Rock 'n Roll, Coca Cola, McDonalds, fried chicken and The Western: America's number 1 exports. Two thousand years from now that might be the only thing left that proved America ever existed.

There have been black westerns, Chinese westerns, midget westerns, gay westerns, Jewish westerns, Argentinean Westerns and Brazilian Westerns. The first film to use a close up was a Western. When Marlon Brando started his own production company and bought in brilliant newcomer Stanley Kubrick for his big Hollywood break, they made a Western.

Almost every European country has made westerns. Like rock n'roll they seem so simple. The good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear the black hats. The only women are faithful or mothers and the only justice is you and your gun.

In the 60's westerns had left the movie theaters and taken over the living rooms. Some of the blandest entertainment imaginable was being pushed into people's homes, getting airtime because the dad rode a horse and carried a gun. Sergio Leone was making a peplum called "Sodom And Gemorrah" when he noticed that Spain looked a lot like his idealization of the old American west. He conceived an idea about an amoral character shooting anything that got in his way. He wanted an American and got lucky. He hired Clint Eastwood to make two films for $35,000.

Leone ripped off the plot for Kurosawa's "Yojimbo", which was cool because Kurosawa ripped off the plot from Dashiel Hammet's "Red Harvest". (No mention of Faulkner, please.) It’s funny because everybody remembers "Yojimbo" and "A Fistful Of Dollars" but hardly anyone has read "Red Harvest" nowadays . . . so much for plagiarism.

The first Leone film, "A Fistful Of Dollars" was a monster hit. Leone the businessman had the sequel, "For A Few Dollars More" in the theaters at the height of the buzz.

The films were made on the cheap but they certainly became more than the budget. Eastwood was the Number One Box Office Star in the world, Ennio Morricone became an icon - he reversed himself in interviews about the scores after the films were a hit - and Leone was considered a genius that had created a genre.

For the Italian film industry to survive they needed to get plenty of product out domestically. International distribution was a dream; the local cinemas were a paycheck. Because of that it was pretty much the norm for the producers to rip off any successful film that came along. It was pretty natural for them to go after their native son's handiwork.

It was a mixed bag. With the coffers of gold in America some of the producers were willing to take a chance and allow their writers and directors a little bit of room to expand the limited genre. That attitude gave us films like "Django". It also gave us plenty, like nearly a thousand of the worst films ever made - most discouraging were the hybrid attempts combining spaghetti westerns with the kung fu craze . . .

"Once Upon A Time In Italy" isn't going to convert anybody into loving Westerns or even Spaghetti Westerns, but for the people who've seen the "Dollar" films or Django and have an interest in the movies, or even for film students who need to see how to make art out of pancake make-up and empty landscapes this is a marvelous set.

Anchor bay has done a very good job of restoring and packaging these films. They fall short of the high standard set by Celestial Films with their release of the Shaw Brothers catalog but there can be no doubt this is a pleasant package. The box is chintzy but each DVD case has a lobby card or poster from the original Italian release of the film. The images are bright and clear and the sound tracks cleaned up nicely with no addition of gimmicky 5.1 effects.

There are plenty of okay extras. Each disk has a filmography of all the principals involved. There are some decent interviews. Each disk makes an impressive package.

The big finds here are "A Bullet For The General" who makes a serious attempt to blend politics with the genre. It fails because of the American actor being incredibly weak, but it is an interesting and worthwhile failure.

Lucio Fulci's amazingly humanistic and compelling, "Four For The Apocalypse" is good enough to see his talent beyond his rather tedious slasher flix.

And finally there is the infamous "Keoma". It features a brilliant sound track by the DiAngelis Brothers. (Although I still think their greatest score was for the very good film "A Man Called Blade") The score is so revelatory that it has caused a lot of academia discussion and forced as much attention on itself as it has the movie. Franco Nero is at his best. The story telling techniques are novel, and suitable.

