Emerging, as Andre Bazin coined it, from the encounter between a mythology, the conquest of the American West, and a medium of expression, cinema, the western was born as the idealized self-portrait of the United States and the most cinematic of genres. , and most malleable. It has experienced a resurgence in the past decade, largely due to the success of Quentin Tarantino’s approach to the genre, in which he often chose to examine aspects that the West had ignored in its heyday – such as the repression of homosexuality or Slavery – as well as putting women first and prioritizing female perspectives. A boom that has also reached the series (in the last five years there have been Godless, The Woodpecker, The Son, Billy the Kid or Yellowstone, in addition to the two prequels to the latter, 1883, already released in the US, and 1923, which will be soon).
A good example of all this is The English, a mini-series available on HBO Max – despite being a BBC/Amazon co-production – which, as is so often the case, sees two opposing protagonists driving together and This encapsulates revisionism as Than the Tender Foot arrived from the east with a desire for adventure or revenge, is the one who in another time would have been played by James Stewart or Gregory Peck, an English lady, Cornelia Locke, who lends her usual poise to Emily Blunt, and the calloused gunslinger, who he teams up with is neither John Wayne nor Clint Eastwood, but a retired Pawnee scout, Eli Whipp, also played by Native American actor Chaske Spencer. Written and directed by Briton Hugo Blick (The Honorable Woman), he has strayed from his usual thrillers but not his penchant for over-complicated plots or strong female characters, in favor of a Western that is both classic and contemporary These times are always on the verge of anachronism or beyond, as reflected in this brief fragment of dialogue between the protagonist and a man who kidnapped her:
“Do you want to rape me?” She asks.
“I am a realist when it comes to consent issues.
“Then fuck a horse.”
From this firm stance, from the unflinching gesture of self-assertion of a foreign woman and an indigenous man in a hostile world dominated by white males, Blick extracts the epic revenge story in which he tries from the start to unite John Ford and Sergio Leone : When Cornelia arrives in the west, the stagecoach door opens as an invitation to enter an unknown world, in a gesture modeled on that at the beginning of Centaurs of the Desert, and Blick films her exit the carriage immediately afterwards as Leone a Claudia Cardinale getting off the train at Hasta que llegó su hora. Extreme characters like the eyelid-less old mugger or the ghostly gunslinger with the syphilis-eaten face and gadgets you might find in a comic book but not in a George Catlin painting, like the saddle-mounted machine gun, seem made out of spaghetti to be transplanted. But the panoramas full of infinite blue skies in Kansas and Wyoming, recreated in Toledo, Segovia and Guadalajara, where the series was filmed, and the explosive luminosity of the photography by Catalan Arnau Valls Colomer relate directly to it, as did Libertad of the Bandits -Westerns by Enrique Urbizu, to the color palette of the great Technicolor titles of the fifties, the golden age of the genre.
An image from the mini-series “The English” by Hugo Blick.
With a mainly Spanish technical team and a full British cast, Blick also claims the universality of a genre that belongs to everyone. So if Urbizu insists in the interviews that the genes of the western are Spanish, because there were bandits in Sierra Morena long before there were cowboys in America and because it was the Spanish who brought the horses and the hats there, and Jordan Peele Claims Nope! The character of the black actor who played the first cowboy filmed is reminded at the end of The English that the first surviving Western, the two-minute short Kidnapping by Indians, was filmed in Blackburn, north-west England, in 1899.
The Englishman has plenty of caricature in the villain, played by a badly affected Rafe Spall, and lacks a good deal of the dynamism and physicality of the classics, which he evokes because Blick, a better writer than director, the composition more than that Movement dominates and is shipwreck in the action scenes, so more than a memorable ride, the six chapters remain a healthy walk through the Wild West with its poetry and blood. But at a time when series claim to be films, and when push comes to shove, they often disguise themselves under layers of special effects and over-production staging that lack the slightest bit of personality, it’s worth celebrating that the images in this Story also that of a love are with Impossible Spells, crying out for a bigger screen.
You can follow EL PAÍS TELEVISIÓN on Twitter or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Receive the TV newsletter
All the news from channels and platforms, with interviews, news and analysis, as well as recommendations and criticism from our journalists
SIGN IN
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits