To some extent Notley Maddox seems to me right. European Westerns did follow the American genre because it was profitable. But they have their own differences. Frayling on Spaghetti Westerns shows ways in which (while paying lip service to the American tradition) they engage with European values. Leone's westerns, for instance, can be seen as deriving their darkness ultimately from fine traditions of Machiavellism, from the kind of monsters that stalked Webster's Jacobean drama, from the iconography of the Catholic church, from the experience of a people (hence the move of the dramatic location from the US to Mexico) used through long generations to living under despots, from the gods and demons of the classic pantheons. And they don't resonate to the thrills of the American Dream, as you'll have noticed! Frayling's theoretical bibliography (he refers to Method) lists those books he used to give him an analytical apparatus - a long list, which includes Althusser, Barthes, Wollen and others, including Will Wright. The last time I tried to order it for students, Frayling was out of print in the UK; but it is a fine study, well worth while pulling from the library if you are teaching this field. Good luck John Izod