Dr. Christopher Conway is Professor of Modern Languages at UT Arlington and Dr. Antoinette Sol is Professor Emerita in the same department, as well as interim Vice Provost for Faculty Success at Texas State University San Marcos. Conway and Sol are the the coeditors of The Comic Book Western: New Perspectives on a Global Genre (University of Nebraska Press, 2022,) which won a Popular Culture Association Award for best book in 2023.
From the beginning of its development in the nineteenth century, the American western has been a global phenomenon. Its globality is not only a function of the ubiquity of U.S. cultural artifacts abroad, but also of how U.S. westerns catalyzed the creation of other westerns that addressed international questions and realities, and sometimes criticized U.S. exceptionalism and colonialism. As Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, put it, “the intentional appeal of the western rests, in part, on the potential for historical experiences of one culture to resonate with the audiences of another” (Miller and Van Riper, International Westerns, xiv). Except for the emptiest of pastiches, international Westerns took the elemental threads of the genre and wove them into a tapestry that spoke to a local reality or different cultural tradition. In this way, a genre we might assume to be quintessentially American became a road map for storytellers and consumers from elsewhere to explore their own identity and historical situation, or to reassess the role of the United States in the world. These other or western hybrids, built with American tropes and infused with local storytelling conventions, represent a historically and culturally significant riff on the global reception of American myths, and on the possibilities of their cultural appropriation and reinvention.
A discussion of a few notable westerns from India, Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea foregrounds how they use transculturation to adapt the genre. Fans and critics of the western immediately associate the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa with Westerns because of his admiration for John Ford, and because two of his films inspired landmark, non-Japanese Westerns. The Seven Samurai (1954) inspired Preston Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven (1960), while Yojimbo (1961), based on a Dashiell Hammett novel, was the inspiration for Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Kurosawa, however, is probably the least conspicuous example of Japanese homages to the Western. Japanese period films with swordsmen heroes—known variously as “Chidaeiki,” “Chambara,” and “Matatabi Mono”—borrowed motifs and tropes from Hollywood films and Westerns from the 1920s into the 1970s (Yoshimoto, Kurosawa, 231). Okamoto Kihachi’s films Desperado Outpost (1959) and Westward Desperado (1960) interwove WWII stories with Hollywood “Cowboy and Indian” motifs, and Junya Sato’s Koya (1968), a pastiche Western featuring a Japanese gunfighter who lives in nineteenth-century California, was clearly an homage to Spaghetti Westerns (Kitamura, “Wild, Wild War,” 111-2).
One of twenty-first century Japan’s most extravagant Westerns is Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django (2007). The story foregrounds the standoff of two rival bands over a small town peopled with archetypes like the corrupt sheriff, the single woman of dubious morality, the young man on the cusp of adulthood, and an older wise woman (who will turn out to be a former professional gunfighter) said to possess a treasure. As in so many westerns, the townspeople turn to an outsider to protect them and eliminate the threats to their community. As A. Bowdoin Van Riper underlines, Miike weaves together a broad array of citations that invoke transnational Westerns, Japanese samurai films, and crime stories, such as Yojimbo, A Fistfull of Dollars, Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966), and Shakespeare’s Henry IV among others (Miller and Van Riper, International Westerns, 401). Through defamiliarization and parody, Miike playfully creates something new and obliges the spectator to reconsider the western. Van Riper calls the film a kaleidoscope that demonstrates how the Western can blend with ease with other popular genres, and thrive in different national contexts (Miller and Van Riper, International Westerns,” 408).
One of the most influential and enduring Asian Westerns of the 1970s was an Indian production, Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay (1975), an iconic film that was the top-grossing Indian film for nineteen years, and which Stephen Teo describes as “forever etched” in the memory of Indian filmgoers (Teo 109). The film explores the connection between evil and violence and the potential role of nonviolence as a method of resistance. The story centers on the relationship between four characters, two of whom recall Sergio Leone’s characterizations of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Teo 111.) Thakur Baldev Singh, a former police officer, wishes revenge on Gabbar Singh, a bandit, for cutting off his hands, and sets out to realize that goal with two helpers who, like Leone’s “ugly” archetype, are neither wholly good nor evil. The village of Ramgarh, in which the action is set, serves as a stand-in for India and its class and caste structure, rooting the film in a world that is immediately legible to its Indian viewers. In this familiar setting, Sippy remixes imagery and themes; for example, the revenge narrative is both interrupted and complemented by Bollywood songs and dance, which erupt throughout the film (Kumar, 36.). As Teo observes, Sippy knits Bollywood tightly to the Western by having musical numbers interrupt violence in progress, and violence interrupt song and dance (Teo 114.). From the American Western, Sippy channels the tried and true narrative of the futile quest of the film’s heroes to settle down and live peacefully, as well as iconic imagery like an exciting train chase/shoot out, and the framing of riflemen and riders on rock ledges and outcroppings, silhouetted against the sky. References to Italian Westerns are also self-evident: Thakur Baldev Singh’s severed hands bring to mind Sergio Corbucci’s Django, in which villains crush the titular hero’s hands, and the serape Thakur wears to cover his mutilated limbs invokes one of the most distinctive hallmarks of Spaghetti Western costuming.
