Six American Westerns Directed by Non-American Filmmakers (Spaghetti Westerns Excluded)

By Matt Prigge
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Oct. 3, 2007

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

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Canyon Passage (1946): The Western genre is dominated by Yanks: John Ford, John Wayne, Anthony Mann, Clint Eastwood. So whenever a foreign director takes a crack, it's like seeing our openest spaces with a new set of eyes. The only Western from French-born Jacques Tourneur (Cat People), Canyon Passage reimagines the genre as one long hoedown, with a town presented in the kind of near-plotless, densely layered style not seen till the anti-Western days of McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

Rancho Notorious (1952): Fritz Lang dabbled in Westerns a couple times (including 1940's The Return of Frank James), but it's this thoroughly artificial outing that really threatened to reinvent the genre. Marleine Dietrich plays a cross-dressing bordello queen who harbors criminals--a gender switch that beat Nicholas Ray's delirious campfest Johnny Guitar to the punch by two years.

High Noon (1952): Wouldn't you know the most structurally daring of classic Westerns would come from a nonnative? That's Austrian-Hungarian-born Fred Zinnemann, also responsible for the gung-ho From Here to Eternity.

River of No Return (1954): Otto Preminger's quasi-aquatic thriller not only reenvisions the West (or, technically, its Canadian stand-in) in a rectangular frame, but has delicate flower Marilyn Monroe go unexpectedly tough and no-nonsense as well.

The Naked Dawn (1955): Another Austrian-Hungarian emigre, Z-grade master Edgar G. Ulmer (The Black Cat, Detour) directed at least 50 of the most resourceful cheapies barely seen, few of them as layered as this Mexico-set Western. Bandito Arthur Kennedy takes a farmer couple hostage, and in lieu of thrills and spills--that would require a budget--is a thoughtful exploration of the Stockholm Syndrome.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007): Surely it'd take a non-American (Andrew Dominik of New Zealand) to resurrect the anti-Western.

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