The books in this section focus on the West as an iconic genre of filmmaking, as well as other areas of screenwriting that contribute to the Western's uniqueness.
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Making the Movies
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The Theatre of Science
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Photoplay Plot Encyclopedia
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Shoot-Em Ups
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Ride, Boldly Ride
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Ernest Alfred Dench. Making the Movies. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1919.
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Robert Grau. The Theatre of Science: A Volume of Progress and Achievement in the Motion Picture Industry. New York: Broadway Publishing Company, 1914.
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Frederick Palmer. Photoplay Plot Encyclopedia. Los Angeles: Palmer Photoplay Corporation, Department of Education, 1922.
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Les Adams and Buck Rainey. Shoot-em Ups: The Complete Guide to Westerns of the Sound Era. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985.
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Mary Lea Bandy and Kevin Stoehr. Ride, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the American Western. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012.
From Google Books: This comprehensive study of the Western covers its history from the early silent era to recent spins on the genre in films such as No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, True Grit, and Cowboys & Aliens. While providing fresh perspectives on landmarks such as Stagecoach, Red River, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Wild Bunch, the authors also pay tribute to many under-appreciated Westerns. Ride, Boldly Ride explores major phases of the Western’s development, including silent era oaters, A-production classics of the 1930s and early 1940s, and the more psychologically complex portrayals of the Westerner that emerged after World War II. The authors also examine various forms of genre-revival and genre-revisionism that have recurred over the past half-century, culminating especially in the masterworks of Clint Eastwood. They consider themes such as the inner life of the Western hero, the importance of the natural landscape, the roles played by women, the tension between myth and history, the depiction of the Native American, and the juxtaposing of comedy and tragedy. Written in clear, engaging prose, this is the only survey that encompasses the entire history of this long-lived and much-loved genre. |
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True West
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Method Westerns
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Shooting Cowboys
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Western Myth
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Crowded Prairie
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Michael Barson. True West: An Illustrated Guide to the Heyday of the Western. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2008.
From Amazon: Return with us to yesteryear, when cowboys were cowboys and gunslingers lurked around every corner. Today that colorful period continues to resonate in the collective imagination of red-blooded Americans everywhere—and now we have True West, which illustrates, in hundreds of full-color illustrations, how America’s mass media stamped that vision so indelibly on our collective unconscious over the past century, into today. Boasting hundreds of rare and colorful movie posters, pulp magazines, television memorabilia, advertisements, paperback books, record album jackets, toys, and clothing, True West covers such hugely popular television series as Gunsmoke, The Lone Ranger, and Bonanza, along with classic Western novels, including Shane, The Searchers, Welcome to Hard Times and that epic of all epics, Lonesome Dove. True West bows to the icons who ruled the silver screen—Tom Mix, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood, to name a few, while offering up such indelible movie triumphs as Red River, The Searchers, Hud, The Wild Bunch, and Unforgiven. It also showcases the great Western comic books and comic strips--Colt, Red Ryder, Straight Arrow, and Jonah Hex—along with all those nifty toys and other ephemera that helped link kids to celluloid heroes like Hopalong Cassidy, Roy and Dale, and the ubiquitous Gene Autry. And what would the Wild West be without an accompanying soundtrack? True West reproduces the sublime album covers and sheet music that served up classic odes like “Streets of Laredo” and “Cool Water,” narrative ballads like “El Paso” (with Marty Robbins bedecked in his black gunfighter togs on the cover!), and “High Noon.” |
Jonathan Bignell. "Method Westerns: The Left-Handed Gun and One-Eyed Jacks." In Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye, eds. The Book of Westerns. New York: Continuum, 1996.
From Amazon: The Book of Westerns concentrates on the period between 1939 and the present day, looking at the Western from a wide variety of perspectives and providing in-depth critical analysis of many notable movies up to Tombstone (1993) and Wyatt Earp (1994). The coverage includes such celebrated works as George Stevens's Shane with Alan Ladd as the archetypal solitary Western hero, Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar where the combatants in the final gunfight are Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge, and King Vidor's Duel in the Sun with its orgasmic climax when Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones shoot each other down and then claw their way toward a dying embrace. The text, mainly written by film critics and academics associated with Movie magazine, is aimed at the informed filmgoer as well as the film student and is illustrated throughout with stills that capture the flavor of the Western. |
Andrew Brodie Smith. Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Westerns, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2003.
