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.

Autorentext

Philip French

Inhalt

Preface Part One: Westerns (1973; 1977) Introduction (1973) 1. Politics, etc. and the Western 2. Heroes and Villains, Women and Children 3. Indians and Blacks 4. Landscape, Violence and Poker 5. The Post-Western. Bibliography. Afterword (1977): The Italian Western Television Cops and Vigilantes Baseball Children New Faces of 1885 Comedies Westworld The Missouri Breaks More Books Part Two: Westerns Revisited (2004) Introduction 1. Waiting for the End 2. Television 3. Comedies 4. The Italian Western 5. Westward the Women 6. Legends Re-examined: The alamo Wild Bill Hickok The James Younger gang Billy the Kid Tombstone and the Earps 7. The Modern West 8. Transpositions and Displacements 9. Native Americans 10. Eastwood Ho! 11. Two New Western Stars 12. Some Left-field Entries Latest Books Filmography Index of Films Index of Names