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This short conclusion reiterates the main thesis of Cowboy Classics: that Westerns help us grapple with identity issues in a culturally relevant way while providing the comfort of chronological distancing, much as Homer and Virgil’s epics did for their societies. As a result, the Western has proven remarkably resilient, with the past decade seeing a number of big-budget films, both originals and remakes, as well as successful TV series. And just as the characterization of epic heroes shaped notions of idealized masculinity in antiquity, the Western hero remains a pervasive model for ideal manhood in America more generally, as is evident both in other film genres – from science fiction and fantasy to detective and gangster films to post-apocalyptic narratives – and in real world scenarios where men are engaged in heroic action on behalf of society (or want to be seen as such). Indeed, the model of masculinity Westerns provide is so deeply ingrained in the American cultural consciousness that it in turn colors our reception of ancient epic, which is itself now often filtered through a “Western” lens.

This chapter analyzes the following Westerns: High Plains Drifter (1973), Pale Rider (1985), and Unforgiven (1992). It argues that it is the theme of trauma that allows these films to demonstrate a trajectory in which Eastwood attempts again and again to come to terms with trauma and violence. Through allegorical renderings of the disruption caused by trauma, Eastwood bridges a gap between his earlier roles as the amoral, postmodern phallic man—the ultimate trickster who can be anything and everything—and the melancholic, conflicted William Munny of Unforgiven.

This chapter explores Zinnemann's involvement in High Noon (1952), a modestly budgeted story of a Western sheriff left alone to face his enemies that would go on to be one of the most controversial Westerns and stinging critiques of American politics and culture. Although the film's resonance with the Hollywood blacklist has impacted its critical status as a “true Western,” the European-born, Jewish director, perhaps even more than the screenwriter, is the “outsider” in this American Western debate and the key to understanding much of the critical unease surrounding High Noon for sixty years. The chapter focuses not only on Zinnemann's revisioning of the genre through the harsh cinematography and edited close-ups, but also on his unique collaboration with Gary Cooper that resulted in aging, vulnerable Western hero who was nevertheless unafraid to show his fear.

Drawing on a wide range of cinematic productions spanning from The Virginian in 1929 to Golden Age and spaghetti westerns to recent popular TV series like Deadwood and Longmire, this chapter establishes the close connection between Western film and ancient epic, showing that like the poems of Homer and Virgil, Western film places invented or fictionalized characters in a foundational period from history, and thus offer enough truth to be relevant, but enough fiction to provide a comfortable distance. Works from both genres also delineate fundamental values and beliefs and provide models both virtuous and cautionary for male and female behavior while helping to justify national self-image. At the same time, the best productions from both genres complicate the ideologies they promote through devices such as depictions of excessive violence, positioning protagonist and enemy as alter egos, and the hero’s ultimate exclusion from the society he has redeemed. And much as epic both reflected and influenced notions of honor, justice, and manhood in antiquity, the imprint of Westerns on our own belief systems is so powerful that it continues to shape and reflect our own values and ideologies today.

The topic of this chapter is a series of four thematically related American Westerns: Vera Cruz, The Magnificent Seven, The Professionals, and The Wild Bunch. In each, a group of American mercenaries finds itself south of the border and becomes involved in what may be described as various Mexican revolutions. Because these Westerns involve a paramilitary group of expert warriors, they are apt to be categorized as members of the sub-genre called the professional Western. The professional Western, in turn, has been theorized as a celebration of expertise that reflects the ethos of an emerging social class in America that has been alternatively referred to as the managerial class, the technocracy, the professional managerial class, or, more recently, the overclass.

Wilderness and the moving frontier constituted an environment of heroics, anarchy and lawlessness, and these in turn became the ingredients for many different kinds of adventure narratives. Among writers of Scottish origin, the interpretation of wilderness varied greatly, with Washington Irving and R M Ballantine emphasising the evolution of frontier heroes, the fostering of independence and resourcefulness and the rewards of courage. Others were more negative, dwelling on the fear of the unknown, the physical threat, and sinister potential of the wild to foster cruelty, lawlessness and greed. R L Stevenson’s Master of Ballantrae, John Buchan’s Sick Heart River, Steph Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves and the Scottish contribution to the Western genre are examined. The chapter discusses the way the wild’s intrinsic hostility to humanity generates adventure and offers an environment of liberation, challenge and spiritual enlightenment as well as of threat, drudgery and failure, ambivalence reiterated in images that, through film and fiction, have deeply affected the popular imagination.

