puzzleprompts | Fandom Reccs

For this outstanding post, many thanks to

sabotabby, our resident expert on the western genre.

Television:
Deadwood: This is one of my top three shows of all time, along with Breaking Bad and Doctor Who. Based on historical events and figures, but what it does with them is just unexpected and beautiful. It also has one of the best narrative shifts where they realize that the hero is boring and the villain is awesome, so let's just make the villain the hero in season 2. The best thing about it is that it has more swearing than any show that is not called The Thick Of It, mostly cocksucker (there is one character who only knows three words in English and one of them is cocksucker), but all of the dialogue is in iambic pentameter. It's utter genius.

Strange Empire: This show is my Firefly. It got one season and was cancelled too soon. It's also the spiritual successor to Deadwood—like, literally, the showrunner decided to make Deadwood but in Canada and with less swearing and more women. (There are a lot of awesome female characters in Deadwood, though.) Basically a group of settlers get ambushed by a bad dude and almost all of the men get massacred, leading to a formation of a temporary city run and populated by women. Our heroine is a Métis sheriff and the other two leads are the biracial mistress to the bad guy and an autistic woman who would be a doctor if there wasn't a patriarchy. Said Métis sheriff is played by Cara Gee, who wears a long swoopy black coat and a black hat and is so very pretty.

Movies:

Obviously everything Sergio Leone ever did. The Man With No Name Trilogy is classic, but they're all excellent.

The Spaghetti Western genre in general is amazeballs—basically the opposite of what Westerns were doing in the US, often because they involved blacklisted American actors and writers. One of my other favourites is The Great Silence, which is so bleak that they shot an alternate ending.

Kurosawa samurai films. Because that's what all the people who made good Westerns were obviously watching, Seven Samurai and Hidden Fortress being the most obvious examples.

Quentin Tarantino's two, Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, for modern historical Westerns.

Getting into some weirder stuff:

Red Westerns: This is a recent, delightful discovery, but the USSR also made its fair share of Westerns and they are almost as good as the Italian ones. My favourite, which is dying to be remade by Tarantino and ought to star Cara Gee, is Sons of the Great Bear. It's about a Lakota man whose father is murdered by a white gold prospector who also wants to kick his tribe off their land. It does involve redface (it's East German, so their opportunities for hiring Native American actors were approximately zero) but the author of the book it's based on lived amongst the Lakota and completely did her research, so beyond that it's very respectful.

Another one I loved was A Man From the Boulevard des Capucines, which is about a gentleman who comes to the wild frontier bearing the gift of cinema. It's pretty lighthearted and the humour stands up in English subtitles. Basically it's about how film is the most awesome thing ever and makes people more civilized and cultured.

I'm slowly making my way through Acid Westerns, my favourite of which is Walker. The less you know about it going in, the more fun it will be to watch for the first time, but then I recommend watching it again to see all the stuff you missed. It's about an American mercenary who declares himself president of Nicaragua. It was made during the 1980s Contra War so it's very much about American foreign policy in Latin America. Also Joe Strummer did the soundtrack and appears briefly in it.

Books:

I don't really read many because I don't think it translates as well in literature as on the screen. But Cormac McCarthy is worth reading.