N THE YEARS since it was made, La strada per Fort Alamo—Mario Bava’s first excursion into the West-
ern genre—has become one of his most elu- sive films. Although entirely (and somewhat deservedly) eclipsed today by many other Italian Westerns, the it was produced at a time when the so-called “Spaghetti Western” had yet to be born, before the films of Sergio Leone—beginning with Per un pugno di dollari/A Fistful of Dollars (1964)—estab- lished the cinematic vocabulary of this national genre.
Much like the Italian horror film in the mid- 1950s, the Italian Western was nothing new in 1964, but it had been extinct long enough to become something new. One of the earliest Italian Westerns, Una signora dell’Ovest (“A Lady of the West”) was directed by Carl Koch in 1942.1
Christopher Frayling tells us that Koch’s film was criticized in its day by Giuseppe De Santis for its “cardboard backings . . . and a general atmosphere of the baroque.”2
(If this
is an accurate description, Koch’s film was a stylistic antecedent of La strada per Fort Alamo and would make very interesting viewing.)