From Amazon: Academics have generally dismissed Hollywood's cowboy and Indian movies - one of its defining successful genres - as specious, one-dimensional, and crassly commercial. In Shooting Cowboys and Indians, Andrew Brodie Smith challenges this simplistic characterization of the genre, illustrating the complex and sometimes contentious process by which business interests commercialized images of the West. Tracing the western from its hazy silent-picture origins in the 1890s to the advent of talking pictures in the 1920s, Smith examines the ways in which silent westerns contributed to the overall development of the film industry. Focusing on such early important production companies as Selig Polyscope, New York Motion Picture, and Essanay, Smith revises current thinking about the birth of Hollywood and the establishment of Los Angeles as the nexus of filmmaking in the United States. Smith also reveals the role silent westerns played in the creation of the white male screen hero that dominated American popular culture in the twentieth century. Illustrated with dozens of historic photos and movie stills, this engaging and substantive story will appeal to scholars interested in Western history, film history, and film studies as well as general readers hoping to learn more about this little-known chapter in popular filmmaking. |
Matthew Carter. Myth of the Western: New Perspectives on Hollywood's Frontier Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2015.
From Amazon: What is the nature of the relationship between the Hollywood Western and American frontier mythology? How have Western films helped develop cultural and historical perceptions, attitudes and beliefs towards the frontier? Is there still a place for the genre in light of revisionist histories of the American West? Myth of the Western re-invigorates the debate surrounding the relationship between the Western and frontier mythology, arguing for the importance of the genre's socio-cultural, historical and political dimensions. Taking a number of critical-theoretical and philosophical approaches, Matthew Carter applies them to prominent forms of frontier historiography. He also considers the historiographic element of the Western by exploring the different ways in which the genre has responded to the issues raised by the frontier. Carter skilfully argues that the genre has - and continues to reveal - the complexities and contradictions at the heart of US society. With its clear analyses of and intellectual challenges to the film scholarship that has developed around the Western over a 65-year period, this book adds new depth to our understanding of specific film texts and of the genre as a whole - a welcome resource for students and scholars in both Film Studies and American Studies. |
Michael Coyne. The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western. London and New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1998.
From Amazon: This fresh, stimulating book employs the Western as a vital medium for examining the many tensions--political, racial, sexual, social and religious--which have beset modern America from Stagecoach and the Depression's last years to the decline of the genre in the 1970s. Michael Coyne focuses on a group of great Westerns, showing how they engaged covertly with such thorny issues as miscegenation, labor-management relations, generational discord, codes of masculinity, the Cold War, McCarthyism, Vietnam, and the increasing individual social alienation. |
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Hollywood Westerns
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From Silents to Cinerama
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Cowboys
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Silent Screen Classics
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Western Genre
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William K. Everson. The Hollywood Western. New York: A Citadel Press Book, 1992.
From Amazon: Film historian Everson coauthored with George Fenin The Western: From Silents to the Seventies (1973. o.p.), but his latest work is a revision of his Pictorial History of the Western Film (Carol Pub. Group, 1971). He explodes horse kissing and "they went thataway" myths and explains why heroines had no moms. Silents, series, serials, B-Westerns, and director John Ford are properly analyzed, but the past 40 years suffer coverage gaps. Neither The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Professionals (1966), nor large-scale B-movies like Little Big Horn (1951) or The Tall Texan (1953) are discussed. Only two of James Stewart's seven gritty Fifties Westerns are examined. Director William Witney gets more play than John Sturges or Anthony Mann. - Kim Holston, American Inst. for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters, Malvern, Pa. |
George N. Fenin and William K. Everson. The Western: From Silents to Cinerama. New York: The Orion Press, 1962.
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Phyllis R. Fenner. Cowboys, Cowboys, Cowboys: Stories of Round-ups and Rodeos Branding and Bronco-busting. London: Chatto and Windus, Ltd., 1913.
