The 10 Westerns That Influenced Quentin Tarantino

The 10 Westerns That Influenced Quentin Tarantino

Throughout his career, Quentin Tarantino has been inspired by such classic westerns as Django, A Fistful of Dollars, and Rio Bravo.

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Quentin Tarantino has been influenced by all kinds of movies, from gangster movies to slasher movies to World War II movies. But, perhaps more than any other genre, the iconic writer-director was inspired by westerns. Out of the nine entries on his filmography, Tarantino has only made two straightforward westerns: Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight.

But even non-westerns like Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill show strong influence from the classics of the western genre. In almost all of Tarantino’s movies, there’s a shot lifted from Sergio Leone or Sergio Corbucci.

10 A Fistful Of Dollars (1964)

Tarantino once listed his top 20 spaghetti westerns for Spaghetti-Western.net. He put Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, the game-changing masterpiece that birthed the spaghetti western subgenre, in sixth place.

In Django Unchained, Tarantino directly recreated the shot of smoke clearing around the hero after an explosion. Like Tarantino, Leone was heavily influenced by existing cinematic classics. A Fistful of Dollars reimagines Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo in a Wild West setting.

9 Django (1966)

After Leone created the spaghetti western with A Fistful of Dollars, Sergio Corbucci solidified its brutal, bloody vision of the Old West in his 1966 masterpiece Django. Starring Franco Nero as the titular bounty hunter, Django is another westernized remake of Yojimbo, bolstered by a love story.

His most obvious Django reference is Django Unchained – one of the many unofficial Django movies that followed Corbucci’s classic – but the infamous ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs is also a nod to Django’s torture scene.

8 The Searchers (1956)

John Ford’s The Searchers is one of the most seminal westerns ever made. John Wayne stars as a Civil War veteran who spends years traversing the wilderness in search of his abducted niece, only to find that she doesn’t want to be saved.

The most iconic images from the movie are the opening and closing shots, in which Wayne is framed in his brother’s doorway. Tarantino recreated this doorway shot in both Kill Bill: Volume 2 and Inglourious Basterds.

7 For A Few Dollars More (1965)

Tarantino gave the lucrative second-place spot on his spaghetti western ranking to For a Few Dollars More, Leone’s sequel to A Fistful of Dollars (the second chapter in the so-called Dollars trilogy).

This time, Clint Eastwood’s ice-cool, gunslinging Man with No Name antihero reluctantly teams up with a fellow bounty hunter – played by Lee Van Cleef – to track down a common enemy that neither of them could handle alone.

6 The Mercenary (1968)

The fourth place on Tarantino’s list belongs to The Mercenary, another collaboration between Corbucci and Nero (their previous collaboration, Django, takes the third spot).

Tarantino has recycled a bunch of tracks from Ennio Morricone’s Mercenary score, while the shot of blood pouring from the flower in Calvin Candie’s suit in Django Unchained is a nod to a similar shot of Jack Palance’s subversively camp villain in The Mercenary.

5 The Wild Bunch (1969)

Sam Peckinpah masterfully blended the glorious bloodshed of a traditional western with the gritty revisionism of an anti-western in his 1969 masterpiece The Wild Bunch.

Tarantino’s violent filmmaking style has always been influenced by Peckinpah, but he’s pointed out the influence of The Wild Bunch in particular. According to Newsweek, Tarantino called the final shootout in The Wild Bunch “a masterpiece beyond compare.”

4 Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)

Taking fifth place in Tarantino’s list, Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West is both an affectionate love letter to westerns and a bittersweet swansong for a dying genre. Leone didn’t cast Eastwood in this one; instead, it stars Henry Fonda, playing against type as a ruthless killer, and Charles Bronson as the harmonica-playing gunfighter seeking revenge against him.

Tarantino referenced the title formula of this movie – and Leone’s final movie, Once Upon a Time in America – with the name of his own latest epic, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

3 Rio Bravo (1959)

Although it has the opening and closing acts of a classic western, Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo is mostly a hangout movie. John Wayne and his buddies spend the majority of the movie sitting around, waiting for their prisoner’s gang to show up to try to liberate him.

According to The Guardian, Tarantino loves Rio Bravo so much that he used to screen it for potential girlfriends as a litmus test to see if they’d be a good match.

2 The Great Silence (1968)

Arguably Corbucci’s bleakest, most brutal western, The Great Silence revolves around a mute gunslinger trying and failing to protect a town from ruthless bounty killers. The movie takes place in snow-bound environments, which inspired the middle act of Django Unchained.

Tarantino wrote in The New York Times, “[The Great Silence] takes place in the snow — I liked the action in the snow so much, Django Unchained has a big snow section in the middle of the movie.” Midway through Django Unchained, Dr. Schultz takes Django out into the wilderness and teaches him to shoot over the course of a harsh, unforgiving winter.

1 The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly (1966)

Leone completed the Dollars trilogy in 1966 with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, a western epic that’s arguably even greater than its two predecessors. This one sees the Man with No Name (“the good”) racing two other guys (“the bad” and “the ugly”) to a hidden cache of Confederate gold.

According to The Telegraph, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is Tarantino’s favorite movie and he once declared it to be “the greatest achievement in the history of cinema.”

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/quentin-tarantino-western-movie-influences/

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