The Italians started making Westerns of their own, only their Westerns broke all the rules. The good, the bad and the ugly is a prime example of this.

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   The western film genre was first introduced in 1910 and remained popular throughout the years to the present day. Western film genres generally attempt to portray the struggle of man trying to conquer the wilderness of the west, to triumph over nature, in the name of civilization, or the fights to take back the land from the ‘savage’ Indians. Over time the Western film genre has evolved from being stories about stereotypical heroes fighting the baddies in the name of ‘Law and justice’ to completely the opposite and centering on baddie vs. baddie. That’s where ‘spaghetti westerns’ come in. in the 1960s America began to tire of Westerns and Europe became more interested in it, Italy especially. The Italians started making Westerns of their own, only their Westerns broke all the rules. The good, the bad and the ugly is a prime example of this.

   In the opening sequence of the movie there is man waiting in a secluded town in the middle of a desert, after a few moments two other men arrive. They begin slowly walking towards each other until they reach each other outside of the saloon. This is where the audience is misled. At first you think that the first man you saw was the hero of the story and that he is about to fight the two other ‘baddies’. However all three men suddenly burst into the bar firing there guns at a fourth party, the shocking part is that all three men are killed by said fourth party and he runs off escaping into the distance. This is disturbing for the viewer as they had thought they knew who the hero was but now he was dead and they are left confused but intrigued.

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 Iconography is the symbolic meanings of subjects and signs used to convey ideas important to particular cultures or religions, and the conventions governing the use of such forms. There was plenty of this used in the starting sequence to create tension. One part being the abandoned wagon in the street, wagons were meant to represent the journey of the homesteaders as they overcome the barren west and create civilization, to show an abandoned wagon is like saying these people failed in that quest and that they couldn’t win against nature. Another point would be the flapping hides that the ...

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