Why Have Westerns In Cinema and TV Fallen out of Favor With Movie Audiences ?

[Vladd67]

Or maybe, sadly, they have to be remade with a modern audience's level of sex and violence.

 

[Cat's Cradle]

Geesh, I hadn't thought of that, but that's a good point, Vladd67. Revisionism can sometimes be expressed by more explicit violence, gore, and sex. We'll have to hope it goes the other way (if westerns do in fact make a return).

 

[HanaBi]

I was brought up on Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone and the era of the "The Spaghetti Western".

For me it was a golden age for the western (60s-70s), good stories, the cool hero, the nasty bad guy, plenty of gunfights and a good level of violence! And I think all of those factors were beautifully realised in what I would consider the finest western of all - "Once Upon A Time in the West" (1968), with screen legend, Henry Fonda, going against type and playing the cold-blooded, calculating bad guy!

Eastwood's "The Unforgiven" (1992, was perhaps the last decent western I have enjoyed. More contemporary efforts - "True Grit", "Django Unchained", "Hateful Eight", "Magnificent Seven" have all been "just okay!" in my book, but nothing more than that. Instead they come across as being too stylised, impeccably polished and a little soulless! The characterisations are not nearly deep enough or realistic enough: instead I keep thinking it's the actor's persona dominating the role rather than the character he is supposed to be playing.

Perhaps I am just older and a lot more cynical.

 

[Overread]

Hollywood follows big sellers. So things tend to come in huge waves. WII films did well everyone did them; Westerns did well, so everyone did westerns; Spyfilms did well, everyone did them. Right now its Comicbook films that are doing well and - surprise surprise - everyone is doing them.

In general if someone makes a film that sells like crazy, everyone else tries to copycat it. Starwars is a fantastic example of one film that spawned a wave of films copycatting it. Of course you get some studios that do their own thing, although one could argue that even with the diversity of settings and characters studios like Pixar are still producing films of a similar nature.

So we likely will see westerns return when someone makes a massive block-buster of a film.
Of course it doesn't always work like that. Lord of the Rings opened fantasy up, but we've not really seen it take off. Most fantasy films are still coming out of the smaller end with things like 7th Son etc.. which are not bad films, but are not blockbusters.

 

[Parson]

We've had Deadwood and Hell on Wheels in the last ten or so years. And Tarantino has made a few westerns that were fairly successful. I think the public loses interest when saturated by a genre, but then through nostalgia, becomes curious again a generation or so on. I think the struggle might be to bring new generations into an old, seemingly-stale type of film. So new vision/voices might also be required to rejuvenate a genre.

Any comeback of the Western must have been set back a decade by the remake of The Lone Ranger. It's a flat out terrible Western --- IMO.

 

[Overread]

The Lone Ranger is just the kind of films that fantasy keeps getting - slightly comic, but with a serious undertone that is somewhat lost with actors who are either not "top" in leading roles (although often you get a top supporting actor); or in this case a key actor who generally likes acting the fool (I have to admit I am getting to a point where I don't want JD in the next Pirates of the Caribbean because he just keeps fooling around too much).

 

[HanaBi]

As a side note - all this talk of westerns has pushed me favour of watching Sergio Leone's three "Fistful" films this evening, including the incredibly underrated "Fistful of Dynamite" (AKA - "Duck, You Sucker!") starring James Coburn and Rod Steiger.

 

[2DaveWixon]

Any comeback of the Western must have been set back a decade by the remake of The Lone Ranger. It's a flat out terrible Western --- IMO.

Yes. I was hoping for much better from that film. But to my eye, it appeared to be intended to be satire that was meant to express a strong message, and from that point of view I thought it merely rehashed the old bad-white-man-capitalists-oppressing-if-not-killing-the-Indians message.
But it did it so badly!
(*Sorry -- sounded like a certain politician there, for a moment...*)

So imagine my disappointment when the new Magnificent Seven came along...same message except for the Indians part.

Key to both films, I think -- along with many in other genres -- is the apparent need to kill as many people as possible in as many novel ways as possible... (You ain't seen nothing until you've seen that John Wick 2 spectacle!)

I seem to recall, from the dim past, that when the Spaghetti Westerns came along, there was reaction to the level of violence... Are we seeing stages of a continuing escalation of such? It's a forbidding prospect.

 

[2DaveWixon]

As a side note - all this talk of westerns has pushed me favour of watching Sergio Leone's three "Fistful" films this evening, including the incredibly underrated "Fistful of Dynamite" (AKA - "Duck, You Sucker!") starring James Coburn and Rod Steiger.

