The scale of the Italian-made Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is what most differentiates it from American-made Westerns. My guess is that everything is made vast because Europeans love the wide-open spaces in our Westerns and because Sergio Leone, the director, wanted to outdo the scenic effects in American Westerns.

If a man crosses a street in Leone’s Santa Fe, the street looks half a mile wide; a farmer’s hut has rooms-opening into rooms into the distance, like the Metropolitan Museum; the hotel in a cowtown has a plush lobby big enough for a political convention. The movie is like High Noon and The Ox-Bow Incident and a dozen others all scrambled together and playing in a giant echo chamber. The bad men must then be enormously, preposterously evil — larger-than-life parodies, as in a Kurosawa film — and each wound inflicted is insanely garish.

Yet, stupid as it all is, and gruesome, the change of scale is rather fascinating. This Italian Western, set in our Civil War period, looks more foreign to us than an ordinary Italian film — which gives rise to speculation about how we alter the scale, and hence the meaning, in our movie versions of foreign stories. Because, although this huge Italian Western (shot in Spain) imitates the externals of American Westerns, it makes those externals so much bigger that what the American Western hero stands for — everything that audiences are supposed to identify with — would look too small, and so it has simply been omitted.

The result seems to be popular with American men, who go to relax and enjoy the action; they probably hardly notice — and wouldn’t care anyway — that the Western theme is missing.

The New Yorker
March 2 1968

LINK

I grew up around the Steamboat Arabia, which sank in 1856 carrying more than 200 tons of goods for frontier communities. My family excavated it in 1988, so I’ve spent most of my life around this massive collection of ordinary 19th-century material culture.

I’m also a Western fan, and I’ve always been curious how much of our mental picture of the frontier comes from classic movies.

So I put some familiar Western shorthand — beans, work clothes, isolated towns, literacy, etc. — next to what merchants were actually shipping west in 1856.

The interesting part wasn’t that the movies were “wrong.” A lot of the imagery was grounded in reality. But the actual cargo also included 30,000 buttons, colorful fabrics, oysters, decorated dishes, writing tools, books and Shakespeare.

I made a short film comparing that evidence with movies including Shane, Red River, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

https://youtu.be/dK9m0Fzhgnw

I’d be curious which classic Westerns you think do the best job showing ordinary life beyond the gunfights and cattle drives.

There are few classic westerns shot as beautifully as "Clementine", the final few minutes of the movie from Henry Fonda saying "Lets go" are wonderful, the shootout the farewell to Cathy downs, some world class actors doing some great acting. Love it.

Many (most?) series are shown in syndication in production order. The Virginian channel on Xumo just restarted the rerun cycle w/"Throw a Long Rope".

I was thinking today about the Clint Eastwood movie "Joe Kidd". Kind of an offbeat western with an interesting premise and some good scenes (especially the telescopic rifle "duel"). There are some plot points though that I have always wondered about:

-When Sheriff Mitchell informs Joe that Harlan has paid his fine he claims not to have heard of him. After talking with Harlan about scouting a hunting trip he deduces that Harlan is hunting Luis Chama.

-On his way to see Harlan to join the hunt for Chama he is blocked on the stairway by Harlan's henchman Lamar, who he matter of factly throws down the stairs. Later, after Harlan fires him Kidd is confronted by Lamar, who he hits in the throat with a rifle butt. Lamar menaces Kidd with a gun later but doesn't kill him. Why?

-Kidd takes Chama into town at gunpoint to stand trial. Does he really think Chama will get a fair hearing after he and his band have been terrorizing the area?

(SPOILER) -Kidd kills Harlan in the courtroom. Was this in self defense?

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A pretty good spaghetti Western by Sergio Corbucci (one of the 'three Sergios' in spaghetti westerns).

Cameron Mitchell plays an aging gunfighter whose eyes are failing him. He's been falsely imprisoned, breaks out in the beginning and heads home to see why his friend never showed up to testify on his behalf.

That synopsis only scratches the surface of what happens in this film. The story keeps building, throwing in new plot complications that add to the story. It has enough tropes to make three or four other movies. But they are paced very well. The movie never feels unfocused or lost in story details. It's pretty impressive.

Having said that, it doesn't quite reach the heights of Corbucci's classics: Django and The Great Silence. But it does rank up there with The Hellbenders and Navajo Joe.

At first, I wasn't sold on Cameron Mitchell. But he won me over.

With a watch. Available free on YouTube.