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Joe Franklin. Classics of the Silent Screen: A Pictorial Treasury. New York: The Citadel Press, 1959.
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Philip French. Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre. Manchester, U.K: Carcanet Press, Ltd., 2005.
From Amazon: The political, historical, and cultural forces that shaped the development of the Western film genre—especially the 30 years after World War II—are explored in this book. Addressing the treatment of Native Americans, African Americans, women, and children, the role of violence, the landscape, and poker playing, this cultural analysis advances the theory that most Westerns of those years can be put into four principal categories that reflect the styles and ideologies of the four leading politicians of that era: John F. Kennedy, Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson, and William F. Buckley. The argument further contends that this genre continues to be highly influential in reflecting the social and psychological currents in American life. |
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Inventing the Wild West
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The Western
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Box-Office Buckaroos
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Bound and Gagged
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Imagining the Frontier
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Holly George-Warren. Cowboy: How Hollywood Invented the Wild West. Pleasantville, NY, and London: The Reader's Digest Association, Inc., 2002.
From Publishers Weekly: One hundred years ago, cowboys were a driving force in popular culture, "giving life to the brand-new motion picture industry, riding on the coattails of the still-solvent but fading traveling Wild West show extravaganzas, and the still-flourishing dime novel publishing boom." Asserting that cowboys "never really went away," journalist Holly George-Warren presents Cowboy: How Hollywood Invented the Wild West. Fantastically illustrated with vintage movie posters and film stills, the book covers the films of actors from Roy Rogers to Clint Eastwood; the western musicals of Gene Autry; cowboy style from Stetson hats to pointy-toed boots; and legendary cowboys such as Hopalong Cassidy and Buffalo Bill. |
Phil Hardy. The Western. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1983.
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Robert Heide and John Gilman. Box-Office Buckaroos: The Cowboy Hero from the Wild West Show to the Silver Screen. New York: Cross River Press, 1982.
From Publishers Weekly: Any would-be cowpoke who once toted a Lone Ranger lunch box to school or used a Roy Rogers cap pistol to get even with bullies and other varmints will enjoy leafing through this droll guide to entertainers who rode tall in the saddle from the 1920s to the 1960s and the legacy of collectibles they left behind. Popular culture specialists Heide and Gilman (Disneyana) give the lowdown on Hollywood's greatest cowboy heroes, providing songs and dialogue from their films and TV shows, as well as some juicy tidbits of gossip ("Trigger's best trick, it was said, was practicing self-restraint indoors"). The text is complemented by more than 250 color and black-and-white photos of cowboy-inspired gadgets, sheet music, paper dolls, even a full page ad for Quaker Puffed Rice Sparkies starring Gene Autry, who advises boys and girls to "Rope yourself this spark up breakfast today." The authors' decision not to list prices for the collectibles shown here (because values are "constantly on the rise") is understandable but frustrating for those who wonder how much a Tom Mix wristwatch from 1934 is worth today. |
Kalton C. Lahue. Bound and Gagged: The Story of the Silent Serials. New York: Castle Books, 1968.
