For an older generation, the mention of the Western genre will bring back fond memories of John Ford, stagecoaches, John Wayne, Monument Valley and Alan Ladd. For a later generation, it will forever be associated with Clint Eastwood and the man-with-no -name trilogy (though the laconic cowboy character he portrayed has been known under various names such as Joe, Manco and Blondie) — A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The cowboy and the Western are firmly rooted slices of Americana, but the Dollar trilogy , as the Eastwood films are also known as, had its origins in Italy, having been directed by the Italian maestro, Sergio Leone; hence, the sub-genre known as the Spaghetti Western.
Today, in a world without geographical boundaries, the Western genre has flown far and wide. It has gone beyond generic conventions; while some modern filmmakers are using the so-called rules of the genre merely as a peg to hang their ideas on, others have gone back to the same conventions and reinvented them. In this spreading of wings, filmmakers have taken their cues from past masters. A Fistful of Dollars is based on Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), which, in turn, is based on Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest (1929), and John Ford’s 7 Women (1966) is set in China. It should therefore come as no surprise that the circle repeated itself with Sang-Il Lee’s Unforgiven (2013), based on Eastwood’s masterly 1992 Oscar-winning film of the same name. While the Japanese remake may not have boasted of Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, it, nevertheless, appears as a picturesque backdrop time and again, and alongside the obligatory horse opera and gun elements, the katana swishes into play as befits a samurai Western. Add Ken Watanabe’s magisterial lead performance and we are looking at a modern classic. Danish filmmaker Kristian Levring, on the other hand, stages a much more conventional revenge drama in the 1980s-set The Salvation (2014). Though shot in South Africa, the film is set in the 1870s Wild West of America. Levring, once a champion of the severe Dogme 95 film movement, abandons those restricting principles in crafting a ravishingly shot tale headlined by the stoic Mads Mikkelsen and the fiery Eva Green. While the story — a Danish settler and former soldier takes up arms to avenge his wife and son — may be as old as the genre itself, Levring’s storytelling interprets the Western as an edge-of-the-seat thriller even as the body count ratchets up.
That the world is the Western’s playground nowadays is evident from films such as David Oelhoffen’s Algeria-set Far from Men (2015), John Hillcoat’s Australia-set The Proposition (2005), and Andreas Prochaska’s Austria-set The Dark Valley (2014). The title of Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django (2008) tells you everything you need to know. For those bemoaning the lack of a decent Curry Western after Sholay (1975), there is Raja Choudhury’s upcoming and as yet untitled Ali Fazal starrer to look forward to.
