Foreign westerns...I've seen the spaghetti westerns, of course, and Luc Moullet's western, A Girl is a Gun with Jean-Pierre Leaud as Billy the Kid. I saw the Czechoslavakian western spoof, Lemonade Joe, and one East German Indian movie.
Trouble with the foreign westerns is that they're not foreign enough. In the East German movie, the Indian clothing and U.S. Army uniforms looked way too authentic. Foriegn filmmakers build western sets and have western props and costumes that are indistinguishable from those in American movies.
I want to see a foreign western where things aren't quite right. Where the cowboys carry 19th century European revolvers. Where the U.S. Army cavalry dresses in World War One French uniforms. I want to see a medieval European mountain village standing in for a town in the Old West.
As I said somewhere earlier, I never liked westerns. They're about people who are either illiterate or may as well be who wear ugly clothes, live in ugly towns, whose greatest goal in life is to own a ranch. Their only form of recreation is hanging around in bars. There's a lot of violence, but that's pretty dull since they only have two kinds of gun----a Colt revolver and a Winchester rifle. The fist fights usually consist of two men punching each other in the face over and over.
The Italians improved on them a bit by throwing in a machine gun here and there, and Clint Eastwood kept karate chopping people in one movie. But they didn't go far enough.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
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