From Amazon: Dust jacket notes: "The adventure, romance, and pathos that were so much a part of the silent serial during the early years of the motion picture industry have vanished from the scene of the Hollywood movie studio. The present generation neither remembers - for none was born yet - nor cares; for to them the silent serial is but a small part of the American past which might never even have existed. But to those who themselves were growing up in the pre-talkie era, when the motion picture industry itself was just beginning to unfold its wings, the silent serial was an outlet for the fancies of children and the dreams of adults. It was an action-packed, thrill-a-minute entry into the world of exciting experiences. Bound and Gagged is the story of the silent serial: its birth; its growth; its heroes and heroines; its successes and failures; and finally its demise. Author Kalton Lahue takes you behind the scenes, into the studios, to show you how the serials were made. The operations of the famous studios that produced these serials - Pathe, Universal, Vitagraph, Rayart, and Mascot - are fascinatingly explained and discussed in detail. What was the industry thinking behind the thrilling episodes? How did writers create the thrill-a-minute scenarios? Did serial directors function differently from their feature counterparts? All these questions and more are answered fully in the captivating text. Within the pages of Bound and Gagged serials come alive once more as Spencer G. Bennet, Robert F. Hill, Frank Leon Smith, Ford Beebe, Louise Lorraine, and others reveal the past in personal interviews. Here the reader will find the only career study of Charles Hutchinson and Eddie Polo, and long-obscured facts about many fabulous serial people. Hundreds of illustrations bring back the excitement of The Jungle Goddess, The Fortieth Door, The Vanishing Dagger, The Green Archer, The Adventures of Tarzan, and many, many others...." |
Stephanie Le Menager. "Imagining the Froniter." In Leonardo Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby, and Benjamin Reiss, eds. The Cambridge History of the American Novel. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
From Cambridge University Press: In the collective imaginings of the United States, the frontier has also functioned to separate the USA from global imperial history, marking it as an exceptional national experiment. The frontier problem that Wallace Stegner identified as that of establishing a continuing human pattern in a country that changes as fast as the West has been solved by exceptionalist thinking. American exceptionalism showed itself more readily in the upstart city of Chicago, a former frontier trading post that within half a century had become the nation's railroad hub. It could be argued that the frontier was born on the back of industrial popular culture, as the arts began to sift into high and low forms and toward distinct classes of audience in the later decades of the nineteenth century. The frontier enacts a grand obsession, a drama by and about US settlement culture and its coming to power in North America. |
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Westerns and American Culture
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Western Philosophy
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Westerns, Changing America
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History of Western Movies
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Shane to Kill Bill
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R. Philip Loy. Westerns and American Culture, 1930-1955. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc, 2001.
From Amazon: Many people have fond memories of Friday nights and Saturday afternoons spent in theatres watching cowboy stars of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s chase villains across the silver screen or help a heroine out of harm's way. Over 2,600 Westerns were produced between 1930 and 1955 and they became a defining part of American culture. This work focuses on the idea that Westerns were one of the vehicles by which viewers learned the values and norms of a wide range of social relationships and behavior, and thus examines the ways in which Western movies reflected American life and culture during this quarter century. Chapters discuss such topics as the ways that Westerns included current events in film plot and dialogue, reinforced the role of Christianity in American culture, reflected the emergence of a strong central government, and mirrored attitudes toward private enterprise. Also covered is how Westerns represented racial minorities, women, and Indians. |
Jennifer L. McMahon and Steve Csaki, eds. The Philosophy of the Western. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2010.
From Google Books: The western is arguably the most iconic and influential genre in American cinema. The solitude of the lone rider, the loyalty of his horse, and the unspoken code of the West render the genre popular yet lead it to offer a view of America's history that is sometimes inaccurate. For many, the western embodies America and its values. In recent years, scholars had declared the western genre dead, but a steady resurgence of western themes in literature, film, and television has reestablished the genre as one of the most important.In The Philosophy of the Western, editors Jennifer L. McMahon and B. Steve Csaki examine philosophical themes in the western genre. Investigating subjects of nature, ethics, identity, gender, environmentalism, and animal rights, the essays draw from a wide range of westerns including the recent popular and critical successes Unforgiven (1992), All the Pretty Horses (2000), 3:10 to Yuma (2007), and No Country for Old Men (2007), as well as literature and television serials such as Deadwood. The Philosophy of the Western reveals the influence of the western on the American psyche, filling a void in the current scholarship of the genre. |
R. Philip Loy. Westerns in a Changing America, 1955- 2000. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2004.
From Amazon: For many, the Westerns of 1930 to 1955 were a defining part of American culture. Those Westerns were one of the vehicles by which viewers learned the values and norms of a wide range of social relationships and behavior. By 1955, however, Westerns began to include more controversial themes: cowardly citizens, emotionally deranged characters, graphic violence, marital infidelity, racial prejudice, and rape, among other issues. This work examines the manner in which Westerns reflected the substantial social, economic and political changes that shaped American culture in the latter half of the twentieth century. Part One of this work considers shifting themes as the genre reacted to changes unfolding in the broader social landscape of American culture. Part Two examines the manner in which images of cowboys, outlaws, lawmen, American Indians and women changed in Westerns as the viewers were offered new understandings of the frontier experience. |
Leonard Matthews. History of Western Movies. New York: Crescent Books, 1984.
