The Joy of Watching Spaghetti, Ramen and Curry

Genre art is often media agnostic. Great examples of romance, tragedy, comedy, drama, horror, thriller etc can be found in various forms, like books, movies, theatre and even music and painting. However, one of the most popular and influential genre of movies, Westerns, can be found almost exclusively in audio-visual media. There have been literature and even paintings, which can be considered Westerns before movies, but the silver screen is where the genre became immensely popular and captured the public imagination. From the earliest days of cinema (The Great Train Robbery was a silent film released in 1903), we have been enthralled by gunslingers and cowboys.

But it was director John Ford, with a young and struggling actor John Wayne, who created movie history with the release of Stagecoach in 1939. Their long and extraordinarily successful collaboration is often considered to be the cornerstone upon which the enduring popularity of the genre has been built.

But strangely for a genre which started with depiction of a specific geography and time period (American West of the 19^th century), Westerns have transcended all these barriers and become a truly global genre.

One of the early adopters of the genre outside America was Japan. Lead by the great Akira Kurosawa, who loudly proclaimed his love for the genre, Japan produced some of the greatest and most influential Westerns of all times. Films like Yojimbo and Seven Samurai by Kurosawa were so popular that both were later adapted by Hollywood itself (A Fistful Of Dollars and The Magnificent Seven, respectively). This set off a trend in Japan, which created a sub-genre of Westerns known as Ramen Westerns. It includes popular film franchise like the Lone Wolf And Baby Cub series, The Samurai Trilogy and the massive 27 film Zatoichi series.

Perhaps the most famous names in the genre, after Ford and Wayne, would be Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood, who revitalized the genre in the 1960s and 70s. Leone’s series was filled with stylized violence, breath-taking cinematography, magnificent music and morally complex characters. Shot quickly and cheaply in Spain and Italy, these came to be known as Spaghetti Westerns. Films like For A Few Dollars More, Once Upon A Time In The West and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly have become synonymous with the genre today.

Back home in India, we had our own brand of Westerns, known as Curry Westerns (What’s with the food names though?). Mosagaalaku Mosagaadu (Telugu), Mappusakshi (Malayalam) and Jakkamma (Tamil) were amongst the earliest Indian foray into the genre. But it was the landmark Hindi movie Sholay, released in 1975, that’s the most iconic Curry Western. Inspired by Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, Sholay went on to become the highest grossing Hindi film for decades and one of the most beloved Indian movies of all time.

With numerous other sub-genres like Acid Western (the incredible El Topo), Weird Western (ridiculously funny The Good, The Bad and the Weird), Revisionist Western (the gorgeous Dead Man), Neo Western (the hauntingly beautiful Unforgiven), etc this has proved to be an evergreen source of great films. The popularity of the genre has spilled over to various other mediums as well, like TV, with great shows like Firefly, Deadwood and Westworld and video games with the incredibly popular Read Dead series. The days of gunslingers and outlaws may be long over, but Westerns are not riding into the sunset anytime soon.