List of Western subgenres
Western narratives often concern the gradual attempts to tame the crime-ridden American West using wider themes of justice, freedom, rugged individualism, manifest destiny, and the national history and identity of the United States.
The film is filled with bizarre characters and occurrences, use of maimed and dwarf performers, and heavy doses of Christian symbolism and Eastern philosophy.
In the 1930s and 1940s, these were typically films about horsemen in rural Mexican society, displaying a set of cultural concerns very different from the Hollywood metanarrative, but the overlap between "charro" movies and Westerns became more apparent in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.
The Paleface "features a cowardly hero known as "Painless" Peter Potter (Bob Hope), an inept dentist, who often entertains the notion that he is a crack sharpshooter and accomplished Indian fighter".
[16] In this period, post-Western precursors to the modern neo-Western films began to appear, such as Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men (1952) and John Sturges's Bad Day at Black Rock (1955).
Thazhvaram (1990), the Malayalam film directed by Bharathan and written by noted writer M. T. Vasudevan Nair, perhaps most resembles the spaghetti Westerns in terms of production and cinematic techniques.
Kodama Simham (1990), a Telugu action film, starring Chiranjeevi and Mohan Babu, was one more addition to the Indo Western genre that fared well at the box office.
[24] Irumbukkottai Murattu Singam (2010), a Western adventure comedy film, based on cowboy movies and paying homages to the John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Jaishankar, was made in Tamil.
[26] Zachariah featured appearances and music supplied by rock groups from the 1970s, including the James Gang[26] and Country Joe and the Fish as "The Cracker Band".
[26] The independent film Hate Horses starring Dominique Swain, Ron Thompson, and Paul Dooley billed itself as the "second electric Western".
[30] One of the grandest films in this genre is Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), which shows many operatic conflicts centered on control of a town while using wide-scale shots of Monument Valley locations against a broad running-time.
[28]: 136 Other notable examples include Duel in the Sun (1946)[28]: 127 with Joseph Cotten and Gregory Peck, The Searchers (1956) with John Wayne, Giant (1956) with Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean, The Big Country (1958) with Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston, Cimarron (1960) with Glenn Ford, How the West Was Won (1962) with James Stewart and Henry Fonda (among many others), Custer of the West (1967) with Robert Shaw, Duck, You Sucker!
One of the most popular German Western franchises was the Winnetou series, which featured a Native American Apache hero in the lead role.
Also in Finland, only a few Western films have been made, the most notable of which could be the 1971 low-budget comedy The Unhanged, directed by, written by, and starring Spede Pasanen.
Some new Euro-Westerns emerged in the 2010s, including Kristian Levring's The Salvation, Martin Koolhoven's Brimstone, and Andreas Prochaska's The Dark Valley.
Notable examples are Blood on the Land (1966), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film,[34] and Bullets don't come back (1967).
Undead Nightmare (2010), an expansion to Red Dead Redemption (2010) is an example of a video game in this genre, telling the tale of a zombie outbreak in the Old West.
Singers Doris Day and Howard Keel worked together in Calamity Jane, a huge success on release which remains one of the most popular Western musicals.
On the other hand, crooner Dean Martin and pop singer Ricky Nelson played the parts of gunfighters in Rio Bravo, which is not a musical, although they did combine to sing a couple of songs in the middle of the film while they were guarding the jailhouse.
"[42][43] Examples of narco Westerns include the American television shows Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, as well as the films Miss Bala, El Infierno and Heli.
Narco Westerns often feature narratives of personal identity, usually the struggles of a cowboy-like anti-hero, while focusing on themes of life and death, love and loss, greed and desire, and hope and pain.
Osterns are typically divided between "Easterns", which sought to portray an Eastern European analogue to the Wild West set in frontier regions across Eurasia, and "Red Westerns", which were set in the American West but sought to subvert the ideas of manifest destiny and other narratives typical of Hollywood Westerns in favor of Marxist ideals of proletarian internationalism and class consciousness.
Osterns frequently featured Gypsy or Turkic people in the role of the Indians, due to the shortage of authentic Native Americans in Eastern Europe.
Gojko Mitic portrayed righteous, kind-hearted, and charming Indian chiefs (e.g., in Die Söhne der großen Bärin (1966), directed by Josef Mach).
Examples include The Drifting Avenger, Break the Chain, Millionaires Express, East Meets West, Tears of the Black Tiger and Dynamite Warrior, Let the Bullets Fly, Unforgiven, Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts, Buffalo Boys, The Good, the Bad and the Weird, Golden Kamuy and Sukiyaki Western Django.
[50] Early examples are serial films such The Phantom Empire (1935) and Ghost Patrol (1936) which incorporated supernatural figures of science fiction fantasy into a Western setting.
[50] An example of cross-over genre, the fantasy science fiction Western The Valley of Gwangi (1969) displayed cowboys fighting dinosaurs, a trend that took hold during the 1960s.
Many of these films are low-budget affairs, shot in locations (for example, the Spanish desert region of Almería) chosen for their inexpensive crew and production costs, as well as their similarity to landscapes of the Southwestern United States.
[61] Veteran American actors Charles Bronson, Lee Van Cleef, and Clint Eastwood[61] became famous by starring in spaghetti Westerns, although the films also provided a showcase for other noted actors such as James Coburn, Henry Fonda, Rod Steiger, Klaus Kinski, Jason Robards, Gian Maria Volonte and Eli Wallach.
The film Western Religion (2015), by writer and director James O'Brien, introduces the devil into a traditional Wild West setting.
