Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford camped it up superbly as 1950s Western matriarchs in Rancho Notorious and Johnny Guitar respectively. Yet they were outflanked by the steelier Barbara Stanwyck, an actress passionate about the genre.
The 19 films directed by Anthony Mann between 1950 and 1960 included all 11 of his Westerns – five of them psychologically nuanced vehicles for James Stewart as an irascible loner scourged or mutilated for his obsessive pursuit of some goal. The zenith of Mann’s unflinching study of violence and compromised masculinity was 1953’s Naked Spur, though 1958’s Man of the West, starring Gary Cooper, runs it close. Jean-Luc Godard, for one, has raved about it.
Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is the most Melvillean of modern Westerns. It is the American conquest tragedy allegorised in a sprawling semi-fictional account of the 1892 Johnson County range war, in which the big ranchers of the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, supported by President Benjamin Harrison, waged a vigilante campaign against the region’s small farmers, settlers, and rustlers. The film’s Ahab is Frank Canton (Sam Waterston), the supercilious, monomaniacal leader of the WSGA’s mercenary Regulators.
The title is the film. In a new low point for high concepts, producers Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg only needed to see the cover of the titular, unfinished comic book to give Cowboys & Aliens the green light. Iron Man’s director Jon Favreau, JJ Abrams’ writers, Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig similarly found the prospect of the sort of six-shooter/laser dust-up last seen when 1980s schoolkids tipped up their toy boxes irresistible.
Spare, slow and beautiful, Kelly Reichardt’s revisionist Western is an effective allegory about bad leadership in America, but it’s as a minimalist tribute to women pioneers that it excels.
As shoes to fill go, John Wayne’s dusty cowboy boots are about as big as it gets. So when the Coen brothers decided to take their shot at True Grit – the Charles Portis novel that finally won Wayne his Oscar – the world sat back with folded arms to see whether Jeff Bridges could grizzle and swagger his way into the role of one-eyed Rooster Cogburn that Wayne made so completely his own.
Kelly Reichardt’s quietly radical vision of the Wild West is a slender, provocatively ambiguous work and the antithesis to the genre’s muscular action-packed epics. It’s a western which aligns us with those who don bonnets rather than Stetsons, and which favours quiet pluck over showy heroics. With a narrative shorn almost entirely of incident, its existential, quasi-religious minimalism recalls Waiting for Godot.
Henry Hathaway's 1969 version of True Grit famously won John Wayne his solitary Oscar for Best Actor.