Lang Thompson comments: > >Westerns? There have been only a few great ones made during the last fifty > >years. Only Shane comes to mind as the "standard" by which all others might > > Thirty years might be more accurate: the 50s were probably the genre's > high water mark and there were still quite a few "great ones" during the > 60s from the likes of Ford, Peckinpah, Hawks, etc (& if you want to go > beyond Hollywood, the spaghetti Westerns were a major contribution and > extension). You might argue that many of the elements that attracted > audiences (not the least of which would be young males) is what drives > action films: good vs. evil, with manly men settling their differences via > guns and quick wits. (Which means the next big genre will be the singing > action hero: Bruce Willis and John Travolta have both had hit records > after all. You heard it on Screen-L first.) Something much harder to > evaluate would be a declining sense of "the frontier" but which certainly > can't be dismissed. And as for current Westerns, TNT has had a fair amount > of success with its string of Westerns. The whole question needs to be looked at contextually as well as generically. Western literature, arguably beginning with James Fennimore Cooper and enshrined as a popular genre in the works of Brett Harte, Owen Wooster and others, still has its fans, but I would venture to say that there is no volume of literary production (a source for many films) that comes close to its heyday under the dime novels written by Ned Buntline and co. or to the level that can still be found in other popular genres, such as the detective story or science fiction. Into the 1950s, westerns accounted (if I remember right) for over half the films produced in Hollywood (granting that most of these were forgettable). The "great" (however you define that term) Westerns were relatively few, and many fans were not taken with the attempts at psychological or political commentary in the "great" Westerns of the 1950s such as SHANE and HIGH NOON. (But the young directors-manques of CAHIERS DU CINEMA were more likely to be smitten by an offbeat film like JOHNNY GUITAR.) Film production also also slacked off in Westerns in the 1950s because the genre was transposed to TV. Instead of being in a serial or bottom-double-bill B picture, Roy Rogers had his own weekly TV show and Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autrey were recycled on the tube as well. The 1950s marked a peak of TV Westerns, including THE CISCO KID, WYATT EARP, BAT MASTERSON, ANNIE OAKLEY, RIN-TIN-TIN, THE LONE RANGER, and of course GUNSMOKE (the longest running series of all time for a long time) and such hour-long fare as CHEYENNE and MAVERICK, among many others. (Look at the conclusion of Bob Hope's comedy THE LEMON DROP KID for its use of cameos by the stars of many of these TV shows along with movie stars like Gary Cooper!) By the 1960s, especially as Vietnam imposed itself on the national consciousness, many of the assumptions about Manifest Destiny and the righteousness of violence that were taken for granted in the bulk of Westerns were no longer viable (including the bloated 1962 Cinerama epic HOW THE WEST WAS WON). The TV western virtually disappeared by the end of the decade (but so for the most part had the War Film and TV shows like COMBAT and THE GALLANT MEN). Hawks was recycling the orignally-groundbreaking plot and characters of RIO BRAVO and EL DORADO once again in RIO LOBO. Ford's 1964 film, CHEYENNE AUTUMN, about one of the most infamous massacres of Native Americans in US history, was intended in part as an apology for earlier films. Peckinpah was rubbing audiences' noses in blood and violence while simultaneously mourning the passing of a way of life. Only Sergio Leone, by returning to the Western's mythic roots (and employing music and widescreen to original effect), seemed to be offering a vital new twist to the genre. Many thought that Mel Brooks' BLAZING SADDLES was the final nail in the Western's coffin. They were wrong. But the Western will never be what it was. As Lang Thompson points out, we can't return to those thrilling days of yesteryear quite so easily any more, even though there will still be attempts to do so. In 1939, John Ford could get away with having STAGECOACH's Doc Boone say that Geronimo was "a nice name for a butcher!" In 1993, we got *two* not-unsympathetic versions of Geronimo's life (as well as 2 versions of the Gunfight at the OK Corral). Lang may be right about the return of the Singing Western--heaven help us! Don Larsson ---------------------- Donald Larsson Minnesota State U, Mankato [log in to unmask] ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu