December 8, 2007
Soviet Westerns Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:10 PM EST Arts & Letters Daily today links to a diverting piece from The New Statesman by the journalist and filmmaker Lucy Ash, “Wild, Wild East,” about the fascination Soviet leaders had for American Westerns. The piece quotes Orson Welles claiming that Stalin was a great fan of John Wayne but was so disturbed by Wayne’s anti-Communism that he sent KGB assassins after him. This seems unlikely, not least because the KGB was founded in 1954, the year after Stalin’s death, but it is a diverting anecdote, and no doubt deeply gratified Wayne. Ash also reports that Leonid Brezhnev was a passionate admirer of Chuck Connors, the star of the TV series The Rifleman, an enthusiasm I have read about in several other places. Ash claims that Connors presented Brezhnev with twin Colt .45s, after which Brezhnev permitted The Rifleman to be broadcast on Soviet TV. Ash writes that enthusiasm for our Westerns inspired the Soviet Union to try to develop an indigenous capacity, quoting Russians as claiming that the best of these is The White Sun of the Desert, which I intend to check out. The movie’s hero is a demobilized Red Army soldier caught in a showdown between a Red Army cavalry unit and Muslim counter-revolutionaries during the Russian Civil War, with the arch-villain a Muslim leader who murders some of his own wives to escape the Red cavalry, and the hero, who only wants to go home after the wars, determined to rescue the remaining wives. Ash describes the Russian hero as a man who serenely lights his own cigarette from a smoldering fuse attached to a bundle of dynamite, which reminded me that, as in the case of the coordination of tanks and tactical airpower, a technique invented by the Germans, or the realist novel, a literary form pioneered in Western Europe, the Russians are not necessarily maladroit when adapting things invented elsewhere. As Ash told her story, I was quickly persuaded by her assertion that the Western was made for the Russians: Siberia as the West, indigenous peoples hostile to Russian expansion as the Apaches, and a shared enthusiasm for strong silent types. On the other hand, people may not need immediately obvious cultural-historical parallels to the history of the United States to make and bolt down their own versions of Westerns. The Germans were for a long time mad for their novelist Karl May, one of the best-selling German writers of all time, greatly admired by Germans as various as Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, and Hermann Hesse. Between 1912 and 1968 Germans made 23 movies of May’s books. As for Westerns recast in local costume, one of the greatest westerns ever made is surely Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, in which Toshiro Mifune plays a masterless samurai who hires out to two competing gangs of gangsters fighting over control of a terrified village, and cleans up the town by betraying both of them. Yojimbo was remade first by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars, a spaghetti western starring Clint Eastwood in the Mifune role, and then as an entirely American neo-Western, one updated to the 1930s. That later remake was by Walter Hill, and is titled Last Man Standing, with Bruce Willis playing a version of Mifune’s character. So we exported Westerns, and in some famous cases wound up re-importing and re-adapting what we had originated. Cultural interpenetration is an intricate business. It is also a very wide-ranging one. A year or so ago, my friends were off to see a very highly praised Thai Western, Wisit Sasanatieng’s Tears of the Black Tiger. Americans have sent more dreams out into the world than we may realize.
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