Dinner and a movie for $20.00?  We’re doing that at Popolo.  Salads, special pizzas, and a variety of Spaghetti and distinctive sauces make the movie-watching experience unlike any other.  Our costumed waitstaff, signature drinks, and special movie seating make this more than a night out:  it’s a happening.  You could win a $50 gift card at Popolo just for being the best dressed cowboy, cowgirl, or saloon mol at dinner.  Get your tickets early because attendance is limited.  There’s one screening only.  We ask that you be at the restaurant at 7:00pm; the movie will start shortly afterward.  If it doesn’t sell out in advance, there will be tickets at the door.  We recommend you phone.  We’re serving dinner for the non-movie-goes in the lobby.

Fistful of Dollars [1964]

The Western all’Italiana or Spaghetti Western, a sub-genre of western filmmaking, emerged in the 1960s following the box office success of Italian director Sergio Leone.  Leone’s trilogy of Westerns – A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, and The Good The Bad and the Ugly – invigorated the trend already growing on the continent.  Leone’s father Vincenzo was a silent film director who had married an Italian starlet.  The western, Italian Style, introduced Leone’s signature extreme close ups and protracted long shots which, in a sense deconstructed the myth of the American cowboy that had been nurtured in Hollywood.  Leone’s childhood friend, Ennio Morricone, created the groundbreaking if quirky scores for these films which were perhaps the first film scores to take their influence from pop music.

Now viewed by most with a pinch of irony, the cult classics that gave young star Clint Eastwood his career create a strange blend of sound and picture; the dialog is often overdubbed, amplifying even further the odd pacing of Leone’s editing.  Many of these films weren’t even shot in the west and use Spanish landscapes as proxy.  But we still learn quite a bit from seeing ourselves as strangers see us.  We certainly don’t need to abandon our sense as we hold on the both the fun and the lesson of the Spaghetti Western.

Tonight, October 23, we’re showing Fistful of Dollars, the first in Leone’s trilogy.  Released in Italy in 1964 and in America in 1967, Fistful of Dollars stars Clint Eastwood as The Stranger, a role that built his iconography “the man with no name,” and, to some extent, the meme of the stranger who came to town, perhaps the most prevalent theme in the Western Genre.

It could be you.  Tuesday, October 23, 2012 at 7:00pm.