Setting out to tell the story of a mysterious cowboy a stranger in town with a terrible secret Christine Montalbetti is continually sidetracked by the details that occur to her along the way, her CinemaScope camera focusing not on the gunslinger s grim and determined eyes, but on the insects crawling in the dust by his boots. A collection of the moments usually discarded in order to tell even the simplest and most familiar story, Western presents us with the world behind the cliches, where the much-anticipated violence of the plot is continually, maddeningly delayed, and no moment is too insignificant not to be valued. Montalbetti s daring theft of movie technique and subversion of a genre where women are usually relegated to secondary roles victims, prostitutes, widows, schoolmarms makes Western a remarkable wake for the most basic of American mythologies.