"Adios, Texas" and "Companeros" are better than average examples of the genre. Very much worth seeing for key scenes and genuine entertainment, but they both trod ground others have trod before instead of pushing the genre forward.

Sirk's trademarks were bright primary colors, often framing his stars in bright colors against bright cyan skies.

He kept the lighting neutral, not often using it for dramatic effect, thus forcing the drama and focus to always be on the actors and their voices. His plots always centered on possibly real people of different classes and backgrounds attempting to co-exist and survive and a world that didn't care what you were or what you might become.

Sirk might well be totally forgotten today, his 3 major hits occasionally turning up, but in the 80's a brash, strident playwright wrote critical pieces on Sirk, considering his films to be the epitome of the film art, and film to be the epitome of art.

Fassbinder's writing was so persuasive and the films he would subsequently make so potent that he was responsible for the term "Sirkian" entering the lexicon.

Fassbinder made some of the great films of the 80's, all of which cadged extensively from Sirk both thematically and in style.

One of Fassbinder's best films, "Ali: Fear Eats The Soul" was merely an adaptation of Sirk's, "All That Heaven Allows". The major telling point in both being the way a family and the community reacts to an older woman seeking sex and then love, a love that appears, at first, to be an empty product of sex. (You need to remember that, as it is also a central theme in "You Are My Sunshine".)

Regrettably I can't read Korean. Even being a native Angelino with a lot of friends in Koreatown, can't give me any insight to why, from the outset, Korean movies so carefully ape the films of Douglas Sirk. In a few of the gangster films like "Old Boy" and "Bittersweet Life" there are strong hints of Fassbinder but overwhelmingly most Korean movies are eerily Sirkian!

"You Are My Sunshine" is a good movie, atypical in a lot of ways. It explores similar themes to "Christmas In August", "Birdcage Inn" and even "Spy Girl". The only irksome thing about it was the sudden rush to proclaim this a true story. If a film director can't convince me that a story is real then why should I bother watching?

"You Are My Sunshine" almost seems like another remake of "All That Heaven" allows, but retold for a more modern audience and for a different culture.

Aside from the readily apparent similarities (the iconography of the two giant yellow balloon men and the vivid primary colors worn by the actors until they descend into hell) there is one scene that truly jumps out, when the farmer calculates out how much he figures a coffee shop girl makes in a month and then goes and delivers the cash to plead with her to not make anymore deliveries, the camera angles used are identical to the ones used by Sirk when Dorothy Malone confronts Robert Stack in "Inherit the Wind" and the scene is played in tone to equate to Fassbinder's self starring "Fist: Right To Freedom" when he tries to buy the cute rich boys love with his lottery cash.

The similarities are too close to the surface to be happenstance but so ingrained and organic that it just conceivable that Sirk and Fassbinder had converged with the Koreans on to the universal best way to tell these sort of stories.

Aside from the film history lesson this is a good movie. Highly entertaining and giving a brilliant insight into human relationships, into humanity.

The climax is soul searing but the denouement side steps some important issues, which seemed odd in a film that until then had been so committed to exploring the whole truth.

King Hu is a killer filmmaker. He made movies for Chinese audiences. Never paid any attention to foreign markets. This paid off in spades for one of the greatest films of all time, "A Touch Of Zen".

As great as that movie was this film is probably more important. Without "Lee Kahn" there might not even be an Asian film industry, and we would all be poorer for that.

After Bruce Lee died the "Kung Fu" market was lost and consigned to fad status. The apex and the nadir for the genre was when "Chinese Hercules", an insignificant film otherwise, actually made Box Office number 1 grossing movie list.

Both before and certainly after "Chinese Hercules" the main drive of Kung Fu movies was hucksters looking to turn a quick buck. They'd pick up the cheapest product they could (Chinese Hercules was rumored to have a $5,000 US negative cost) and then sell the pictures at a flat fee, usually one to three hundred bucks a week.

Flat fee films would never play the big first run houses. They were consigned to the grind houses. In LA that was in theaters like the World on Hollywood Blvd. The World was a "prestige" grind house, next to the porno Pussycat Theater. Most of the grind houses were downtown near skid row. You'd get 4 films for a $1 admission price and most of the theaters were open 24 hours. They employed an usher whose main job was to wake up the tenants who found it cheaper than a hotel room.

For the few who wanted to see one of the films it was an education that a DVD will never be able to recreate.

One of my perverse favorites from this time was a movie called "Hong Kong Cat". These guys had picked up for almost free a bunch of really bad Thai and Taiwan kung fu flics. They were so bad that there decision was to get a cheap but nifty looking black and white poster and then just cut out all the fight sequences and stick them together in any fashion they happened to fall in. This was amazing cinema. Some guy you'd never seen before would throw one punch and then there'd be a 3 minute fight scene featuring a whole different bunch of guys fighting and on and on for seventy minutes! Sometimes the fighters would re-appear later on but most of the time they didn't.

Then in the UK censorship had gotten ugly. They cut the films up so badly it was like watching hard-core porn on an R rated cable channel.

The best example of this was in Lee's "Way Of The Dragon". Lee walks out into the alley with the thugs and in the next shot he walks away from the alley while the thugs lie all beaten up on the ground!

"Sight and Sound" is a stuffy, pretentious British FILM magazine. Right around this time they published an article by Tony Ryan's called "Threads In A Labyrinth".

Ryan's was attempting to do for Chinese movies what Donald Ritchie had done for Japanese movies with his work on Ozu and Kurasawa.

The Labyrinth article attempted an auteur semiotic examination of Chinese cinema by examining King Hu's "The Fate Of Lee Kahn" and Chang Cheh's "Golden Swallow", with a history of each director's work until that time.

Ryan's article was brilliant and ended with the comment that these two men were merely examples and served his point to illustrate what were merely threads in a dense impressive cultural labyrinth. (Hence the gooney title)

Of note were his observations on the way the Chinese read films. In Western films we read left to right so that a plane flying right to left signifies danger and creates tension (as a simple example of composition). The Chinese read up and down and use a different dialect.

He also pointed out that the cultural imperative. To describe a phenomenal feat, such as jumping 6 feet straight up, the Chinese theater was used to a sort of hyperbole; so that the viewer had a different set of filters when watching a film.

Suddenly kung fu movies had cachet! Hong Kong's response was to up their price.

The Hollywood distributors response was to pick up more American indy and Italian films (Last House On The Left, giallo being the immediate beneficiaries, films like "They Call Her One Eye (Thriller)" "Gone In 60 Seconds" and "Sword Of Vengeance" (Part 3 of the Lone Wolf and Cub films) got chances they wouldn't have had otherwise.)

"The Fate Of Lee Kahn" started things rolling. It got a two week run at the Fox Venice (known for it's art film leanings) and at the Oriental Theater (known as a second run house), completely side stepping the grind houses.

In England it was used to side step the censors. Distributors rented theaters. To see the film you had to sign up for a private membership. To get the private membership you merely had to buy a ticket.

In America this practice is called Four Walling, where the distributor would take his film and rent the theater for the time needed, keeping all the profit. It was new in modern film distribution in England.

The end result was that in Europe, "Lee Kahn" made 86% of the Best Film Of The Year lists. In England some of the great Chinese movies suddenly had a new market.

Hong Kong didn't make much money from those deals. The USA was still the prize, but all the quality films were deemed too expensive. For a few thousand dollars you could buy some old Green Hornet episodes, splice them together and have a new Bruce Lee film, one that even played on the Champs Elysee in Paris complete with a 15 foot, half block long mural of Lee.

For Chinese movies the only thing selling were the super cheap Bruce Lee rip offs and the occasional hum dinger like "Master of the Flying Guillotine" and Chang Cheh's "Five Deadly Venoms".

And that could have been the fate of Chinese movies - the odd cheap film and the Art House presentation. But then came home video and "Black Belt Theater".

That's got little to do with King Hu though.

This is a film worth having.