In the nineteenth-century Arizona desert, a western hero fights alongside his sidekick, an expert rider who wields weapons with deadly skill. The westerner's rugged and stoic presentation contrasts with his companion's broken English, painted face and wild unkempt hair. This extravagant character is not one of the film's many Apaches, but an alien presence that more powerfully threatens if not the western hero, then the generic frame of westernness that would contain him: she is Brigitte Bardot, playing opposite Sean Connery, in Shalako (Edward Dmytryk 1968).

Bardot made westerns – or at least films that have been called westerns. In addition to Shalako she starred with Jeanne Moreau in Viva Maria! (Louis Malle, 1965) and with Claudia Cardinale in Les Pétroleuses / The Legend of Frenchie King (Christian-Jaque, 1971). High-wattage celebrity and eminent directors notwithstanding, these films garner scant attention in most accounts of Bardot's film career, where commentary more assiduously dwells on the frank and youthful sexuality exhibited in Et Dieu … créa la femme / And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956), and her consecration as a nouvelle vague icon in Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris / Contempt (1963). Vadim's and Godard's films are hailed as signal events in Bardot's stardom and, each in its way, in the history of French cinema. When not overlooked entirely, the three western films are marginalised as curiosities of a spent film career slouching towards an undistinguished end.

The relation between genres and stardom is complex. Richard Dyer has identified two axes in this dynamic. On the one hand genres and star images are complicit: genre serves as a mediator of ‘fit’ between a film role and a star's established image, and may be a signal constituent of it ( John Wayne and the western, for example, or Carole Lombard and the screwball comedy). However, they are also homologous: genres, like star images, are continuous with a relay of iconography, visual style, symbolic structures and discourse that exceed what appears on the screen. This structural similarity snares the star vehicle in the same circular conundrum that has often vexed genre criticism: namely that the group of films that define measures of ‘good fit’ between a star and a genre will a priori exclude those that present ill-fitting characteristics.