It wasn’t just Hollywood that revelled in the glorious
adventures offered by the Western as a genre – Europe made its fair share, too.
By Oliver Farry
The Western is one of those film genres that owes its
survival largely to the enthusiasm of hardcore cinephiles. Since they stopped
making regular appearances on cinema marquees sometime in the 1970s, there has
been relatively little demand for Westerns and what films do get made are often
quickly forgotten. Yet there remains a desire among filmmakers to tackle a
Western – some have even been successful, such as the TV show Deadwood, Andrew
Dominik’s poetically revisionist The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward
Robert Ford and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, a tribute to the more
scabrous of the Spaghetti Westerns, directed by Sergio Corbucci and starring
Franco Nero. One can imagine though that a Western is a tough pitch to
Hollywood – unless you can jazz it up some way with violence or comedy, it’s
hard to see where an audience for cowboy movies might be. There’s hardly anyone
under the age of 50 for whom Westerns were a constant feature of their growing
up. For most, it was something from an earlier generation, that their parents
watched; bring the age threshold down to 25 and Westerns seem positively
prehistoric.
Still, Westerns are a dominant part of the Hollywood
canon, and people with a serious interest in film history and heritage tend to
revere them. Screenwriters and directors figure large among this constituency,
hence the periodic sorties into the genre by the likes of the Coen Brothers,
Sam Raimi, Kelly Reichardt and Alejandro González Iñárritu, whose The Revenant
is due out next year. Tellingly though, nobody since Walter Hill in his heyday
has attempted to make more than one. The fact that Westerns are ineffably
old-fashioned is the most obvious reason for their decline but changing
political and social mores are probably a more determining factor. Just as jazz
has, in recent decades, been condemned to an inexorable forward advance into
the ever more arcane reaches of improvisation, neither can the Western be what
it once was. The Old West is not viewed with quite the same fond indulgence as
in the past, and portrayals of Native Americans as savage incorrigible enemies
of America are viewed rather dimly these days, even in a country as
conservative as the US can often be – even John Ford had come around to that
realisation towards the end of his career. The rise of the Western was built on
the vivid mythology of the United States’ most recent past, and once that
mythological edifice began to crumble, the Western fell from grace.
But Westerns are also notable for being blank canvases and
sites of ideological contention. The Revisionist Western had gained a firm hold
on Hollywood by the time the genre began to peter out, even if older mainstream
Westerns themselves were far from being simplistic on the matter of dialectics
– Howard Hawks and Ford, unreconstructed males as they were, interrogated the
old codes in studio-era Westerns such as Red River, Rio Bravo, Fort Apache and
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. It is this thematic suppleness of the Western
that has long attracted European filmmakers, working outside Hollywood, to the
genre. Their concerns sometimes intersected with those of “native” Westerns,
more often they were at cross-purposes. Initially though, the attraction of the
Western was merely its sense of adventure, which was in itself a bedrock of
European popular culture in the late Imperial age.
The first European “Western” seems to be the Lumière
Brothers’ two-minute short Repas d’Indiens (albeit of Mexican Indians), from
1896. Native American scenes and other depictions of the West continued to be
popular among the European studios in the early days of single-reel films, such
as the “Arizona Bill” series, filmed in Camargues in France from 1911 to 1913
(and later paid homage as “Arizona Jim” in Jean Renoir’s The Crime of Monsieur
Lange (1936)). This was the first in a long series of European Westerns to be
filmed in the old continent – the one thing about Westerns is that, once you
found a wide-open landscape vaguely redolent of the American West, they were
relatively cheap to make. Almeria in Spain, Montenegro, Ukraine, Bosnia, Israel
and South Africa would all be used as locations for European Westerns. The
French did attempt to get a foothold Stateside though – Pathé initially thought
it was a good idea to film Westerns across the Hudson from Manhattan in Jersey
City, before it dawned on them that Texas, and then California, might be
better. They did pull off the coup of getting the renowned Native American
producer and director James Young Deer to head their west coast operation
before the industry shake-up after the Great War sidelined them.
Though the French were the pioneers of the European
Western, it was the Germans and the Italians who would make the most forays
into the genre. German-born directors such as Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang and
Robert Siodmark would all try their hand at Westerns while in Hollywood, but
there were Westerns made on the home front too, even under the Nazis. The
Kaiser of California (1936) was a paean to Germanic derring-do, being a biopic
of Swiss-born John Sutter, whose sawmill was the origin of the California
gold-rush. The Germans already had a novelist, Karl May, who was famous for his
Westerns; there was a sense that May was searching out for unconquered
territory in much the same way Imperial Germany was after its European rivals
had divvied up the rest of the world among them. May’s muscular tales of
adventure had an ideological foreboding – Klaus Mann called him the “Führer’s
Cowboy mentor” however unfair that might appear to a writer who died in 1912.
