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Once upon a time in China and America, there lived two distinct genres of action cinema fated to cross paths. On one side of the world, the western, which combined stylized violence, stoic masculinity, and American cultural mythology to tell tales of honor, loyalty, and vengeance across the Old West. On the other end, the martial arts picture, which combined stylized violence, stoic masculinity, and Chinese cultural mythology to tell tales of honor, loyalty, and vengeance throughout the Middle Kingdom. Two genres operating, two sides of the same coin, separated only by a mere 7,000 miles of distance between countries.
By late-1960s, the traditional western was well past its prime, mostly sustaining via the “spaghetti” westerns coming in from abroad or the New Hollywood and countercultural revisionism taking root at home. At the same time, the martial arts film was in the midst of its own renaissance with the global ascendency of Bruce Lee, Shaw Brothers Studios, and Hong Kong action cinema at large. It didn’t take long for western filmmakers to recognize the thematic overlap between the two genres, and before long the Spanish and Italian film industries began turning out spaghetti westerns with a kung fu twist, beginning with Enzo Peri’s James Shigeta-starring feature, DEATH WALKS IN LAREDO (1967).
The kung fu western trend would arguably hit its peak in 1972 with the major studio release of Terence Young’s RED SUN, a spaghetti western-samurai movie crossover starring Toshirō Mifune and Charles Bronson (coincidentally, stars of both SEVEN SAMURAI and its western reimagining, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN), and the debut of the popular television serial KUNG FU, featuring David Carradine as a Shaolin abbot journeying through the Old West. But the trend didn’t end there, nor did it die out as the spaghetti western craze of the 60s & 70s began to flag. On the contrary, Italian and Spanish studios had leaned even heavier into the hybrid-genre gimmick as a way to sustain appeal, leading to a small mid-70s boom of martial arts-spaghetti western crossovers: A final stand of sorts, in classic western fashion.