The Western: Aspects of a Movie Genre

Westerns is the classic account of the emergence, growth and flowering of one of the most perennially popular film genres. When it was first published thirty years ago it was welcomed by reviewers in Europe and the United States as a major work. In this new edition, fully revised and updated, with a new introduction, both movie buffs and general readers have the opportunity to engage again with one of the sharpest film critics of our time. The book focuses on the political, historical and cultural forces that shaped the Western, dealing especially with the thirty years after World War II. It considers the treatment of Indians and Blacks, women and children, the role of violence, landscape and poker-playing, and it advances the theory that most Westerns of those years fit into four principal categories that reflect the styles and ideologies of four leading politicians of the era: John F. Kennedy, Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson and William Buckley. The genre has remained highly influential since the book was first revised in 1977: in spite of a decline in the number of Westerns made for TV and the cinema, it continues to reflect the social and psychological currents in American life. In the 1990s Academy Awards for best movie went to Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, the first time that Westerns were so honoured since Cimarron won an Oscar in 1930. French takes in these and other films, such as Heaven’s Gate, the costly failure that brought down the studio that produced it, and brings the story of the Western into the twenty-first century as the genre that was renewed in Cold Mountain, Open Range, Hidalgo and The Alamo.