Renegade Westerns: Movies That Shot Down Frontier Myths

Renegade Westerns: Movies That Shot Down Frontier Myths

Renegade Westerns: Movies That Shot Down Frontier Myths

Renegade Westerns: Movies That Shot Down Frontier Myths

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Overview

The Western is America's definitive contribution to cinema, a bullet-spattered blueprint for the nation's image of itself and its place in the world. To watch a western is to witness the birth of a nation, overseen by square-jawed sheriffs and steel-nerved gunfighters, armed with six-guns and a clear moral vision. Their victories against outlaws and Indians were proof that might was right — so long as it was in the correct hands.
Renegade Westerns shows the shadowy side of this picture, where heroes behaved like villains, where Indians were not always the savages we'd been led to expect. From injustice in The Ox-Bow Incident to racism in The Searchers, numerous films criticised the methods behind the myths and the personalities behind the legends. They questioned the simple belief that the destiny of the United States was to expand right across the continent, regardless of other peoples' claims to the land.
The cast of characters includes cynical mercenaries and ageing cowhands, gun-toting cattle queens and teenage outlaws. We encounter western superstars — John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, Gary Cooper and Robert Mitchum — and icons of modern film — Brad Pitt and Samuel L. Jackson, Johnny Depp and Michael Fassbender.
More than 100 films are dissected and discussed, from the hidden depths of High Noon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to the ferocity of The Wild Bunch. There are skewed biopics of Billy the Kid and Jesse James, acid westerns and Cold War parables. The book ranges over 70 years of movie-making, right up to the biggest westerns of recent times — The Homesman and Slow West, and a double-barrelled blast of Tarantino: Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight.
Complete with a foreword by western expert Edward Buscombe and first-hand accounts by Wild Bunch stars Bo Hopkins and LQ Jones, Renegade Westerns offers a fresh perspective on a genre that continues to attract both large audiences and critical acclaim.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781903254936
Publisher: FAB Press
Publication date: 10/01/2018
Pages: 400
Product dimensions: 7.50(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Kevin Grant is an armchair film historian and lifelong aficionado of the western genre. The author of the renowned book Any Gun Can Play: The Essential Guide to Euro-Westerns (FAB Press, 2011), he has written features and reviews for many film-related publications and sat on the jury of the 2013 Almeria Western Film Festival.

Clark Hodgkiss shares a passion for the western, whether it be Hollywood products or their European cousins. He founded the trailblazing Euro-western fanzine Blood, Money and Vengeance, and has contributed essays and reviews to other magazines. He also provided additional research material for Any Gun Can Play. This is his first book.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

One of the earliest, if not the first, film genres to firmly take root, the western has demonstrated considerable flexibility and diversity over the course of its existence. Yet still, to a considerable extent, it is regarded as a monolithic form, its creed, like the mind-set of its characters, somehow fixed as unyielding to outside influences and pressures as the primitive landscape against which its quasi-mythical stories unfold.

The purpose of this book is to refute this, to show that the western has never been solely a haven for hidebound traditionalists preaching moral absolutism or sanctifying westward expansion. It is a malleable form that has moved with the times, adapting to audience moods and social pressures, accommodating artists of all sensibilities and political persuasions. For Richard Slotkin, The mythic space of the genre should be thought of as a field for ideological play which is attractive precisely because a wide range of beliefs and agendas can be entertained there. That the western has served as a tool for forging and reinforcing a sense of national identity among Americans, as well as projecting that vision abroad, is inarguable; the immense popularity of The Iron Horse (1924), The Plainsman (1936) and other early epics saw patriotism seared into the genres flanks like a brand. Just as its archetypes and iconography have been deployed to support the dominant ideology, however, so they have been ranged against it. Many westerns, with all the trappings in place, have pushed against the confines of jingoistic pride that once limited at least in theory the genres freedom of expression. By challenging the assumptions behind American exceptionalism and denying the legitimacy of Manifest Destiny, they have highlighted the contradictions in the national self-image that have always attended fictional stories and popular histories of the frontier.

That films of this ilk have held their own alongside broadly traditional westerns such as Open Range (2003), and the remake of True Grit (2010) Quentin Tarantinos patchworks Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight (2015) fall somewhere in the middle says much about the tenacity of a genre that was first pronounced dead even before the advent of sound. It also confirms that the ambiguities in the American national character, embodied in the popular imagination by the Westerner and first exposed to scrutiny more than half a century ago, remain unresolved.

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