Until this thread I had never NOT thought of Zorro as a Western. Same with the Cisco Kid (and Pancho). But I can see the point of the question. Horses pretty much equal Westerns for me, but I can’t quite feel right about including more recent (in terms of the setting of the film) movies like:
On referring to Wiki: it would seem that *The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly * is, as it were, a prequel to “Fistful” and For A Few Dollars More – “The Good…”'s action takes place during the Civil War, but in the south-western US. I’m no Civil War expert, but had been vaguely aware that some lesser action in the war took place in the South-West: the Wiki entry specifies the New Mexico Campaign of 1862, which I’d never hitherto heard of.
It’s just a geographical aspect which has slightly bugged me: calling a film about Civil War doings in places such as Virginia / the Carolinas / Georgia, a “Western” (as done by the British publication mentioned) feels to me, comically wrong.
A western set primarily east of the Mississippi is stretching things. But the Civil War is contemporary with the opening of the West. A lot of westerns are set just post Civil War with soldiers from the war going west.
And these matters can vary, can they not, according to the period of history? As a geography-conscious kid in the UK in the 1950s, I was always puzzled by Davy Crockett’s being called “king of the wild frontier”; because Tennessee was where he hung out – whilst I associated the “wild frontier” with Wyoming and Idaho and Arizona and all that good stuff. Year later, the penny dropped for me: Davy was an early 19th century guy – at that time the wild-frontier-and-West were a lot further east, than they came to be, fifty or sixty decades later.
FWIW, here’s TV Tropes’ take on the subject of what’s a Western. Most stories take place in the western half of the continental U.S. between 1865 (the end of the Civil War) and 1890 (the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre and when the census declared the frontier closed). However, the genre is not limited to this particular time and place as seen in the pages for the related sub-genres or sub-tropes.
FWIW, The Mark of Zorro (with Fairbanks) and The Legend of Zorro (with Banderas) are both classified as Westerns on IMDb. (But other Zorro movies ain’t, so . . . ?)
The you’re wrong. It was an Eastern. I suppose it had some elements of a Western, but it’s missing so many, revolvers and rifles, cowboys, cowboy hats, cattle herds, trains, showdowns, saloons, saloon whores, tin stars, barbed wire, just about everything that actually identifies a Western, and especially a lack of westiness.
For my own money, “Western” is as much a state of mind as a “state of the Union” sort of thing. I suspect each of us has a working definition that outlines “what is and what ain’t” and (for us individually at least) that’s the main issue.
Unless there’s an academic or “official” discussion where rules are established at the outset, as opposed to this thread’s “Do you consider…” (leaving the definition(s) to the reader), we’re left to our own preferences. That’s my take on it anyway.
In the first one – maybe the second one, but I’m pretty sure it was the first – No Name is ducking from bullets behind some tombstones in a graveyard. The dates of death on the tombstones clearly show the 1880s. I guess they didn’t figure on sequels, because the third one was definitely during the Civil War, specifically Sibley’s failed New Mexico Campaign.
