We think of westerns as a…as the…American genre. They’re our national myth; our way of defining ourselves as a people. But just as Hollywood has made medieval romances and tales from the Arabian Nights, other countries have made westerns. They’ve also let westerns influence their contemporary dramas and samurai films.
March 1 through April 26, SFMOMA explores how foreign filmmakers handled this most American genre with the series Non-Western Westerns. The series starts with the obvious choice, Sergio Leone, and ends with the second most obvious, Akira Kurosawa. In between come some curious surprises.
To be fair, they didn’t go with an obvious Leone selection like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but with the less-often-seen For a Few Dollars More. It screens on a double-bill with another spaghetti western, Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence. (Unfortunately, the museum is screening For a Few Dollars More off of a DVD. The other movies will all be in 35mm.)
Of course, no one would literally define the closing film, Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, as a western. But the influence is so heavy it fits. I have to assume that’s the case with many of the other films on the schedule, such as the Bollywood Sholay, and Johnnie To’s Exiled, set in Macau in 1998.
OTOH, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Mexican allegory El Topo definitely belongs in the western genre, but is it “non-western?†Mexican culture played such an important role in the American west–and in American westerns–that the genre seems as much theirs as ours.
Bayflicks 
Sholay is really about as close to a Western as one can get for a Bollywood film. Exiled is a less literal choice- its more a display of Western stylistic influences than genre conventions. I’m excited for another chance to see El Topo, and my first shot at a Rocha film.