Quote from: Barrington Boots on 19 August, 2023, 09:28:34 AMI think there's a difference between a Western and a film set in the old West, but it all depends how you define a Western and there's no set criteria. This is the sort of stuff you can debate endlessly: my Mum pretty much thinks anything is a Western if they're wearing cowboy hats and therefore the Dukes of Hazzard qualifies.
Having thought about it, I don't think there's a checklist of stuff that makes something unquestionably a Western, but I do think it needs to have a lot of elements and that they need to be to the fore of the film, not only in setting and structure but also in its mood and the 'soul' of the picture.
I don't think adding elements of another genre disqualifies a film from being a Western although if its not the defining feature of the film it could be questionable. In High Plains Drifter, although the ghost element is the main thrust of the plot, it's full of the tropes and elements we associate with Westerns - frontier setting, rugged characters, guns and horses and the like but also personal justice, lawlessness, individual isolation, retribution through violence - that saturate the film more so than the supernatural elements, so its a film about a ghost, but I'd argue its a Western foremost and not a ghost film foremost.
Interestingly having written that above list out they do also feature in Hateful Eight as well, but I don't think they're part of the soul of the picture. Quentin Tarantino is very good at putting genre elements and homages into his films but he's making something different, partly because he's working in a different cultural zeitgiest. In the same way, I'd say that Kill Bill is a revenge movie with a lot of martial arts in it, but not a Kung Fu movie in the same way that the Hong Kong films he's paying tribute to are, nor is it a Wuxia film. I thought HE was a whodunnit because the whodunnit elements seemed, to me, to be the overarching crux of the film (I've only seen it once though and happy to told otherwise!)
It's like film noir: there's a lot of films made influenced by that genre and containing elements of it, but it could be argued there's not really been any major film noir movies made since the 60s. It all really depends on how strictly you define the film genre in question though, like I say - there's no talking in definites here.
TLDR: it's subjective.
If there's a gun-shot with a PSH-WHAMMM ricochet sound it's a western. Otherwise it's not.
Absolutely delighted to have been selected, it was not expected given the overall calibre of entries.