I'm confused by your use of the word "including," here: I don't think Fistful of Dynamite was in the Leone trilogy (which consisted, I think, of A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly).

Nonetheless, Fistful of Dynamite was -- forgive me! -- a dynamite film! Sarcastic, sardonic, and carrying a powerful message of revolution.

 

[HanaBi]

I'm confused by your use of the word "including," here: I don't think Fistful of Dynamite was in the Leone trilogy (which consisted, I think, of A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly).

Nonetheless, Fistful of Dynamite was -- forgive me! -- a dynamite film! Sarcastic, sardonic, and carrying a powerful message of revolution.

Tbh, I think the "Dynamite" film sits somewhere between the genuine Dollar films, and Leone's "Once Upon A Time....." trilogy.

I really enjoyed "Dynamite" because if its heavy political influence, and because of Rod Steiger's eclectic performance!

 

[2DaveWixon]

Tbh, I think the "Dynamite" film sits somewhere between the genuine Dollar films, and Leone's "Once Upon A Time....." trilogy.

I really enjoyed "Dynamite" because if its heavy political influence, and because of Rod Steiger's eclectic performance!

I find myself wondering if your use of "eclectic" was a typo for "electric" -- both work for me!

 

[BAYLOR]

I think the reason the audiences started to turn away was because the themes got stale. They stopped saying anything new.

The 1950's and 60's were the heyday of tv westerns. They started to fade in the late 1960's and by the mid 1970s they were pretty much gone. 1975 was the last season of Gunsmoke which ended a 20 year run as the most successful tv western in history and the longest running in that genre.

Westerns in the Cinema which had been popular since the beginning of Cinema also faded in the 1970's

 

[2DaveWixon]

The 1950's and 60's were the heyday of tv westerns. They started to fade in the late 1960's and by the mid 1970s they were pretty much gone. 1975 was the last season of Gunsmoke which ended a 20 year run as the most successful tv western in history and the longest running in that genre.

Westerns in the Cinema which had been popular since the beginning of Cinema also faded in the 1970's

You could also say that Westerns in books and magazines followed that same time frame (except that they started earlier, back in the 19th c.). Westerns boomed early and lasted a long time.
(No pun intended...)

 

[Foxbat]

Personally, I think the number of westerns (and western-type serials) was always artificially high and what we are seeing is not so much a decline but a natural rebalancing.

When D.W. Griffiths decided to move west to Hollywood, he not only set up the location for the future of the American film industry but opened up cinema to a number of locations that would cost little or nothing to use - locations most suited to the Western genre. You only have to watch a few of the old westerns and serials to see the same locations used over and over. Then you had people like John Ford who began using Monument Valley. Just look at the number of movies that were filmed there and the proprtion of westerns amongst them. List of appearances of Monument Valley in the media - Wikipedia

Then you had the rise of the Spaghetti Western, which mostly used locations in Spain that were cheap and easily available. Over six hundred of these were made between 1960 and 1978...a large number for any genre.

Just my opinion but I think economics played a large part.

 

[KGeo777]

Westerns were cheap to make, but they also appealed to some segment of rural America so they were profitable.

But when the movie studios were absorbed into bigger entities that no longer needed to care about profits from audiences, they phased them out. They are thinking globally too, and a superhero movie sells better than a western.

It is a problematic genre because the current studio owners on Wall Street do not want to portray European heritage in a positive light and such a genre usually requires some alpha male behavior which that absolutely detest.


I was watching For a Few Dollars More the other day and it struck me Hollywood of the 60s onward era would never make such a film because the male leads were devoid of neurosis or guilt. Lee Van Cleef is seeking to avenge his sister (raped by a Mexican--no way Hollywood would make such a story-not even in the 60s).


You got two alpha white males as the lead characters. And you also have a hunchback who is not portrayed even remotely sympathetic--in a Hollywood movie there would be violin music and a barmaid feeling sorry for him. Different sensibility in Hollywood vs Italy (and Japan, if you look at the Seven Samurai and compare it to the Magnificent Seven).



One time years ago I was talking to a university student from Wisconsin and she said matter of factly that Hollywood did not represent US culture, true then, but especially these days where the studios are completely detached from audiences and making films based on their corporate/ideological agenda alone.

A superhero film has some relation to a Hollywood western, i.e. with the noble hero as opposed to one motivated by self-interest as you usually get in a spaghetti western, but there is too much that is antagonistic to the globalist studio belief system.

 

[J Riff]

All true, but Revenge of the Virgins has all the required rubbish elements of today - and it shares cheap scary music with the Beast of Yucca Flats.