the development of the form. It is a fascinating study in the case of Sergio Leone, whose tale of insecurity and great success unfolds along with his films.

Spaghetti westerns may have become “respectable” now but only Leone is accorded much respect – his DVDs alone are marketed as the “director’s cut”. Leone was the one bad boy allowed into the House of Culture; the door was then closed and the rest of the ragazzi – Corbucci, Damiani, Giulio Questi – remain outside.

Corbucci and Leone were friends, then rivals as well as filmmakers of great influence and significance. Leone’s west was one of uneasy alliances between god-like men – cat-like, innately violent westerners; cold, technological easterners, and Mexican bandits. Corbucci’s west was a world without alliances, in which one man – usually crippled, maimed or blind – was forced to confront two gangs of equal villainy. In Leone’s world, money was always the goal. In Corbucci’s world, money was mentioned, then quickly forgotten in a downward spiral of torture, destruction and loss.

These days, westerns don’t figure much on the horizon, outside the world of DVDs. In Almeria, three of the old sets remain as tourist destinations, paved and featuring faux-western brawls. The Italians don’t make westerns any more, though the French still do, from time to time. And it is one of the laws of Hollywood that every up-and-coming male star will get to make (and possibly direct) at least one western as a vanity project.

Obsessions are interesting things but they don’t last for ever, any more than anything else does. And, after watching so many spaghetti westerns, with the same sets, the same actors, the same repetitious jokes, the same sexism and racism and ennui masquerading as entertainment, I am finally sick of them! Or, at least, I tell myself I am. Just as Corbucci once told reporters he was sick of westerns and would never make another.

But then he got to thinking about a man on a horse against the horizon, and about how fine that looked and, before he knew it, he was back in the desert again.

Alex Cox’s ‘10,000 Ways To Die: A Director’s Take on the Spaghetti Western’ is published by Kamera Books, £16.99. He is working on ‘Repo Chick’, a sequel to ‘Repo Man’

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Alex Cox on making his own spaghetti western

Just over 20 years ago, sheltering from the sun on the main street of a western set in southern Spain built for a Charles Bronson film, I shot a spaghetti western of my own.

The result, Straight to Hell (1987), is the only western to feature Dennis Hopper, Shane MacGowan and Grace Jones. Despite this, it is not universally acclaimed. What the reasonable, sane, general viewer does not know, but the spaghetti western fanatic will understand, is that Straight to Hell is a homage to the greatest spaghetti western, Giulio Questi’s Django Kill (1967).

The latter is also the most perverse, pessimistic and sinister western of all time. Questi didn’t even like westerns (“the only one I like is the one I made,” he told an interviewer), so, when asked to write a western script immediately and to start shooting the following week, he based his film on his experiences as a teenage partisan, fighting the fascists in the second world war.

These must have been some experiences. In Django Kill, soldiers are massacred by bandits, who then turn on each other with guns. The hero, sometimes called Django, sometimes known as the Stranger, sometimes, oddly, known as Barney, crawls out of his grave and goes in search of the men who shot him. Most of them are already dead, lynched by xenophobic and religious townspeople. They, in turn, are terrorised by a sadistic, white-clad rancher, Sorro, who dresses his “muchachos” all in black, and plays the barrel organ.

This was my inspiration and Tom Richmond, the cinematographer, recreated Questi’s lighting designs – big washes of yellow and blue – in all the night-time sequences. We had a great actor in Biff Yeager, who (I think) gave Django Kill’s Roberto Camardiel a run for his money in the white-suited rancher-villain role. For Sorro’s black-clad muchachos, enter the Pogues, all dressed in mariachi outfits, scoured from the costume houses of Madrid.

Looking back, the results may not be quite of the same Bunuelian standard as Questi’s masterpiece. But, for four weeks on that dusty desert set, we were in Italian western heaven, and that is worth a lot, if you are spaghettily inclined.