The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly/Navajo Joe NC

These spaghetti Westerns differ from most Westerns of their time by the method in which the story is told. Both films start out with violence; TGTBTU shows Tuco shooting down bounty hunters and Navajo Joe starts with Duncan killing Joe's wife. The American Western film norm of the time did not start with such chaotic violence, in so much that early violence almost always included some character development to understand the reason for the violence. In these spaghetti Westerns, the audience is plunged into violence from the start, which continues until the end. The violence itself, much more prevalent, also almost always includes much more gore. The texture of the colors of nature in these films (the colors of the brown dirt, red/grayish mountains, and faded green grass) bring out the red of the blood. The films tell stories, but much of the films is devoted to conflict and death. Scenes are reserved in traditional Westerns that help develop the story, but spaghetti Westerns seem to be exclusively about violence at times. The violence is harsh, but it seems nonsensical at times. The doctor's death as well as his wive's in Navajo Joe, while not comic, almost invokes laughter due to its ridiculousness. The American Western builds up to serious scenes of life and death with talking and interaction, but the doctor and his wife seem to be senselessly shot down.

Besides the more common violence, greed and capitalism are also subjects more deeply explored. The gold in TGTBTU is on everyones mind, and characters are hurt and killed in its search, just as the bank's money in Navajo Joe is sought by the doctor (doctors are often well paid anyways, showing the intense greed of the character) while Joe acts in good will to be paid.

Though Blondie and Navajo Joe may arguably be the alpha male cowboys of these films if they carry alpha male cowboys, they portray the roles around the money. Joe's aim is to collect his pay for acquiring the money for the town, and Blondie rides off with the gold. Though The Searchers presents a John Wayne playing a character who had mysteriously acquired gold at the beginning of the film, the film does not center around this fact. The strength of greed in these films questions the idea of the alpha male in spaghetti Westerns altogether.

With the ideas of violence and greed, these foreign-produced films express from a cultural studies point of view the global view on America. As these films were created during a time when world travel was not the norm as it is today, most people living abroad might judge a people by what their respective medias said about them. Foreigners recognized the place of America in wars, and in seeing past Westerns and how American's acted, foreign stereotypes of the US may be thought to be exaggerated, but it may say how those abroad really do think of America. The world could think that Americans are violent and greedy by how the film was produced and the way the stories were told. Whether this is true or not, American Westerns have been seen as a mark of heritage and pride of American culture and expansion. Spaghetti Westerns try to say not-so-subtly how they believed Americans truly behaved and acted.