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Posted: |
May 30, 2017 - 11:30 PM
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By: |
Richard-W
(Member)
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WilliamMcCrum:
Richard-W
Europeans couldn't tell that story; it takes a knowledge of the American west.......
.... Again, the Europeans couldn't tell this story because they have no knowledge of the American west, no interest in the humanity of the people.
I can't agree with this part. It is the novelist's or playwright's part to research, empathise etc., and you're greatly underestimating imagination. Any nationality of writer can write any story. That's art. It's a very nationalistic statement, even if not intentional.
Theoretically, that may be true, except it hasn't been true in practice. Most westerns are written by Americans who understand the American west because they are raised in American culture with American history in their orientation from birth. For example, Alan LeMay wrote about what he knew; where he lived in Texas, THE SEARCHERS had been a current event. Spag writers didn't have that advantage. Spag writers recycled the same revenge story over and over again, with a bank robbery or prison break or bounty hunt. Shallow stuff. Spag writers didn't tell stories about the American west. I studied 159 spags, watched many of them two or three times. I saw no spag equivalent to HELL'S HINGES, CIMARRON, STAGECOACH, BLOOD ON THE MOON, FORT APACHE, RED RIVER, SEA OF GRASS, SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, DEVIL'S DOORWAY, SHANE, THE MAN FROM LARAMIE, THE SEARCHERS, GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL, THE HANGING TREE, THE ALAMO, TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE, TRUE GRIT, A MAN CALLED HORSE, ULZANA'S RAID, I WILL FIGHT NO MORE FOREVER, SILVERADO, DANCES WITH WOLVES, OPEN RANGE, THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSIE JAMES, APPALOOSA. Brits or Austrians may have directed them from time to time, but the stories are told by Americans writing about where they live and how they live.
My neighbor has three thousand paperbacks shelved in his rec room. He adds more to it all the time. Just an amazing collection of western novels including movie novelizations and novels that were adapted into films. Alphabetized by author, organized by date of publication. They're all written by Americans telling the story of the American west. Every culture tells its story in its fiction. History can be researched, but there is no trace of historical research in any spag that I've seen. Not much trace of reading western novels, either.
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Can we stop having western threads please.
You all know why.
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Spaghetti westerns aren't representative of 'Europe' as a whole. They are a closed genre mainly aimed at the adolescent market, and, if I can avoid national stereotyping, they have the aesthetic of the Renaissance buck with his sword, hanging round the town Piazza waiting for a fight, like Romeo and Mercutio. The motivation seems to be swaggering and macho and 'Look how I can cuckold your wife and see how long my muzzle is'.
British or European writers don't tend to write western screenplays these days, but if they did, and if they weren't comedies, they'd be different.
Spag westerns are limited, and can't be generalised from.
I have to say, as regards the western paperbacks thing, beyond Owen Wister I'd not be trawling through those for inspiration really. Maybe I'm wrong on that.
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Ah, but Xebec, hes right, because art films from the East arent really art films, they are hybrids. 
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Posted: |
May 31, 2017 - 11:53 AM
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By: |
Richard-W
(Member)
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WILLIAMDMCCRUM:
Spaghetti westerns aren't representative of 'Europe' as a whole. They are a closed genre mainly aimed at the adolescent market, and, if I can avoid national stereotyping, they have the aesthetic of the Renaissance buck with his sword, hanging round the town Piazza waiting for a fight, like Romeo and Mercutio. The motivation seems to be swaggering and macho and 'Look how I can cuckold your wife and see how long my muzzle is'.
British or European writers don't tend to write western screenplays these days, but if they did, and if they weren't comedies, they'd be different.
Spag westerns are limited, and can't be generalised from.
I have to say, as regards the western paperbacks thing, beyond Owen Wister I'd not be trawling through those for inspiration really. Maybe I'm wrong on that.
You're wrong on that last bit.
Owen Wister is generally credited with writing the first western, The Virginian, but this is not strictly true. The structure and elements of the story could be found in newspaper accounts, court records, diaries and journals and biographies, and travelogs that came out of the American west. It was all there, Wister just put it in novel form. Biographies and autobiographies of Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Custer, the white girl captives of Indians, county histories of the feuds and range wars, railroad and mining town conflicts, the gambling fraternity -- all started publishing before the 1870s and are the antecedents of The Virginian. Honestly, I think Clarence B. Mulford had a greater impact with his Bar 20 novels which started publishing at the same time as The Virginian. The Hopalong Cassidy films made mincemeat out of those. Novels by Harold Bell Wright and Emerson Hough, among others, had a profound impact on how the western was formulated starting in the 1890s.
Why is it so hard to understand that the American west actually happened in the American west? It was a cold hard reality, not a myth or a dream or a fantasy or a fictitious invention. It happened, it was real, and people lived through it. The majority were born and raised in the USA and no awareness of the "old country;" the minority were immigrants from Europe who discriminated against themselves and each other. The American west produced a vast body of literature and documentation while it was happening, and later, with hindsight, the people who lived through the American west, and made it happen, wrote about their lives. Out of this came westerns. To put the artifice of spags on the same level as an American western is just ridiculous.
I'm aware that spags aren't representative of Europe as a whole. I've been watching European films all my life. Some of my favorite European westerns were made by Jan Troell and Claude Lelouch. Alan Sharp, an Irishman (or was he a Scott?) living in Los Angeles, wrote a couple of excellent westerns. The British made several good westerns including LAWMAN (1971) and EAGLE'S WING (1979).
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