SMC Founder.Programmer Craig Hammill on Three Great Westerns (That Aren't Westerns)

Yojimbo (1961, dir by Akira Kurosawa) 

First up is Akira Kurosawa's & Toshiro Mifune's seminal samurai movie about a masterless samurai who wanders into a town run by two sets of warring criminal families. And the only one getting rich is the coffin maker! Mifune plays both sides off each other as a sword for hire at first apparently to just make money but with actual good intent he keeps hidden in his heart. What's fascinating here is that voracious reader Kurosawa actually lifted the plot from Red Harvest, a gangster novel by Dashiell Hammet. So this is a great example of an American gangster novel influencing a Japanese samurai movie which in turn influenced Italian spaghetti westerns. Which is all a way of saying that somehow the western archetypes and genres pulse throughout all cultures.

Sholay (1975, dir by Ramesh Sippy)

One of India's most successful movies of all time, often remembered as the movie that launched superstar Amitabh Batchan's career. Like many great Hindi cinema classics, this movie is a musical, a comedy, a romance as well. But interestingly, it's predominantly a kind of Indian western about two friends who help a small village get revenge on the band of outlaws that terrorize them. Heavily influenced by Leone's Once Upon A Time in the West, Sholay even borrows the flashback/memory structure to reveal key character backstory. But in some ways, it improves upon the western by also being an unapologetic Hindi crowdpleaser with great songs and everything amped up to 11. This movie was so popular it played continuously for five years in one Mumbai cinema. Pure delight. A must see.

The Road Warrior (1981, dir by George Miller)

Apocalypse movies are basically westerns in reverse. Instead of movies about trying to civilize the wild west, they are movies about chaos breaking down civilization. The second of four Mad Max movies (all of them good), Road Warrior would be everyone's favorite if Fury Road hadn't come out thirty four years later and essentially redefined the action movie. In this one, Max helps a ragtag group of survivors holed up at an oil refinery fight a gang of scavengers headed by a BDSM hockey mask wearing leader named the Humungous. All in the Australian outback. One of the niftiest tricks here is that the Stagecoach chase from John Ford's 1939 Stagecoach and the action sequences from Buster Keaton's The General are re-jiggered as intense all-out freeway car chases with an oil tanker.

Written by Craig Hammill. Founder and Programmer of Secret Movie Club.