Tognazzi, Raimondo Vianello or Fernandel. An Italian critic has compared these comedies to American Bob Hope vehicles. Origins of the Spaghetti Western The first American-British western filmed in Spain was The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958), directed by Raoul Walsh. It was followed in 1961 by Savage Guns, a British-Spanish western, again filmed in Spain. This marked the beginning of Spain as a suitable film shooting location for any kind of European western. In 1961 an Italian company co-produced the French Taste of Violence, with a Mexican Revolution theme. In 1963, three non-comedy Italo-Spanish westerns were produced: Gunfight at Red Sands, Implacable Three and Gunfight at High Noon. In 1965, Bruno Bozzetto released his traditionally animated feature film West and Soda, a Western parody with a marked Spaghetti Western-theme; despite having been released a year after Sergio Leone's seminal Spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars, development of West and Soda actually began a year earlier than Fistful'''s and lasted longer, mainly because of the use of more time-demanding animation over regular acting. For this reason, Bozzetto himself claims to have invented the Spaghetti Western genre. Since there is no real consensus about where to draw the exact line between Spaghetti Westerns and other Eurowesterns (or other Westerns in general) one cannot say which one of the films mentioned so far was the first Spaghetti Western. However, 1964 saw the breakthrough of this genre, with more than twenty productions or co-productions from Italian companies, and more than half a dozen Westerns by Spanish or Spanish/American companies. Furthermore, by far the most commercially successful of this lot was Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars. It was the innovations in cinematic style, music, acting and story of Leone's first Western that decided that Spaghetti Westerns became a distinct subgenre and not just a number of films looking like American Westerns. A Fistful of Dollars and its impact In this seminal film, Leone used a distinct visual style with large face close ups to tell the story of a hero entering a town that is ruled by two outlaw gangs, and ordinary social relations are non-existent. The hero betrays and plays the gangs against one another in order to make money. He then uses his cunning and exceptional weapons skill to assist a family threatened by both gangs. His treachery is exposed and he is severely beaten, but in the end, he defeats the