Richard Lutz heads west for the films you have to see this week on the box.

Get your Stetson on, round up those Longhorns, head for the Last Chance Saloon: I have a cowboy double header that’ll leave you crossing The Great Divide.

There, that’s it with the western cliches.

But Shane (Wed, 11.05, More4) and Yojimbo (Wed, 12.55, Film4…better yet make that 00.55 Thurs am) are a double header that’s worth hitting the record button for- one a great Hollywood movie about the solitary good guy versus the crazed crowd and the latter a Japanese classic about the same iconic figure that Clint used as a role model for his ground breaking Spaghetti westerns.

Let’s take Shane first:a tired gunslinger (Alan Ladd) tries to settle down with homesteaders Van Heflin and wife Jean Arthur and lead a quiet life. But ultimo-baddie Jack Palance is itching for a fight.

Shane knows to hit the fighting scene is a retrograde step. But he is driven by fate. He is a gunfighter. Not a sodbuster. So Shane, the loner, goes back down the road to perdition and violence. There’s a keen subplot about Shane’s attraction to the rancher’s wife and how he is idolised by her small son.

But it is the stark and simple theme of a man and a gun (appallingly played out in the streets of American today) that strikes a chord. And Palance, all jangly boots and menacing grin is uber-bad as hired gun Jack Wilson.

The final scene is a movie classic too: Shane walking away from the farm (and normalcy) with little boy Joey (played by a young Brandon de Wilde) crying out: “Shane…Shane…come back.”

Of course, he won’t. And he doesn’t.

Eight years later, in 1961, Japanese director Akiro Kurosawa completed his great ‘Eastern’ called Yojimbo. And doesn’t it have the ring of many great cowboy films: A lone samurai warrior (played by Toshiro Mifune) shows up in a small town riven by crime gang rivalry. He plays one side off the other, utimately freeing the terrifed town from the violent gangsters.

Yeah, yeah, Clint Eastwood played the same character in A Fistful of Dollars and Yojimbo itself is based on a Dashiell Hammet story called Red Harvest and, yeah, yeah, even the more recent Lucky Number Slevin is linked with the Yojimbo plot.

But it still stands on its own. Mifune is a five star stud hero who Kurosawa used time and time again: a kind of John Wayne with irony and a certain self mocking persona in films such as Seven Samurai and Hidden Fortress.

Both movies grab that central modern theme of One Man versus The Horde and wrings every last inch of drama out of it. That they are both are on the same day is noteworthy and worth the time staring at the flatscreen when you should be doing the garden, reading a Donna Tartt novel or down at the pub.