Pietro Germi, Hybridity and the Roots of the Italo-Western

This chapter examines Western tropes in Italian cinema's ‘neorealist’ phase. Taking as key case studies In the Name of the Law (In nome della legge, Pietro Germi, 1949) and The Bandit of Tacca del Lupo (Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo, Pietro Germi, 1952), it explores the complex ways in which Germi worked references to American genres into his work, thereby debunking approaches presupposing an Italian neorealism separated from ‘popular’ cinema, and demonstrating an oft-overlooked precursor to the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and 1970s. Identifying in Germi's two films a representational equivalence between the Italian South and the American West, the chapter charts a lineage of tales of banditry that blended the international and the local.