Reframing Cult Westerns: From The Magnificent Seven to The Hateful Eight

271 Pages·2019·14.401 MB·English

by  Lee Broughton (editor)

Reframing Cult Westerns
ii
Reframing Cult Westerns
From The Magnificent Seven
to The Hateful Eight
Edited by
Lee Broughton
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First published in the United States of America 2020
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Cover image: Samuel L. Jackson in a still from The Hateful Eight, 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Broughton, Lee, 1966- editor.
Title: Reframing cult Westerns: from The magnificent seven to The hateful eight /
edited by Lee Broughton.
Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references,
filmography, and index. | Summary: “This carefully curated collection focuses
on a wide range of post-classical era cult Westerns from around the world,
offering new critical insights into key films belonging to this important and
enduring film genre”– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019040275 (print) | LCCN 2019040276 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501343490
(hardback) | ISBN 9781501343513 (epub) | ISBN 9781501343506 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Western films–History and criticism. | Cult films–History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.W4 R44 2020 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.W4 (ebook) |
DDC 791.43/6278–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040275
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040276
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4349-0
eBook: 978-1-5013-4351-3
ePDF: 978-1-5013-4350-6
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Cult Westerns and Cult Films Lee Broughton 1
Part One Classic Cult Westerns
1 “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time”: Hollywood, Homology,
and Hired Guns—the Making of The Magnificent Seven Paul Kerr 21
2 The Historical Accuracy of Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and
the Ugly Peter J. Hanley 39
3 Where White Men Dream Out Loud: Robert Altman’s
West Cynthia J. Miller 59
4 The Gold Rush: The New Right and the Westerns of 1980
Craig Ian Mann 73
Part Two Charting New Frontiers and Mapping Identity and Politics in
International Cult Westerns
5 Landscape, Imagery, and Symbolism in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s
El Topo Matt Melia 93
6 Dancing with Death: Whity, a Singular Western Hamish Ford 111
7 Man of the West: Dean Reed’s (Cinematic) Frontier Personas in
Blood Brothers and Sing, Cowboy, Sing! Sonja Simonyi 130
8 An(Other) West: The Limits of National Identity in The
Proposition Chelsea Wessels 148
Part Three Contemporary Cult Westerns and Contemporary Concerns
9 The Return of the Repressed: Locating the Supernatural in US
Civil War Westerns Lee Broughton 167
vi Contents
10 Stranger and Friend: Non-American Westerns and the Immigrant
in the Twenty-First Century Jenny Barrett 186
11 The Intrusion of Climate in The Revenant Jack Weatherston 204
12 “Hand in Hand We’ll Get There”:—the Racial Politics of The
Hateful Eight Thomas Moodie 222
Filmography 239
About the Editor and the Contributors 245
Index 248
Acknowledgments
Thanks go to Katie Gallof, Erin Duffy, and all at Bloomsbury Academic for their
help in bringing this volume to print.
Thanks also to the Archivio Fotografico della Cineteca Nazionale (Rome),
Tom Betts, VG Bild-Kunst (Bonn), Ulrich Bruckner, Marco Brunello, Edward
Buscombe, the Cineteca di Bologna, Christopher B. Conway, Alex Cox, Dover
Publications, Glenn Erickson, Christopher Frayling, Rosaria Gioia, Mark
Goodall, Emma Hamilton, Sebastian Haselbeck, Ally Lamaj, the Leverhulme
Trust, the Library of Congress (Washington, D. C.), Hervé Mayer, Andrew
Patrick Nelson, John Nudge, Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris, John Power, the
Reporters Associati (Rome), Viridiana Rotondi, Bill Shaffer, Laura J. Shepherd,
Elisabetta Simi, Giuditta Simi, Tom Wellings, John White, Wild East Productions
(New York), Jeremy Wooding, and Karen Zarker. And last, but not least, a big
thank you to every one of the fine scholars who contributed a chapter to this
collection.
Parts of Peter J. Hanley’s chapter have previously appeared in his book Behind-
the-Scenes of Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Dulmen: Il buono
Publishing, 2016.
viii
Reframing Cult Westerns Introduction
Introduction:
Cult Westerns and Cult Films
Lee Broughton
The Western Today: A Cult Genre
The Western occupies a curious space within the cinematic landscape of the
twenty-first century. From the early days of cinema to the late 1950s (when
Hollywood’s so-called classical era came to an end), the Western was quite
possibly the most popular and the most voluminous of film genres. But post-
1960, the production of Hollywood Westerns began to exponentially decrease
with each passing year. So much so that many observers were quick to announce
the genre’s death during a particularly fallow period of production at the turn of
the 1980s. Those announcements regarding the genre’s demise were somewhat
premature, but the fact remains that relatively few Westerns are made today
and those that are tend to be marginal productions. The exceptions to this rule
are those mainstream-yet-still-somewhat idiosyncratic variants that are given
impetus by the involvement of acutely film-literate star directors (such as the
Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino) or “cult” character actors (such as Kurt
Russell, Samuel L. Jackson, and Tommy Lee Jones). To all intents and purposes,
the Western has become a cult genre in the twenty-first century.
New Westerns that receive widespread cinematic releases may be relatively
few in number today, but the central tenet of the Western—the rugged hero
fearlessly standing tall in the face of adversity and doing “what a man’s gotta
do” (be it civilizing the wilderness, protecting kith and kin, seeking revenge for
those who have been wronged, rescuing a good woman, or relieving villains of
their ill-gotten gains)—remains a trope that still holds the power to appeal to
film fans of various stripes. Hence an ever-increasing number of postclassical-
era Westerns have enjoyed an afterlife as cult Westerns via regular repertory
cinema and television screenings and home video releases. Similarly academic
interest in the genre has remained high. This might be because the Western’s