The Urban Western

[Vanatru]

Bmwhtly (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/member.php?u=6349) mentioned it in the other post. Which got me thinking about the transitions from a classic western to a modern urban/contemporary western.

Example being:

Horses --> truck/atv
Six shooter -->auto
Cowboy hat --> still cowboy hat in some places, but ball caps
Cowboy boots --> work boots
Telegraph --> Cell phones and radios

Sorry, gotta run. More later.

[Bmwhtly]

To carry on the comparison I used in the other post (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62864), I'd say that although you don't actually need direct links (horses to cars, caps for hats) they provide little hooks for the western fan.
I mentioned the blizzard chase in Four Brothers. And after I posted it, another one occured to me that illustrates a good point about the Urban Western.

Remember A Few Dollars More? Lee Van Cleef knocks on the door of the guy he's looking for (Cavanaugh, I think his name was) and gets shot at. When he opens the door, he finds Cavanaugh has lammed out the window. Van Cleef takes a shot and stops him.

Four Brothers: Three of the brothers see the guy they're looking for (Damian) enter a tower block. They follow him in, Damian sees that they're armed and hops the elevator.
After a brief tussle with the dogs (In lieu of getting shot at). They enter the apartment to find that he's lammed out of the window on a rope.
Here's a little advantage of the urban. Because it's a tower block (which you don't get in Actual westerns), they cut the rope and Damian falls to earth.
"You think he's dead"
"He's not dead, he's just F*cked up, let's talk to him now"

It's an adjustment to the environment. Van Cleef used the wide open spaces of the Old West to get a clear shot at his man.
Wahlberg used the Tall buildings to stop Damian.


The point of this comparison? Simply to make the point about this film specifically (which may translate to the Urban Western genre in generally).
You can have direct replacements for Western Staples.
You can have a film with a western theme and little hooks that a western fan (read: nerd) can relate to Actual Westerns.
You can have a modern day film with a Western Theme.

This seems like a sub-genre that could help kick-start the western markets.

Or I may have had too much coffee.

[JeanneTGC]

I think you could point to almost any "buddy" movie -- comedy or procedural -- any "rag tag team up against insurmountable odds", or any "lone man standing up for what's right" movies and they would all fall into a Western theme.

And I think you could take any existing Western and turn it "modern" as well.

Just read a long London Times article about John Wayne, and it was interesting to see how they looked at his movies. It was also interesting to me that many of his movies were made in response to others (Rio Bravo to High Noon was one example that stood out to me). Even in his war or modern movies, John Wayne's characters tended to still have the same characteristics that his Western characters did. I think there are just certain traits that we associate with the Old West -- put those traits into a modern movie and you can easily see it as a Western, and vice versa.

[seven41]

I think Louis L'amour's THE BROKEN GUN is an excellent transition piece.