The place, Texas; the time, that indeterminate period between the ending of the Civil War and the closing of the frontier which all moviegoers recognise as the span of the Western. The characteristic iconography and narrative form of that genre begin to unfold onscreen: dusty terrain and isolated homestead; an attack by Mexican bandits with sombreros slung round their necks; the ride to the rescue by the seven sons of the homestead. But perhaps there is something out of the way about this family; something rarely seen in the Western. One of the retreating bandits says, ‘I’d rather fight a tribe of Apaches’; the sons of the family are querulous and argue about whisky; one of them is excessively religious; the womenfolk are hospitable to a fault. The homestead's walls are hung with tartan, eighteenth-century pistols and claymores. The older menfolk wear kilts and bonnets and there is even a running gag about thriftiness. The family is, indeed, constructed within an armature of what are popularly, but misleadingly, called stereotypes of the Scots but which ought more accurately to be called ‘discursive positions’ relating to Scotland.

What is most startling of all, however, is that the film is called 7 pistole per i MacGregor (Seven Guns for the MacGregors) (Franco Giraldi, 1966): it belongs to the so-called Spaghetti Western cycle of the sixties and seventies. An Italo-Spanish co-production, it was written by four Italians, was directed by another, and has a cast made up primarily of Italians and Spaniards. These facts are noted not to sneer at Italian Westerns nor to impugn the legitimacy of one society representing another in its art, but to demonstrate that the melange of images, characters and motifs constituting Tartanry and Kailyard is not only the framework within which Scots largely construct themselves but is also the grid within which other cultures construct the Scots.