Out West

This is the blog post for the week of January 28. The blog post for last week precedes this one, and is dated thus.

This weekend, as I pondered through a second viewing of Industrial Light and Magic's Rango, I realized just how much this outwardly so-so picture manages to lovingly homage its western roots.

A Western takes place between the end of the Civil War and the 1890's, when the frontier closed. Westerns actually originated in literature well before the War, when the "frontier" was east of the Missouri River. One of the earliest films in the genre (or of any genre for that matter), was The Great Train Robbery of 1903. Train Robberies are a staple of the Western Genre (and one of the only elements Rango doesn't homage or parody). During the 50's and 60's Western TV Shows and Comics exploded, and from Bonanza to Gunsmoke to Jonah Hex they still remain in semi-public conscience. It was a time of bank robbers and wanted posters, cattle drives and posses. Gunslingers faced off at high noon, and unsavory characters walked bow-legged into saloons.

But when you think of a Western (even though few do anymore) you probably think of the genre's little amigo, the Spaghetti Western. Called so because of their Italian studio origin, Spaghetti Westerns were often filmed on location in Spain (Where the cacti were more stereotypical). They were often distillations and deconstructions (breakdowns) of regular Westerns, but managed to outshine their inspirations. Sergio Leone directed the Dollars Trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), source of some of Wild West cinema's most seminal scenes (like that song that always plays when a gunfight happens), and helped make Clint Eastwood (The Man With No Name) the household name he is today.