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 pokerplaying, 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.

Since the book was first revised in 1977, there has been, as the author predicted there would be, a steady decline in the number of westerns made for TV and the cinema, but the genre remains highly influential and reflects 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.

Table of Contents

Preface ix



part one: Westerns (1973; 1977)



    Introduction (1973) 3

1 Politics, etc. and the Western 5

2 Heroes and Villains, Women and Children 30

3 Indians and Blacks 47

4 Landscape, Violence, Poker 62

5 The Post-Western 82

    Bibliography 102

    Afterword (1977) 105

The Italian Western 106

Television 108

Cops and Vigilantes 111

Baseball 112

Children 113

New Faces of 1885 114

Comedies 116

Westworld 119

The Missouri Breaks 119

    More Books 126



part two : Westerns Revisited (2004)



    Introduction 131

1 Waiting for the End 134

2 Television 142

3 Comedies 147

4 The Italian Western 152

5 Westward the Women 155

6 Legends Re-examined 160

The Alamo 160

Wild Bill Hickok 164

The James-Younger Gang 169

Billy the Kid 173

Tombstone and the Earps 176

7 The Modern West 181

8 Transpositions and Displacements 190

9 Native Americans 195

10 Eastwood Ho! 206

11 Two New Western Stars 211

12 Some Left-field Entries 219

    Latest Books 223

    Filmography 226



Index of Films 233

Index of Names 240