Sue Matheson engages with the common perception that Delmar Daves is a competent but conventional studio man. She argues that his work with the ‘adult’ Western is actually that of an auteur film-maker. Placing Cowboy within the context of the director’s 1950s Westerns, she interprets it as his scalding critique of the coming-of-age Western. In what she sees as a radical departure from the ‘classical’ Western, Matheson details how Cowboy critically interrogates classical notions of frontier manhood, deconstructs the celebration of individualism, and empties the Western landscape of its usual symbolic significance. In short, she forwards Cowboy as a an example of genre critique, suggesting that it gleans mythic images and styles from films like Howard Hawks’ Red River and John Ford’s Stagecoach only to contrast them with its presentations of a more ‘authentic’ West. Overall, Matheson forwards Daves as a mythoclast who examined the darker, more selfish side and appetites of the national character.

This chapter explores both Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained and Miike Takashi's Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) as they reference the Spaghetti Westerns, specifically the films of Sergio Corbucci. In an interview that first appeared in The New York Times, Tarantino cited the influence of Corbucci on Django Unchained; not only because he directed the Italian Western to which both Miike's and Tarantino's films make direct reference in their titles (Django (1966)), but also because ‘his was the most violent, surreal and pitiless landscape of any director in the history of the genre’. While Tarantino's claim may be mildly hyperbolic, his citing of Corbucci as an explicit influence is central to the present discussion. The chapter first offers a synthesis of some key ideas within postmodernism, followed by textual consideration of Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django and Tarantino's Django Unchained as two different kinds of postmodern texts.

In Christopher Frayling's book Spaghetti Westerns (1981), he highlights how the character of the Spaghetti Western has since become subsumed into later Western comic books, evidenced through the Lee Van Cleef-like bounty hunter featured in Morris and Goscinny's bande dessinée (French comic) Lucky Luke: The Bounty Hunter (1972). Drawing upon this relationship, this chapter will take a similar approach to Frayling, who mediates between comic book influences upon the Spaghetti Western and the later reciprocal impact of these Westerns upon the comic book. It begins by demystifying some of the tacit references to the comic-like qualities of the Italian Westerns. This provides context for the exploration of the impact of these films upon the Western comic book, primarily achieved through a case study of the bande dessinée series, Blueberry (1963–2005), by Jean-Michel Charlier and Jean Giraud. In a collection that looks to map the relocation and appropriation of the Spaghetti Western, the chapter reinterprets these Italian productions through the comic book.

This chapter examines how Western movies (and their attendant themes and tropes) have functioned since the genre ceased to be a major part of mainstream American cinema, and how these changed generic conditions have affected the ways in which Westerns are produced and understood. It compares this situation with another historical moment in which the conventions of the Western genre found themselves transformed by a different set of surrounding contexts: the Italian adoption of the Western in the 1960s. It argues that the Italian Western makes the genre ‘strange’, and alienates the viewer from the world of the Wild West. It makes a compelling case for how the seemingly familiar codes of the Western have in fact been rendered alien in differing ways upon contact with various contexts, and thereby offers insights into the representational practices of twenty-first-century Westerns such as Appaloosa (Ed Harris, 2008), 3:10 to Yuma (James Mangold, 2007) and True Grit (Ethan and Joel Cohen, 2010).

This chapter describes films directed by Fritz Lang from 1952 to 1953. These include Rancho Notorious, his third Western, released in February 1952. Despite a last-minute title change, despite the film’s being “cut to pieces,” despite Marlene Dietrich’s cold, metallic performance, this was the only one of the director’s three Westerns that actually came alive on the screen and felt truly Langian. Another film was Clash by Night, which released in May of 1952 to positive reviews. This was followed by The Blue Gardenia, an independent production for Warner Brothers released in 1953. While the film is one of Lang’s lesser efforts, it has its own share of fans, including future French nouvelle vague director Eric Rohmer.