Samira Ahmed

Why I love Westerns

We ran a version of this post by Samira Ahmed, the newsreader and reporter for Channel 4, on a previous incarnation of this blog. But with the Coen Brothers’ take on True Grit out next week, Samira has updated and extended it for us now. You can follow Samira on Twitter. here

A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and
little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born,” the Wild West was still – just about – in living memory. And a little British Asian girl growing up in 70s suburbia could read the opening lines to Laura Ingalls Wilders’ Little House on the Prairie, or turn on the TV and enter the frontier lands of the movie Western. One day the little girl grew up to be a journalist and a campaigner on feminist issues, and still loved Westerns so much that she sat through Heaven’s Gate dubbed in German; for the chance to see it on a massive East Berlin cinema screen. This is the story of my journey.

I am 8 years old and find myself at home walking in on the end of a Saturday TV movie matinee. John Wayne is on horseback trying to shoot his beautiful, apparently Indian niece, Natalie Wood. The niece that he’d come to rescue. I am deeply confused. She’s saved by handsome Jeffrey Hunter but it doesn’t feel like a happy ending. I am deeply unsettled.

Now, it was about 15 years later when I actually got around to watching The Searchers from start to finish (when it was screened at the National Film Theatre) , so don’t think I had a highbrow, film critic-style relationship with Westerns from the start. I remember sitting at an uncle’s house in Hillingdon, possibly celebrating Eid, with lots of Hyderabadi relatives, and we were all – kids and adults alike – gathered round the TV watching the end of the original True

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