Un-American European Westerns you need to watch

Reader’s Digest

By James Oliver

September 25, 2017

Foreign cowboys? Whatever will they think of next? James Oliver investigates the wild world of the unAmerican Western and dicovers films that would make John Wayne lose his hairpiece...

 The Western might be an American art-form but that’s not stopped filmmakers from other countries having a bash at it.

And while it might sound odd to have cowboys and injuns going “yee-haa!” in Italian (or Finnish, or Serbo-Croat), some of those movies are pretty darn good.

With the new movie Brimstone coming out—it might look and sound like a US western but it’s actually Dutch—this here is a long over-due round-up of the best non-American Westerns.

The Great Silence

It makes sense to start with the Italians and their "Spaghetti Westerns". But let’s not go for the obvious choices: as wonderful as films like A Fistful of Dollars or The Good, The Bad and The Ugly are, their casts include actors who had significant careers in American Westerns (i.e. Clint).

The Great Silence is a more fully European affair, both in cast (it stars Frenchman Jean Louis Trintignant) and theme: it’s a (not especially subtle) critique of American capitalism in which wordless gunslinger takes on some bounty hunters who are working for The Man. And, in an ending Hollywood would never allow, loses.

Lemonade Joe

There were more Westerns made behind the Iron Curtain than you might think: those Commies never missed a chance to cock a snook at the decadent west.

Lemonade Joe, a Czechoslovakian film, is one of the few that does more than wag a finger at American perfidy, although it does that too—the lead character is a salesman for a thinly-disguised Coca-Cola, that preferred symbol of cultural imperialism.

But there’s an evident affection for the genre too: you certainly don’t have to be working towards the dictatorship of the proletariat to enjoy it.

The Salvation

The immigrant experience is a popular one in Westerns—the folks who come from afar to make their home on the range, settling the country so it could grow into the great nation it became.

Being Danish, The Salvation doesn’t quite share the native optimism of those American movies: here the immigrant is Mads Mikkelsen: he comes to the States to flee war against Prussia, only to discover that the frontier is no less violent.

Inspired by Sergio Leone and shot in South Africa with a multi-national cast, it's also the very first Western to feature Eric Cantona.

Whity

The Germans love their Westerns so it was only to be expected that they’d start making their own once the Italians blazed the trail.

Whity, though, is untypical of those Sauerkraut Westerns. It was directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the national cinema’s enfant terrible, here taking time out from berating his fellow countrymen to take a pop at American hypocrisy for a change.

His subject is racism, punching the bruises of slavery and prejudice more forcefully even than something like Django Unchained. His anger is undermined, though, by his use of white people in black-face make-up. Then again, since this is Fassbinder we’re talking about, it’s entirely possible he did it as a way of provoking even more people.

Carry on Cowboy

There are more British Westerns than you might think; even excluding those set in The Empire (in Australasia, Africa and Canada), there are not a few that take place in the Old West: Ramsbottom Rides Again, for instance (in which “Big Hearted” Arthur Askey deals with some no good varmints). Or The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (Kenneth More makes friends with the indigenous peoples.)

And there’s Carry On Cowboy too. Devoid of sophistication and wit it may be—it is a Carry On film, after all—it still needs to be acknowledged. And now we’ve acknowledged it, let us move swiftly on.

The Singer Not The Song

There are some dashed queer films on this list but The Singer Not The Song tops the lot. For a start, it’s another British Western, itself something of an oddity but all the more so since it’s set in Mexico; you will be relieved/ disappointed—delete as appropriate—to discover the cast don’t do the accent.

Ah yes, about that cast. It stars Dirk Bogarde, then at the height of his fame. Unquestionably a fine actor, one of the best this country ever produced, but not the most obvious choice to play a Mexican bandito. A Mexican bandito, moreover, who likes wearing tight leather trousers.

And what of the plot? That aforementioned Mexican bandito is one tough hombre and he’s got no time for religion. But the arrival of a rugged new priest (played by John Mills) in town sets his heart a-flutter.

Quite what they were thinking (and/ or smoking) while they made it is anyone’s guess but it's a high point of a sort, an oddball camp classic that shows the British could make films as weird as anyone else, even if they couldn’t really make westerns.