The Western Hero Deconstructed in The Searchers and A Fistful of Dollars (Essai comparatif en anglais)
|États-Unis - 1956| |Western| |119 minutes - Couleur - v.o. : Anglais| |Réalisateur: John Ford| | Italie - 1964| |Western| |100 minutes - Couleur - v.o.: Italien| |Réalisateur: Sergio Leone| In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, filmmakers began to question the dichotomies and traditional narrative elements of the mythologized west such as the “black hat, white hat” archetype. In this revisionist tendency, traditional western heroes, like cowboys and cavalrymen, lose some of their lusters. In John Ford’s The Searchers , Ethan, the protagonist, is one of the first to be blatantly racist in American westerns. Meanwhile, in Italy, certain filmmakers propose an even more radical approach, the spaghetti westerns. They reject almost all the values depicted in classical westerns as naïve and propose a more cynical approach. I will argue that the characters of Ethan Edwards in The Searchers and Joe in Sergio Leone’s...