Mavericks

From the very beginning, the Western proved popular in virtually every country of the world. The way was prepared by the torrent of dime novels that poured from the presses in the later years of the nineteenth century. They were circulated abroad in translation, stimulating a mass appetite for tales of daring and adventure set in the American west. Buffalo Bill Cody, himself a hero of hundreds of such publications, built upon his popularity, touring Europe several times with his Wild West show. It was a combination of rodeo, circus and theatre that brought to a world audience the stock characters of cowboy and Indian. The west as a subject for entertainment found Europe in particular a fertile ground, and in due course a crop of home-grown Westerns was produced, some of them strange mutations indeed. It is no surprise that because of the international currency of the west, so many foreign-born directors in Hollywood should have been drawn to the genre including Fred Zinnemann, Fritz Lang and Andre de Toth. Several Hollywood mavericks including Robert Altman, Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray also made some of the finest work in the genre.

Excerpts from BFI Screen Guide: 100 Westerns by Edward Buscombe