From Amazon: This is the story of the development of the film star in Westerns from the very beginning of movie making, when millions thrilled to the adventures of their heroes on the silver screen. The author takes us back to Bronco Bill Anderson, who made over 500 Westerns, and goes on through the decades. |
Patrick McGee. From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
From Amazon: From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western is an original and compelling critical history of the American Western film. *Provides an insightful overview of the American Western genre *Covers the entire history of the Western, from 1939 to the present *Analyses Westerns as products of a genre, as well as expressions of political and social desires *Deepens an audience’s understanding of the genre’s most important works, including Shane, Stagecoach, The Searchers, Unforgiven, and Kill Bill *Contains numerous illustrations of the films and issues discussed. More about Shane. More about Kill Bill. |
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Noir Western
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Making Great Westerns
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Real and Disguised
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The Cowboy Hero
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Cowboy Encyclopedia
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David Meuel. The Noir Western: Darkness on the Range, 1943-1962. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2015.
From Amazon: Beginning in the mid-1940s, the bleak, brooding mood of film noir began seeping into that most optimistic of film genres, the western. Story lines took on a darker tone and western films adopted classic noir elements of moral ambiguity, complex anti-heroes and explicit violence. The noir western helped set the standard for the darker science fiction, action and superhero films of today, as well as for acclaimed TV series such as HBO's Deadwood and AMC's Breaking Bad. This book covers the stylistic shift in westerns in mid-20th century Hollywood, offering close readings of the first noir westerns, along with revealing portraits of the eccentric and talented directors who brought the films to life. |
William R. Meyer. The Making of the Great Westerns. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers, 1979.
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Robert Ray. "Real and Disguised Westerns: Classic Hollywood's Variations of its Thematic Paradigm." In A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.
From Amazon: Robert B. Ray examines the ideology of the most enduringly popular cinema in the world--the Hollywood movie. Aided by 364 frame enlargements, he describes the development of that historically overdetermined form, giving close readings of five typical instances: Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Godfather, and Taxi Driver. Like the heroes of these movies, American filmmaking has avoided commitment, in both plot and technique. Instead of choosing left or right, avant-garde or tradition, American cinema tries to have it both ways. |
William W. Savage, Jr. The Cowboy Hero: His Image in American History and Culture. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979.
From Google Books: Like most other serious students of American popular culture, William W. Savage, Jr., believes that by examining our heroes we learn about ourselves. In The Cowboy Hero he takes as his subject the cowboy of myth, dime novel, wild West show, legend, Hollywood, museum, and television. With an introductory discussion of the elusive historical cowboy and an occasional return to his real world to keep the reader in balance, Savage reviews the cowboy hero in his various guises-as a cowboy doing the work of cowboys (seldom), as musician, as performer on state and in wild West shows, and above all as a man’s man, the object of whose affections is most generally his horse (other objects of the historical cowboy’s affections are courageously alluded to). Then there is the cowboy the purveyor of macho cigarettes, sugarcoated cereal ("the historical cowboy was the very picture of malnutrition, but the cowboy hero might well hold a degree in home economics, so ardent is his praise of brand-name foodstuff"), coughdrops, painkillers, barbecue sauce, and laundry detergent. "No matter how much the American people revere their heroes or tout their myths," says Savage, "they will sell them all to any buyer and at nearly any price." The approach is topical rather than media-oriented, though it is largely through the cowboy’s media appearances that we come to know and love him. With the (no doubt temporary) absence of the cowboy from the television screen, the cowboy hero is today most revered as rodeo performer-participant in a sometimes brutal sport that has nothing to do with cowboying. The author’s description of the young western boy’s initiation into the sport turns little-league horror tales into bedtime stories. The inevitable result of all this is summed up in the title of the last chapter, "A Bore at Last." This book, often funny and expectably ironic but with a serious purpose, is bound to raise the hackles of the followers of the cowboy cult and others whose most lasting perceptions of the American West evolved from childhood cereal serials, B-movie horse operas, and latter-day television epics (did anyone ever actually see Hoss and Little Joe ride a fence line?). The fact is that, as Savage says, this book is, in the end, less about cowboys than it is about you and me. |
Richard W. Slatta. The Cowboy Encyclopedia. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1994.
