HOW ONE OF HOLLYWOOD’S BIGGEST GENRES FELL SILENT
By Felix Hughes
On September 23rd, 1969, George Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid opened as the top film in the box office, earning over $100 million in North America to become the highest-grossing movie of the year. It was a financial success and would pick up four Academy Awards and a Best Picture nomination.
The film's success, like the world it portrays, represents a bygone era.
A genre of no bounds
In many ways, the Western was the original superhero movie in terms of market dominance. Just as the 2010s marked an age where superhero movies were everywhere, the western dominated proceedings like no other subgenre throughout the 40s,50s and 60s. Westerns have the potential to be the epitome of escapist entertainment, playing out with the same well-worn trope: a plethora of action scenes combined with classic tales of good vs. evil. It was a western in ‘The Great Train Robbery’ that was an early short film hit and it was a western in John Ford's The Searchers that pioneered the usage of the wide shot to capture the landscapes that came to define the western.
Or take Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Leone is perhaps the godfather of the whole genre; in this particular picture the mastery he has over the western is clearest of all. From the film's opening, we are thrust into a movie that defies convention with a dialogue free opening ten minutes. From here, Leone employs a much slower pace to the films events creating a different kind of tension then the traditional kinetic pace of westerns. Despite including characters that fit many of the traditional western archetypes in the setting and the character types and yet it still comes across as subversive in its style.
At their peak, Westerns offered the pinnacle of art and entertainment, offering timeless scores, gunfights that make the skin crawl with anticipation while also providing a mirror into the soul of humanity.
Still from Once Upon a Time in the West.
Heading south while the public moved north
Like the frontier towns that make up the stories of so many Westerns, the genre has drifted into the wind. Its main successes this century have been Tarantino's Django Unchained, the highest-grossing Western of all time and The Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, which offered a modern spin on Western tropes, storming its way to the Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
Beyond that, the genre has largely faded into obscurity. While the 40s and 60s saw the release of 140 westerns a year, both big and small, 2024 has seen only one high-profile Western release: Kevin Costner's Horizon: An American Saga, yet despite Costner’s expertise in the genre, it failed to make back its $50 million budget and its sequel has been shelved indefinitely.
As ever with Hollywood, the genre's decline is a response to public appetite. The film industry is about giving people what they want, and for a time, that was Western. If Clint Eastwood, John Wayne or Yul Brynner starred in a film atop horses while saving a small town, chances are audiences would turn out in droves. But as superhero fatigue impacts box office sales today, leading to all major 2023 superhero movies to underperform and loses hundreds of million of dollars, Western fatigue also hit the genre in its heyday.
Novelist Declan Finn said the death of the genre in the 1960s and 1970s was because "writers couldn't relate to the heroic manly man as anything other than a hollow, evil, conniving man" and so they wrote them as such. Finn added that the public "hated" this because they wanted to see Westerns led by the classic morally virtuous hero, and so turned to other movies that provided this. But as writers wanted to do something completely different it seems audiences also wanted something new.
With the growth of action movies in the 70s and 80s led by likeable characters who were just as tough as their Western counterparts but without the moral baggage, it seems audiences no longer pinned for the western archetype but instead wanted to see the kind of characters now played by Stallone or Schwarzenegger or even Clint Eastwood himself. After hanging his hat in westerns for much of his early career, he began to move away from the genre and into action and comedy movies where his stardom took off. Films like ‘Every Which Way but loose,’ an action comedy nothing like his moody westerns but one that grossed over $500 million when adjusted for inflation and marked a decade of success away from the genre. The 80s didn’t see a single western crack to the decades top 30 highest grossing movies, with those 30 movies being dominated by light hearted action flicks like Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop or Indiana Jones that brought the action of the old west to a modern setting without the same grim darkness that had begun to turn away the masses. The oversaturation of the market turned audiences off – but that is only one part of the equation.
With audiences shifting away from an oversaturated genre, this removed the pressure from writers and directors to make the westerns they felt so constrained by and instead focus on their passion projects. As the western began its decline in the 70s, United Artists and indie filmmaking was on the rise. Now studios felt confident in giving ambitious young directors like Scorsese or Coppola the power to innovate as they pleased. So while the war movie was given a fresh angle in Apocalypse Now or Scorsese was reinventing the gangster flick, the western no longer had anyone going to bat for it.
