The Decline of the Hollywood Western

In the early days of Hollywood the frontier, or at least frontier-like conditions in the western United States, were so historically near as to be within the memory of a good many living adults, with the effect all this had for efforts to romanticize it. Half a century on the subject matter was far remote--and increasingly problematic, the attitude toward Native Americans common to the Western, for example, less acceptable. (The confrontation between Sacheen Littlefeather and John Wayne at the 1973 Oscars--recalled to public consciousness by the Will Smith-Chris Rock episode--seems symbolic.) One might add that making so many Westerns for so long--making so much of anything for so long--made it overfamiliar while leaving artists with that much less to do with it that had not already been done innumerable times (the more, perhaps, in as it focused on a very particular period and setting, with perhaps particularly strong limitations so far as such genres go). Unsurprisingly there was less tendency to handle the material "straight," with films like The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Blazing Saddles, all bespeaking a very different, genre-subverting attitude.

Of course a trickle of such films has continued ever after, with something of a surge occurring now and then, most notably in the early '90s (with the commercial and critical successes of Best Picture winners Dances With Wolves and Unforgiven, as well as more modest success with such films as the big screen version of the old Maverick TV series, and a good many other efforts like Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead). Still, it went only so far and lasted only so long, and since then the genre has, its artier, lower-budgeted efforts apart, been more often associated with disappointing receipts and critical derision (as with Wild Wild West or The Lone Ranger) that only confirm the view that popular culture has moved on.

Yet there was another, more fundamental, factor worth recalling, both in the appeal of the Western in its heyday, and the decline of its appeal relative to other forms. Consider what Goethe and Schiller wrote in their piece "On Epic and Dramatic Poetry" (as translated by Evelyn Lantz):

The characters stand best at a certain level of culture, where self-activity is still left to its own resources, where one operates not morally, politically, or mechanically but rather personally (emphasis added).

Goethe and Schiller went on to observe that Greek myths were "particularly favorable to the poet," and so, one might argue, were the conditions of the frontier, where the apparatus and inhibitions and rules of civilization were a comparatively slight thing--what made for situations like those of Stagecoach, the oft-told story of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral (from My Darling Clementine to Wyatt Earp and beyond), High Noon.

As implied by the situations in all these films it is particularly important that it afforded a scene for individualistic action-adventure. And it is not irrelevant to the Western's decline that audiences found other milieu for such more appealing. Among much else there was a tendency to, in an era of hysteria over unruly youth, rebellious minorities, crime in the streets and the rest to see modern urban America as not so far removed from the frontier--and in need of a gunslinger (like a Dirty Harry, who, like the hero of High Noon, tossed away his badge at story's end). The attitude may have been more consequential still with an audience that found it easier to "get into" stories with contemporary settings. (Hence the boom of paramilitary action-adventure from the '70s to the '90s, and the preference for the adventures of superheroes in Metropolis, Gotham or New York to stories in more exotic milieu--like galaxies far, far away.) The result was that by the '70s the Western was not only exploiting an exhausted and increasingly challenged nostalgia, and itself artistically exhausted, but, as a cinematic staple on anything like such grounds, it had become superfluous.