The Western
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WILL PENNY (Dir. Tom Gries, 1968, US)
* * * Will Penny is a Western that I always had in my rear-view mirror. And I was really surprised by how good it is. It is arguably a revisionist, if not, Twilight Western, made in the late 1960s when the genre was about to explode into a million different pieces with Peckinpah’s deconstructive Continue reading
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THE FURNACE (Dir. Roderick MacKay, 2020, Australia) – Outsiders
* * * This shimmering jewel of a postcolonial Australian Western set in the outback in 1897 is one to savour. Written and directed by newcomer Roderick MacKay, The Furnace unearths a repressed history untold, the story of ‘Ghan’ cameleers – Sikh and Muslim men from Afghanistan, Persia and India who migrated to Australia to Continue reading
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SHALAKO (Dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1968)
Shalako, a ragged Euro-Western, opens with the bombastic lyrics of Jim Dale, another high point of late 1960s kitsch, before giving the false promise that this is going to be a story about Western imperialism. A detestable hunting party, made up of unpleasant British, German and American imperialists, haughtily enter an Indian reservation, provoking a Continue reading
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SONCHIRIYA (2019, India, dir. Abhishek Chaubey)
The Dacoit Western is a transnational film genre forged out of a synthesis between the Dacoit film and the Italian Western in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The dacoit in popular culture has undeniably been represented with ambivalence, chiefly as a romantic figure, existing outside mainstream society. Yet the rebellious nature of the dacoit, Continue reading
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THE MAGNIFICENT 7 (Dir. Antoine Fuqua, 2016, US)
What if you got the opportunity to rework a contestable classic but had nothing to say? This is pretty much what The Magnificent 7 feels like. One can probably imagine the creative heads that cooked up this idea stemmed from the certified stone cold image of Denzel Washington as a mysterious gunslinger on a horse cloaked Continue reading
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