Remember that Texas was part of the Confederacy and Oregon was part of the Union, but both are undeniably western. I think the southeast is just as eastern as the northeast.
The Mississippi is a convenient physical dividing line and has lots of historic significance, so why not?
Oh. Well, you’re welcome anyway.
Haven’t seen it so I can’t vouch for it’s greatness, but The Devil’s Disciple is set during the American Revolution and is generally well-regarded (as a film, not as history).
Jungle Red
The Philadelphia Story
Bringing up Baby
Holiday Inn
I’ll echo TWDuke’s comment that westerns as a genre has more to do with certain tropes than it does with geography. A lot of these tropes grew out of literature and include thigns we all learned in in English class. Man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self. Then you have genre characters such as the gun fighter, the gambler, the prostitute with a heart of gold, etc. There’s no cohesive genre of “Eastern” that I’m aware of.
Lissener knows a whole lot more about movies and hopefully he’ll participate in this thread.
Odesio
The Perfect Storm
Ragtime
The Great Gatsby
Dead End
Cotton Comes to Harlem
The Ice Storm
Shaft
Kids
The Hours (2/3 of it anyway)
Superfly
*The Crucible
The Scarlet Letter
Amistad
Little Women*
Any adaptation of a Stephen King story set in Maine.
And anything set in Lovecraft Country.
The Devil and Daniel Webster
Sure there is: Man vs. society.
Woody Allen films are basically about an outsider trying to fit into a culture that he doesn’t get, and that doesn’t get him.
Frank Capra films are about a little guy about to be crushed by The Powers That Be until virtue triumphs in the end.
John Waters movies are about plucky misfits triumphing against stuffy middle-class sensibilities.
The Philadelphia Story is Tracy Lord caught between settling for a safe marriage or yielding to temptation. On the Waterfront has a loser battling corrupt bosses.
I’d go as far as to say if it’s one person against any kind of power structure, it’s an “Eastern.”
I guess we should include all the Batman movies. Wherever Gotham City is, it’s nowhere south of the Potomac and nowhere west of Pittsburgh.
Hotel New Hampshire
Mystic Pizza
Same Time Next Year
Indian Summer
Cider House Rules
Wall Street
Chicago? (Well, that’s still east of the Mississippi and south of the Potomac.)
Like in 3:10 to Yuma, Shane, or other countless westerns where the little guy tries to keep his land in the face of ruthless cattle barons or the railroad?
Odesio
Beat me to it, that was the first thing that came to mind.
Gotham definitely ain’t Chicago. Don’t ask me how I know that, I just know, from years of reading reprints of the early Batman comics.
I alwyas think of it as a dystopian Baltimore. Maybe because B’More was halfway there for a while. . .
The world was a much bigger place before WWII. Cities like St. Louis, Chicago, Nashville, or whatever, each had its own identity. Until American movies started to change with influences from postwar Europe (Italian Neorealism, French New Wave) and with the general postwar “zeitgeist,” it was pretty much taken as universal given that the US consisted of the East Coast . . . and everywhere else. Watching old movies, you get a definite sense of the East Coast as the Center of the Universe, and everywhere else as a provincial backwater. Point being, the Western was only “western” in that it was west of that center of the universe.
Long theory short, almost every movie that WASN’T a western was, in fact, an “Eastern,” as defined by the OP.
Eastern with a historical perspective: Terrence Malick’s The New World