From Google Books: With 450 broad-ranging entries, The Cowboy Encyclopedia is an informative, comprehensive, and entertaining reference to the history and culture of cowboys. From Clint Eastwood, cattle drives, Buffalo Bill Cody, and outlaws to John Wayne, rodeos, roundups, and the Cisco Kid, Richard W. Slatta's The Cowboy Encyclopedia is a one-of-a-kind reference to the people, places, equipment and dress, historical events, terminology, and cultural imagery surrounding the cowboys of both North and South America. Extensively cross-referenced and expertly researched, The Cowboy Encyclopedia is a must for the serious student of cowboy life and Western Americana, as well as an enjoyable treat for the armchair cowboy. In this fascinating volume, myth and reality come together to provide a detailed exploration into how and why the romantic cowboy image came into being. Through numerous topical entries that study the role of cowboys in art, literature, and film, to briefer subject entries focusing on cowboy terminology, readers can take away an insightful and broad perspective of the cowboy culture and its powerful influence over America's vision of the Western frontier. |
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Hollywood Film Genres
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Gunfighter Nation
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Virgin Land
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Horse Opera
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West of Everything
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Thomas Schatz. "Hollywood Film Genres." In Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981.
From Amazon: The central thesis of this book is that a genre approach provides the most effective means for understanding, analyzing and appreciating the Hollywood cinema. Taking into account not only the formal and aesthetic aspects of feature filmmaking, but various other cultural aspects as well, the genre approach treats movie production as a dynamic process of exchange between the film industry and its audience. This process, embodied by the Hollywood studio system, has been sustained primarily through genres, those popular narrative formulas like the Western, musical and gangster film, which have dominated the screen arts throughout this century. |
Richard Slotkin. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.
From Amazon: Gunfighter Nation completes Richard Slotkin’s trilogy, begun in Regeneration Through Violence and continued in Fatal Environment, on the myth of the American frontier. Slotkin examines an impressive array of sources - fiction, Hollywood westerns, and the writings of Hollywood figures and Washington leaders - to show how the racialist theory of Anglo-Saxon ascendance and superiority (embodied in Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West), rather than Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis of the closing of the frontier, exerted the most influence in popular culture and government policy making in the twentieth century. He argues that Roosevelt’s view of the frontier myth provided the justification for most of America’s expansionist policies, from Roosevelt’s own Rough Riders to Kennedy’s counterinsurgency and Johnson’s war in Vietnam. |
Henry Nash Smith. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
From Amazon: The spell that the West has always exercised on the American people had its most intense impact on American literature and thought during the nineteenth century. Henry Nash Smith shows, with vast comprehension, the influence of the nineteenth-century West in all its variety and strength, in special relation to social, economic, cultural, and political forces. He traces the myths and symbols of the Westward movement such as the general notion of a Westward-moving Course of Empire, the Wild Western hero, the virtuous yeoman-farmer―in such varied nineteenth-century writings as Leaves of Grass, the great corpus of Dime Novels, and most notably, Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History. Moreover, he synthesizes the imaginative expression of Western myths and symbols in literature with their role in contemporary politics, economics, and society, embodied in such forms as the idea of Manifest Destiny, the conflict in the American mind between idealizations of primitivism on the one hand and of progress and civilization on the other, the Homestead Act of 1862, and public-land policy after the Civil War.The myths of the American West that found their expression in nineteenth-century words and deeds remain a part of every American’s heritage, and Smith, with his insight into their power and significance, makes possible a critical appreciation of that heritage. |
Peter Stanfield. Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboys. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