In Hong Kong, one of the most powerful and influential capitals of transnational cinema, film makers have woven motifs and patterns of the Western into wuxia or martial arts of films. Wong Kar-Wai’s Ashes of Time (1994), one example of this remixing, tells the story of a self-exiled, virtuous mercenary, Ou-yang Feng,who wanders an ancient Chinese landscape reminiscent of a desolate Wild West topography while acting as a fixer or vigilante. He struggles with what Michael C. Reiff describes as “the outward stoicism and the inner turbulence of the hero” (Reiff, The Self-Exiled Hero, 224). When Oyu-yang Feng enlists two other men to help defeat a gang of thugs, the film traces the men’s jockeying for dominance and their shifting relationship in ways that are familiar to even casual viewers of Spaghetti Westerns, which made such distrustful alliances a centerpiece of its dramas. As Reiff explains, Ashes of Time “displays a self-conscious understanding of the role mythology plays in shaping characters in Westerns and wuxia” and explores the “malleability of identity and the fluidity of time”(Reiff, 224). Kar-Wai rejects generic norms to create a hybrid genre that both cites and questions the conventions and tropes of wuxia and the Western.
South Korean Westerns, popular in the 1960s and 1970s are often called Manchurian westerns because they are set in the mythically evocative, open landscape of northeastern China in the 1920s and 1930s, where more than a million Koreans had emigrated to escape the Japanese occupation and to make a living in the rice fields. The Imperial Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the early 1930s provides the antagonists or villains for Manchurian westerns, which Hye Seung Chung characterizes as a nationalist genre that combines motifs like outlaws, riders, frontier vistas and settings, with elements of espionage, war stories, and martial arts films (Chung 72). As with other types of Asian westerns, Manchurian westerns are self-aware and deliberate in their citation of Hollywood formulas and stories. One of the most well-known Manchurian westerns is The Man with No Home (1968), directed by Shing Sang-ok, which is a Korean retelling of George Stevens’s classic Shane (1953). The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008), directed by Kim Jee-woon, is a postmodern Manchurian western set in 1939 that draws from the influences of the Spaghetti western, and the conventional, formula U.S. western. Jee-Woon’s take on the values of his Korean and U.S. source material are ambiguous—the manichean moral oppositions and sentimentality of Manchurian and Hollywood westerns are muddied through the self-interested and amorality popularized by Spaghetti westerns. In Stephen Teo’s reading of the film, the celebration of the civilizing force of the nascent nation of the U.S., as exemplified through Manifest Destiny and westward expansion in the North American continent, is recast by Jae-woon as colonialism, imperialism, and modern materialism (Teo, Eastern Westerns, 68).
The above are but a few examples of a thriving tradition of Asian film westerns. Like so many other westerns from around the world, Asian film westerns underline the astonishing vitality and plasticity of a genre that is often written off as one dimensional.
WORKS CITED
Chung, Hye Seung. “The Man with No Home/Musukja (1968): Shane Comes Back in a Korean ‘Manchurian Western.’” The Journal of Popular Film and Televisionm 39, no. 2 (n.d.): 71–83.
Kitamura, Hiroshi “Okamoto Kihachi and the politics of the Desperado films.” From Chinese and Japanese Films of the Second World War (Routledge, 2014).
Kumar, Ranjit K. “The Theory of Pleasure Pauses: Making Sense of ‘Interruptions’ in the Indian Film Narrative. Journal of Creative Communications 6 (2011): 35-48.
Miller, Cynthia J., and A. Bowdoin Van Riper. International Westerns: Re-locating the Frontier. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2014.
Reiff, Michael C. “The Self-Exiled Hero: Wong Kar Wai’s Ashes of Time” in International Westerns: Re-locating the Frontier, edited by Cynthia J. Miller and Bowdoin V. Riper, 220-240. Washington D.C.: Scarecrow Press, 2013.
Teo, Stephen. Eastern Westerns: Film and Genre Outside and Inside Hollywood. London, England: Routledge, 2017.