Male and American centrism
Compared to other genres, the Western has largely been a male dominated one. Those Western heroes of the 1950s and 1960s were precisely the kind of men American men aspired to be: tough, hardworking, honourable, protectors, and loyal. In the same way, the role of women in Western society at the time reflected the conservative and limited role of women, and so both genders saw in themselves a 'traditional ideal' of how they were to act. The genre prioritised “the anxieties of men over empowerment of Woman.”
Very quickly, these gender roles began to change and take shape. Female audiences wanted to avoid watching a movie where only three women have a speaking role and are only there to get saved. Yet the genre didn't necessarily change to offer female lead vehicles, giving itself a limited audience to one side of the genre divide. While there are many examples of female lead westerns, they often fail to resonate with wider audiences so that wider audiences still see the western through its traditional male lead archetype. One of the most famous examples of a female lead western in the two renditions of True Grit are not necessarily remembered for the lead female performance by Hailee Steinfeld or Kim Darby, but instead, for the male supporting performances delivered by John Wayne and Jeff Bridges.
Not only did audiences change, but America has changed. Westerns are inevitably linked with America; it is impossible not to when the genre is almost exclusively set in the American West, and initially, this meant that they were designed for American sensibilities. Westerns were the most constant subgenre at the box office during the Cold War period. Even during the late 70s and 80s, when westerns declined as American exceptionalism took a knock over the Vietnam war, they were still a likely profit. In Western countries, the hero often played the exact role America was trying to play on the global stage: The moral hero (America) defeats the villain of pure evil (the Soviets) while liberating everyone from their evil grasp and bringing freedom to all. Westerns weren't propaganda, but they projected the kind of America its citizens wanted.
Once the Cold War ended, however, there was no longer the same need for people to see America portrayed as the global sheriff, and even if Westerners were more than the virtuous hero, this was the stereotype people had for it. The subgenre was further hit with setbacks when its negative depiction of ethnic groups like Indigenous Americans was called into question, with many Westerns portraying them in a highly stereotypical manner and even if many Westerns like Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves portrayed them in a heroic light, the genre could not get beyond the stereotypes it once revelled in. As the world hit the new millennium, the idea of America as the moral centre of the Western world shrunk further to the point that the Westerns still do not mirror the American exceptionalism of the past but are often tales that criticise the American dream like PTA's There Will Be Blood that breaks down the subgenres ideas of masculinity and highlight the greed at its epicentre.
A brief resurgence
Despite all of this, the western did have a brief resurgence. The 90s saw a return to form of the genre, producing some of its most successful and even innovative outwork, perhaps most notably with Clint Eastwood's grand return to the genre in Unforgiven. On the face of it, the film is about a hardened man sent to kill an equally hardened man. Sounds like your standard Western. Yet, Unforgiven is primarily concerned with deconstructing the Western to "reflect a reverse image of classical Western tropes." Eastwoods Munny, who is supposed to be a fearless killer, tries to resist the need to kill while exposing those around him as liars and cowards. Munny is an Achilles-like character, fighting to reject his violent destiny. Such a return for the genre can be tied into the return of American exceptionalism in the post cold-war decade of the 90s where America was once again the single global sheriff and the successful defend of the liberal order fighting corruption and tyranny, just as Munny is the defend of a small town in ‘Unforgiven.
However, such a return did not last forever. No more than a handful of westerns came out per year during this period, with as few as one per year coming out in 2005. Just as American exceptionalism was in decline during the 70s when the western began its original decline, the controversy over the Iraq war destroyed for many the notion that America was the world's sheriff. Audiences did not want movies that celebrated a country's power they had come to question, instead they wanted darker movies that questioned the notion of American exceptionalism and the morality of its actions with movies such as the Bourne trilogy. While the occasional western could still make a killing at the box office, success was few and far between, and usually needed a big name tied to it like Tarintino to get people into theatres. The sun had truly set on the western.
The collapse of the Western as a marketable genre comes down to changing times. Even if they could be movies that encapsulated the best of innovation in film, they failed to separate themselves from the stereotypes of the genre that people no longer enjoyed as they once did. Much of that cannot be blamed on the genre which in its most traditional sense, only comprises 100 years of American history in particular regions of the nation, but it nonetheless occurred.
This leaves the genre in a precarious situation when it barely captures the public's imagination. It is clear that if the genre is to truly take hold as it once did, it needs to be as bold and revolutionary as the Western expansion it often portrays.
Images courtesy of IMDb.