The Sagebrush Trail

Although no longer a centerpiece of motion picture releases, the Western’s cultural importance continues to attract scholars. Richard Aquila has drawn selectively from the considerable body of published scholarship, together with his own take on Western films, for this up-to-date overview of the genre’s history. More than tracing the history of the genre, Aquila examines how the Western has shaped and reshaped images of the mythic West in ways that “keep pace with corresponding changes in American history and culture” (p. 10). While not a novel approach to the genre, Aquila extends it to include the relatively understudied silent period and Westerns made after the 1970s. The book is structured in line with Aquila’s central argument that Westerns changed with the times: the developmental years, from Westerns that echoed Progressive Era values to both A and B films that spoke to American resilience during the Great Depression and World War II; transitional Westerns, which from 1945 to 1963 went beyond simply endorsing a Cold War consensus to incorporate troubling issues of race, gender, and alienation; a starkly revisionist trend, ranging from spaghetti Westerns in the turbulent 1960s to Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992)—but not to the exclusion of more traditionalist fare, notably associated with John Wayne. An epilogue highlights Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) to illustrate the “continuing power of the mythic West,” however stylistically distinctive and attuned to current multicultural sensibilities (p. 331).

Aesthetics · Art · Culture of the United States · Literature · Period (music) · Political science · Power (physics) · Scholarship · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Law