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Discuss @RyanF 's latest article here
Does this mean that, absent John Ford, the Western wouldn't have been given a second chance after the advent of talkies?When Stagecoach hit movie theatres in 1939 it was a complete reinvention of the genre because ,at the time, big budget Westerns were out of vogue. Ford struggled to get the film produced and all the studios objected to Wayne as a leading man, but Ford stuck to his guns and one of the most famous pairings of director and actor was born.
One thing I've heard (and agree with) is that the classic Mad Max/Fist Of The North Star style post-apocalyptic story is in many ways like a Western. That could be another factor-you can, with those, use a broadly similar story in a broadly similar rough environment without having to fall back on something that was, at least at the time, overly familiar and (I suspect) regarded as increasingly stuffy.
Ryan is wrong.
I'm running around today, but I'll type a longer response later that is actually constructive instead of dismissive and rude (sorry Ryan)
The fundamental problem with the Western is that no one since the 1970's has understood the genre, which is why most successful post 70's westerns are deconstructionist. The genre was healthy when a ton of stuff was being put out, 99% of it crap. Now there's very little coming out, so it doesn't say much for the state of the genre even if that very little is good.
I could type a novel-length post on this topic.
Does this mean that, absent John Ford, the Western wouldn't have been given a second chance after the advent of talkies?
True of a lot of science fiction from the 1960s onward, there is something wonderfully ironic about youthful audiences rejecting Westerns as old hat but flocking to post-apocalyptic or science fiction action films that lifted Western themes wholesale (Escape from New York being another example).
I Think Vietnam and Watergate made people less patriotic maybe that is why.
I think the Western peaking in 1969 is important for another reason. Namely, it's the first year the Hays code isn't in effect. While I'm not an expert on the topic, I've heard you could get away with a lot more content-wise in historical films. I think it's entirely plausible the decline of the Western was the market returning to equilibrium after an artificial factor propping the genre up was removed. Don't look at Star Wars. Look at the Godfather. A story of outlaws, revenge and honor but done in a contemporary setting that the code never would have allowed.
It probably doesn't help the Western that science fiction can so easily lift the themes, the tropes, the iconography etc and marry it to more contemporary settings or more fantastical ones. The Western remains 'old'. Similar,y Film Stories #1 had an article on the brief spurt of truckers films in the mid-to-late 70s, arguing these were taking the masculine symbol of the cowboy & the empty frontier imagery and preserving them in a way that seemed more relevant to the time.
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Is there parhaps another element that practically every film started to take cues from the Western in the 1970s that they just faded away? Science fiction had lifted its themes, road movies had lifted its vistas, modern action films had lifted their violence?
Feel free to tear this take to shreds, but I get the impression from this discussion that, while western as a setting may have suffered; western as genre never really left us. It was just transposed into other settings (post-apocalyptic, space, etc.)