10 Best Spaghetti Westerns You Must See Before You Die
5. The Big Gundown
Columbia Pictures
Lee Van Cleef crops up again in this Sergio Donati thriller, which served primarily as an allegory for American Imperialism in Latin America.
Resurgent in the 1960s as a consequence of the Cold War climate, Donati conceived the project within the context of Mussolini's Italy, producing a tale that is as much about America's relationship with the southern continent as it is about social injustice and the dynamic shared between rich and poor.
While such themes are not entirely anomalous to the genre (Rail Barons, rich prospectors etc. were villains both in history and in cinema), the way The Big Gundown juggles them is spectacular, with Van Cleef again assuming the position of a morally ambiguous antihero who, upon acquiring his bounty, is faced with the reality that all might not be as it seems.
Thematically ambitious and riveting in every sense of the word, praise for The Big Gundown may have been slow to accumulate, but now - more than ever - it's proven to be one of the most salient works of the decade, and a classic in every sense of the word.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
