It's funny how fish-out-of-water story concepts make their way on to films. Specifically, when characters and cultures find themselves literally on foreign soil. For instance, East meets West tales have been almost a staple in television and film through the decades. One manner deployed in such tales can have a lone protagonist struggle their way through a foreign culture as a method of discovery or exposition in the yarn (and for the audience). This was effectively done in the Kung Fu TV series (1972-75), and the 1990 film Quigley Down Under. You'll note that my examples purposely looked at the western ilk. I know it's not a genre with universal appeal, but it remains a favorite of mine through the years.While I've wandered into crime/mystery literature of late, I guess I feel that style of writing has a kinship with the western. Like the venerable oater, crime fiction shares similar core motifs of "love, danger, and death". Honor and a code of ethics can also be attributed to both. Each genre has a tremendous versatility in their morality plays to express a point of view and comment on history, injustice, and the commonality among societies and peoples. For me, those parallels make another very effective reason why Joss Whedon's short-lived 'space' western series, Firefly, was so damn good (and why the Fox Network canceling it seems so dimwitted years later). In fact, some of the great fiction writers of recent time have penned great stories in both the crime and western sets (Elmore Leonard and Robert B. Parker would be two of the very best).
