My Name is Nobody: When Henry Fonda and Terence Hill complete the Spaghetti Western

Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone will kill the spaghetti western genre and make it into cinema history thanks to My name is Nobody.

Cinema is crossed by many genres, and if today superheroes dominate, in the 60s, it was the spaghetti western. A derivative of the classic American western revised and adapted by Italian directors such as Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Sollima (the Three Sergios) to name but a few. In front of their cameras the heroes become more immoral, the law of the strongest prevails and North America becomes a land of brutality. Gone are the days of westerns with John Wayne as a white rider, replaced by filthy, unshaven, money-seeking, murderous cowboys.

The successes of For a fistful of dollars (1964) or even Django (1966) have inspired many directors, who produced a colossal amount of feature films of the same genre during the 60s and 70s. Despite the explosion experienced by the spaghetti western, it eventually ran out of steam. It is in this context, at the twilight of this cinema, that My name is Nobody in 1973 with Terence Hill and Henry Fonda. Althoughit is not the last film on this time, it tells the end in the laughter and the epic. And who better to sign the conclusion of this type of western than those who contributed to its fame: Tonino Valerii, Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone.

The time of farewell

a western to bring them all together

My name is Nobody arises as a tribute to the western by those who have played its rules. So directing is Tonino Valerii, whose early career, from 1966 to 1969, consisted of three classic spaghetti westerns of the era. Before that, he was Sergio Leone’s assistant director on For a fistful of dollars and And for a few more dollars. We have seen a worse start to a career. The idea of My name is Nobody incidentally comes from Leone, who directs a few scenes and produces it – at the time, the film is sold like that of Leone. Finally, the soundtrack is composed by the legendary Ennio Morricone, the man behind the most hummed themes of the spaghetti western.

This expert team of cowboy feature films with Italian sauce will bring together everything that set these new westerns apart from their classic American equivalents. Henry Fonda embodies Jack Beauregard, a gunslinger about to retire, but eager to achieve personal revenge before. The greedy resolution of this mission is a reflection of the immorality of these films about an America made up of men without faith or law. Terence Hill is a comedic Lucky Luke (character he will play in 1991) and the archetype of what Clint Eastwood played with Sergio Leone, a solitary and nameless character: Nobody.

My name is Person: photo, Terence HillNobody is in this photo

The construction of the scenes concentrates the identity of these Italian feature films recounting the North American wild west. Time stretches out in heavy silences where the exchange of glances is punctuated by a clock, like a metronome. And when the characters discuss, the irony and the cynicism specific to the dialogues of the westerns spaghetti dress each replica. Decor level, My name is Nobody also wants to be a tourist guide of the classic places of the genre: the desert, the saloon, the cemetery and the dusty little town.

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My Name is Nobody: When Henry Fonda and Terence Hill complete the Spaghetti Western