If you are interested you could watch some of these:
Little Big Man (A. Penn 1970)
Hombre (M. Ritt 1967)
Ulzana’s Raid (R. Aldrich 1972)
Apache (R. Aldrich 1954)
Fort Apache (J. Ford 1948)
Run of the Arrow (S. Fuller 1956)
Jeremiah Johnson (S. Pollack 1972)
Broken Arrow (D. Daves 1950)
Devil’s Doorway (A. Mann 1950)
Across the Wide Missouri (W. A. Wellman 1951)
Flaming Star (D. Siegel 1960)
Tell Them Willy Boy Is Here (A. Polonsky 1969)
Chato’s Land (M. Winner 1971)
I listed Billy Two Hats because Billy is half Native American and despite all the racism everyone was targeting at him, we can see that Billy is a nice lad and nothing like the others make him out to be. The film also makes the viewer sympathize with the tavern owner’s wife: You can see just from her facial expression that she’s been through a lot.
The film isn’t a western per se. It takes place in New England/Canada during the War of 1812. The protagonist is a young Mohawk woman named Oak ( actress Kaniehtiio Horn is Native American, as are the other actors playing Indians in the film), who goes after the US soldiers who kill her lover, Joshua. Joshua is a British agent who has been providing guns and money to the Mohawks for their allegiance to the British. Oak brings out her inner warrior badass to take on the genocidal US officer Hezekiah Holt and his unit of soldiers in pursuit of Oak.
I don’t agree with Gemma on this. American westerns were about the values of their time, Law and Order, Moral Duty etc. and represented the american culture of the time and the culture of the powerful people of hollywood that made the ultra restrictive hays code, not history… they were never interested in being historical films, at least not before the 90s/2000s. Similarily, the italian westerns were heavily influenced by the italian culture of their time as well, and had no creative restrictions… and that resulted in what are completely different genres and often polar opposites.
They are different, but not completely, and especially not opposites. And this is already true for the more conventional US westerns before 1960, and is especially true for the more complex 60s and 70s twilight westerns from Ride the High Country (1961) to The Shootist (1976) or Heaven’s Gate (1980). And again, if one compares SWs with US westerns, that only makes real sense if one compares those which were made in the same time span. Films were generally very different in the 50s compared to the 70s due to the massive retreat of censorship everywhere.
The US western and the SW went in the 60s in a similar direction by transferring a basically (but not always) optimistic genre into a pessimistic one. But they did this both in their own way, and this made the western of the late 60s and early 70s to the richest phase in the genre history, not only thematically but also stylistically.
Yes, US westerns were mostly less inspired by history than by genre conventions, they are barely authentic or realistic, actually they more often adulterate history with purpose than trying to be authentic. But the SW did the same, only with different intentions and results.
All westerns are at first variations of genre patterns.
