My favourite Western sub genres

Time for a pointless film buff top ten - my favourite Western sub genres:

1) Northerns

I classify these as “westerns set in the snow” - there are two main types of these (sub genre of sub genre) - Mountie films set in Canada (eg Death Hunt, The Wild North) and films set in the Alaskan Gold Rush (eg North to Alaska, The Spoilers, Call of the Wild).

I like the latter (I love Canada but Mounties are always dull on screen ) ... always stories set in mud splattered towns with brawls and brothels ... it’s a shame the Oz gold rush never produced a film as fun as North to Alaska

2) Meat pie Westerns

Westerns set in Australia. Bizarrely there are three main sub genres of these.

a) English films made here - eg The Overlanders,

b) Hollywood film made here - pretty much all underwhelming (Quigley Down Under, The Kangaroo Kid) though some are fun (eg Rangle River, the TV series Whiplash)

c) Australian made movies - The Man from Snowy River most notably. But also Raw Deal and TV series like Cash and Company.
 
There were also random off shoots - a Japanese Western filmed here (The Drifting Avenger), a Christian themed western (Shadow of the Boomerang).
 
 Bushranging films are their own subgenre.
 
Best of these? Overlanders and Snowy River are both lot of fun, though I have a soft spot for Raw Deal, too.

3) Southerns. These are Westerns set in the Deep South pre civil war. Quentin Tarantino coined the phrase I believe for Django Unchained (2012)... there were also Skin Game (1971), The Legend of N*gger Charlie (1972), The Soul of N*gger Charley (1973) and... not much else. Westerns tended to shine away from slavery unless in a Civil War context...

Most Westerns set in this place and time basically ignore it like Distant Drums (1951) and The Iron Mistress (1952) (which has a great knife fight)...

I differentiate these from melodramas set during the slave owning past like Mandingo, The Foxes of Harrow and Gone with the Wind.
 

4) Westerns about the French intervention in Mexico.

There’s a whole bunch of westerns where the hero winds up in a shoot out against ... the French. Because in the 1860s the French Invaded México put on a puppet emperor and then saw the whole thing go to hell. For a strict biographical treatment see Juárez (1939) - for Westerns there’s Vera Cruz (1954), Major Dundee (1965), The Undefeated (1969).

5) South African Westerns.

Where the prairie was substituted by the veldt.... There are two main types of these

a) British films with British stars - Diamond City (1949) (David Farrar, Diana Dors), The Adventurers (1951) (Jim Hawkins), The Heillions (1962) (Richard Todd)... the sort of movie where the reviews would invariably say "the best thing is the scenery"

b) local South African films such as Five Fingers for Marseilles (2014), Umbango (1986)

There was also the odd American financed film such as The Jackals (1967)

6) 18th century ones where everyone wears funny hats i.e. the pre revolutionary period.

These have such a different feel I hesitate to call them Westerns - for one thing they mostly take place in the East! But they do have a lot of the same tropes eg set on a frontier, forts, sieges, Indians...

The best known are The Last of the Mohicans adaptations, but there's also films like Drums Along the Mohawk, ones starring Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, Northwest Passage (1940), Unconquered (1947), Many Rivers to Cross (1955).

The unifying elements seem to be (a) avoidance of tackling slavery (b) funny hats. Seriously, there's a lot of funny hats.

7) Pancho Villa era Westerns.

The US West was "won" by the 1890s but it was still game on down in Mexico until World War One... you had Pancho Villa invading the US, Zapata, the Revolution, Germans trying to whip up a Mexican invasion of Mexico. It resulted in some great films - The Wild Bunch (1969), Duck You Sucker (1971), The Professionals (1966) and Viva Villa (1934) notably - and not so great films - a lot of Wild Bunch rip offs - as well as a heap of Mexican and spaghetti Westerns and the Rod Taylor TV series Bearcats.

They could be summarised as "Westerns with cars in them".

8) Isolated white man films.

That description isn't a great one, sorry, but it's the best I can think of - films about Westerners (invariably white men) who are cut off from their society and hang around Indians. They tend to be films about

a) mountain men - The Mountain Men (1980), Jeremiah Johnson (1972)

b) trappers - The Revenant (2015), Man in the Wilderness (1971)


c) men-adopted-by-the-Indians films - The Man Called Horse (1970), Run for the Arrow (1957)
 
These films share many things in common - the Indians outnumber the whites, the heroes love and lose a Indian girlfriend, they emphasise gore and honour and feature a lot of battling against the elements.
 
There have been films about women who are abducted by Indians bt they tend to focus on the white men who rescue them (eg The Searchers).

9) Comedy westerns.

 I read somewhere that Blazing Saddles (1974) killed the Western because once you know what the tropes were you couldn't enjoy it anymore... I don't think that's true, in part because there had been plenty of comic Westerns beforehand, notably The Paleface (1948), Alias Jesse James (1959), Support Your Local Sheriff (1969) and Destry Rides Again (1939).

I should add though that when things gone wrong on a comedy Western, they are the hardest films of them all to sit through eg Lightning Jack.

10) Space Westerns!

Westerns were replaced in the 70s by a combination of cop films and sci fi movies... I actually didn't like westerns that much but I loved anything like a Western in space (lasers, loners, a frontier, a scene with a bar in it) - Star Wars of course but also Battle Beyond the Stars, Outland, Starcrash, Space Raiders, Battlestar Galactica... Maybe not Moon Zero Two