Evolution of Western part 8 - Cowboy Smoke : Film / Movie Forum

The Decline of Westerns in the 80s:

In the early 1980s, westerns began to seriously decline and disappear from cinema screens with changes in public taste and as memories of the trail-blazing past receded. The tiring, familiar presence of westerns on television and the recognition that the way of life of native Americans was practically annihilated in our past caused the downturn. Oscar-winner Michael Cimino's multi-million dollar failure for United Artists, a detailed, over-long epic western Heaven's Gate (1980), contributed to the genre's weakening.

However, in the mid 1980s and into the 90s, western films experienced something of a comeback, due in part to the boost and the recognition received by two revisionistic, Best Picture westerns:

Dances with Wolves (1990), a three-hour epic with twelve nominations and seven awards
Unforgiven (1992) with nine nominations and four awards
Producer/actor Kevin Costner's box-office and critical success Dances with Wolves (1990), his directorial debut, was noted as one of the few westerns that cast Indians in acting roles, used Lakota Sioux sub-titles, and viewed Native Americans in a sympathetic way and not as blood-thirsty savages. Although the film was officially sanctioned by the Sioux, not all Native American groups were sympathetic to its portrayals.

Revisionist Westerns: Questioning and Rewriting the Western

Director Sam Fuller's revisionist, low-budget B-film Run of the Arrow (1957), often noted as similar to Costner's Dances With Wolves (1990) many years later, starred Rod Steiger as a disheartened ex-Confederate soldier who journeyed west, endured a torturous 'run of the arrow' challenge, joined a Sioux Indian tribe, and fell in love with an Indian maiden named Yellow Moccasin (Sarita Montiel, with her voice dubbed by Angie Dickinson). John Ford's redemptive last western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964) with Richard Widmark and Carroll Baker, dealt with the destruction of the Native-Americans, by portraying the forced, late 1880s westward exodus of Cheyenne Indians from Oklahoma to their tribal lands in Wyoming.

Dustin Hoffman portrayed Jack Crabb - the sole, white, 121 year-old survivor of Custer's Last Stand and the Battle of Little Big Horn in Arthur Penn's Little Big Man (1970), a fable about the expansion of the Old West from an adaptation of Thomas Berger's novel. [According to Guinness World Records, the greatest age span portrayed by a movie actor, from 17 to 121, was by 33-year old Hoffman for this role.] Paralleling the Vietnam tragedy, the film demythologized the past and revealed the genocidal atrocities visited upon ethnic Indians by US forces.

A variety of other westerns re-fashioned western themes with greater realism and less romantic and glamorous notions, such as:

The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972)
two films about the James-Younger outlaw gang: Philip Kaufman's The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid (1972) and maverick writer/director Walter Hill's The Long Riders (1980) with actual siblings acting as clan members
Lawrence Kasdan's big-budget Silverado (1985), featuring a future all-star cast of then-unlikely Western actors including Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Kevin Costner, Danny Glove, and John Cleese; a massive 1999 audience-participation Blockbuster Video poll named it "Most Deserving of a Sequel"
the contemporary western Young Guns (198

, with a modern version of the Brat Pack in the lead roles
Hill's Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), a new look at native American Apache leader Geronimo and his conflict with the US cavalry in the mid 1880s
Tombstone (1993) (with Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp and Val Kilmer as the dying Doc Holliday)
Wyatt Earp (1994) (with Kevin Costner in the title role)
and Walter Hill's Wild Bill (1995) with Jeff Bridges as the legendary western frontier character, revealed in dreamy flashback
[The exploits of Earp had already appeared in many previous Hollywood films including Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) (with Henry Fonda) and John Sturges' Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957) (with Burt Lancaster).]

Other post-classical, revisionist westerns in the mid-90s featured the West from a feminist or African-American perspective such as The Ballad of Little Jo (1993) about an ostracized Eastern woman (Suzy Amis) who moved west and disguised herself as a man, Bad Girls (1994) about four saloon prostitutes (Madeleine Stowe, Andie MacDowell, Mary Stuart Masterson, and Drew Barrymore), "a star-studded gang of beauties" who bonded together as gunslingers, and director Sam Raimi's 'spaghetti' western The Quick and the Dead (1995) that starred Sharon Stone as a vengeful lady gunslinger - a female Clint Eastwood. Mario Van Peebles' exploitative, exciting adventure-western Posse (1993) featured black cowboys and revisionist, politically-correct western history.

Western Spoofs and Comedies:

Western parodies and comedies that mocked the genre include director Elliot Silverstein's very successful hit Cat Ballou (1965) (with Jane Fonda in the title role, and with Lee Marvin in a dual, Best Actor-winning role), and Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles (1974). James Garner (of TV's Maverick fame of the late 1950s) starred in two western-spoofs in the period: director Burt Kennedy's Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969) (that paid homage to previous versions of Wyatt Earp's legendary 'Gunfight at the OK Corral' and My Darling Clementine) and its lesser parody sequel Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971). John Wayne appeared in the western comedy McLintock! (1963), featuring a battle-of-the-sexes "Taming of the Shrew" relationship between Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, and including a serious, often-mentioned scene of McLintock breaking up a Native-American lynching.

Another 'western' comedy - City Slickers (1991) followed a group of middle-aged buddies embarking on a two-week western cattle drive led by a tough trail cowpoke named Curly (Jack Palance won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the role). A big-screen, commercially-successful comedy-western, Maverick (1994), a spin-off from a late 50s and early 60s TV series, starred Mel Gibson in the title role as card sharp Bret Maverick, and the original Maverick character (James Garner) as Marshal Zane Cooper. Barry Sonnenfeld's The Wild Wild West (1999) was a spin-off from the popular mid-60's TV spy show with Men in Black's Will Smith as James T. West and Kevin Kline as Artemus Gordon. Tom Dey's old West spin-off Shanghai Noon (2000) featured kung-fu superstar Jackie Chan as Chon Wang - an obvious take-off on John Wayne.

Other Variations on Westerns:

A superb television miniseries, adapted from Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was the classic western saga Lonesome Dove (1989). The eight-hour, four-part miniseries by director Simon Wincer starred Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall as Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call, two aging, cussing ex-Texas Rangers who engage in an adventurous cattle drive over the 2,500 miles from Texas to Montana. [It produced further mini-series sequels, Return to Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo, and Dead Man's Walk.] Westerns from a science-fiction point of view included a western-style Back to the Future, Part III (1990). The low-budget Grim Prairie Tales (1990) was a supernatural horror-western - an anthology of four scary, unbelievable tales told around an open prairie campfire. Jim Jarmusch's metaphoric, unique, mystical black and white western Dead Man (1996) starred Johnny Depp as an 1875 western wanderer (the ghost of poet William Blake?) pursued by bounty-hunters. Kathryn Bigelow's western-noir vampire-horror film Near Dark (1985) featured Bill Paxton and Lance Henricksen as members of a ghoulish motorcycle gang in America's Southwest.