Béla Lugosi’s first screen appearances came in early silent adaptations and the
appeal of May’s novels continued long after the war and a number of them were
adapted for the screen by West German directors, including Treasure of the
Silver Lake by Harald Reinl (1962) and Die Pyramide des Sonnengottes, by
Siodmark in 1965. More canonical work was also sometimes adapted as Westerns,
such as Schiller’s play Don Carlos as Carlos (1971), much as Michael
Winterbottom would use The Mayor of Casterbridge to make The Claim in 2000.
Die Pyramid des
Sonnengottes (1965)
Italy, another country that got in late on the scramble
for Empire, became a major producer of Westerns in the 1960s, mainly through
the work of Sergio Leone (whose father Vincenzo directed the first Italian
Western in 1913), Terence Hill, Sergio Corbucci and Damiano Damiani, among
others. Unlike their German counterparts, the Spaghetti Westerns made a
breakthrough in English-speaking countries and they were revolutionary in the
way they foregrounded Mexico and Spanish America in the genre for the first
time. The Spaghetti Westerns, with their multiple aliases (Leone’s A Fistful of
Dynamite is variously also known as Once Upon a Time…the Revolution and Duck,
You Sucker!), their badly-dubbed voices, their sweaty, sunburned close-ups and
their loud, redounding music, were both gothic and grand guignol. They could
also be incredibly sophisticated amid all the alarum – Leone’s films got
progressively more political as the years went by, while Damiani’s A Bullet for
the General (1965) and Sergio Solima’s Face to Face (1967) are suffused with
the left-wing politics that later exploded in the anni di piombo. Pier Paolo
Pasolini even turned up in a cassock to play a Mexican monk in Carlo Lizzani’s
Requiescant (1966), apparently because he owed Lizzani money. Italy’s
contribution to the Western had probably an even more enduring effect than the
old studio films did, but the Spaghetti Westerns too died out in the mid 1970s.
Requiescant (1966)
A Bullet for the
General (1967)
The Eastern Bloc nations were also sharply aware of the
dialectical potential of the Western. Not surprisingly, East Germany led the
way, with a series of ideologically sound Teutonic Westerns, starring the
Yugoslav actor Gojko Mitić in Native American roles such as in The Sons of
Great Bear (1967) and Tecumseh (1972). The films were intended as a
counterpoint to the “Imperialistic” Hollywood portrayals of Indians and also to
the works of Karl May, which were frowned upon in the GDR (Mitić would,
however, end up playing May’s famous Indian elder Winnetou on stage in 2006).
The Soviet Union had its “Osterns”, films which heavily borrowed from the
Western but which were set on the Ukrainian or Russian steppe, but there was
also the experimental comedy Western A Man from the Boulevard des Capuchines
(1987), set in the US. Other “Red Westerns” came from Czechoslovakia – Oldřich
Lipský’s manic pastiche Lemonade Joe (1964), which remains a cult favourite in
the Czech Republic and Romania – Dan Pița’s Transylvanian trilogy (1978-1981)
about Hungarian emigrants to the Old West. The latter is not unlike Jan
Troell’s The Emigrants or Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, which, as well as
being a criminally underrated film, is probably the most European of Hollywood
Westerns.
Lemonade Joe
(1964)
The Sons of Great
Bear (1967)
A Man from the
Boulevard des Capuchines (1987)
The Oil, The Baby
and the Transylvanians (1981)
The “Emigrant Western” is the form European essays on the
genre often take these days, like in Thomas Arslan’s Gold (2013) starring Nina
Hoss, which portrays the efforts of a group of naive and feckless Germans to
get to the Klondike in 1891. Set and filmed entirely in British Columbia
(meaning it is, strictly speaking a “Northern”) the film is a technically
impressive slice of historical narrative but which nonetheless pales in
comparison to Kelly Reichardt’s similar but more arresting Meek’s Cutoff (2010).
Kristian Levring, one of the stragglers from Dogme 95, has directed what is
probably Denmark’s first ever Western in the forthcoming The Salvation. Mads
Mikkelsen plays Jon, a vengeful Danish immigrant in the West who in turn draws
the ire of the local psychopath and enforcer Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). The
film has a number of intriguing glimmers of historical detail (Mikkelsen’s
character and his brother have fled Denmark following the disastrous defeat to
Germany in the Second Schleswig War in 1865 and the rise of the oil wells in
the film recalls There Will Be Blood) but the main reference is Sergio Leone’s
earlier films. The history is soon relegated to a backdrop in favour of slick
gun battles, which look disconcertingly like they were filmed with video games
such as Counter-Strike or Call of Duty as an aesthetic base. It’s enjoyable
enough as far as mid-range action movies go but it’s disposable stuff,
suggesting that the contemporary European Western is prey to the same desire to
jazz things up as its Hollywood counterpart.
Gold (2013)
The Salvation
(2014)
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