From Amazon: In this innovative take on a neglected chapter of film history, Peter Stanfield challenges the commonly held view of the singing cowboy as an ephemeral figure of fun and argues instead that he was one of the most important cultural figures to emerge out of the Great Depression. The rural or newly urban working-class families who flocked to see the latest exploits of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, and other singing cowboys were an audience largely ignored by mainstream Hollywood film. Hard hit by the depression, faced with the threat - and often the reality - of dispossession and dislocation, pressured to adapt to new ways of living, these small-town filmgoers saw their ambitions, fantasies, and desires embodied in the singing cowboy and their social and political circumstances dramatized in 'B' Westerns. Stanfield traces the singing cowboy's previously uncharted roots in the performance tradition of blackface minstrelsy and its literary antecedents in dime novels, magazine fiction, and the novels of B.M. Bower, showing how silent cinema conventions, the developing commercial music media, and the prevailing conditions of film production shaped the 'horse opera' of the 1930s. Cowboy songs offered an alternative to the disruptive modern effects of jazz music, while the series Western - tapping into aesthetic principles shunned by the aspiring middle class - emphasized stunts, fist fights, slapstick comedy, disguises, and hidden identities over narrative logic and character psychology. Singing cowboys also linked recording, radio, publishing, live performance, and film media. Entertaining and thought-provoking, Horse Opera recovers not only the forgotten cowboys of the 1930s but also their forgotten audiences: the ordinary men and women whose lives were brightened by the sights and songs of the singing Western. |
Jane Tompkins. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
From Amazon: A leading figure in the debate over the literary canon, Jane Tompkins was one of the first to point to the ongoing relevance of popular women's fiction in the 19th century, long overlooked or scorned by literary critics. Now, in West of Everything, Tompkins shows how popular novels and films of the American west have shaped the emotional lives of people in our time. Into this world full of violence and manly courage, the world of John Wayne and Louis L'Amour, Tompkins takes her readers, letting them feel what the hero feels, endure what he endures. Writing with sympathy, insight, and respect, she probes the main elements of the Western--its preoccupation with death, its barren landscapes, galloping horses, hard-bitten men and marginalized women--revealing the view of reality and code of behavior these features contain. She considers the Western hero's attraction to pain, his fear of women and language, his desire to dominate the environment--and to merge with it. In fact, Tompkins argues, for better or worse Westerns have taught us all--men especially--how to behave. It was as a reaction against popular women's novels and women's invasion of the public sphere that Westerns originated, Tompkins maintains. With Westerns, men were reclaiming cultural territory, countering the inwardness, spirituality, and domesticity of the sentimental writers, with a rough and tumble, secular, man-centered world. Tompkins brings these insights to bear in considering film classics such as Red River and Lonely Are the Brave, and novels such as Louis L'Amour's Last of the Breed and Owen Wister's The Virginian. In one of the most moving chapters (chosen for Best American Essays of 1991), Tompkins shows how the life of Buffalo Bill Cody, killer of Native Americans and charismatic star of the Wild West show, evokes the contradictory feelings which the Western typically elicits--horror and fascination with violence, but also love and respect for the romantic ideal of the cowboy. Whether interpreting a photograph of John Wayne or meditating on the slaughter of cattle, Jane Tompkins writes with humor, compassion, and a provocative intellect. Her book will appeal to many Americans who read or watch Westerns, and to all those interested in a serious approach to popular culture. |
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American West in Film
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Filming the West
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Parables of the American Dream
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The Wild West
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Sixguns and Society
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John Tuska. The American West in Film: Critical Approaches to the Western. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.
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Jon Tuska. The Filming of the West. New York: Doubleday, 1976.
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Jeffrey M. Wallmann. The Western: Parables of the American Dream. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 1999.
From Google Books: No element of America’s historical heritage has inspired more myth and legend than the expansion Westward—an epic of immense proportion. And for two hundred years, millions of Americans have thrilled to western stories larger than life and stronger than history, identifying themselves with stalwart pioneers, laconic loners quick on the draw, widows defying rapacious cattle barons, outlaws battling corrupt star-toters, homesteaders defending themselves against Indians, and Indians defending themselves against prejudiced settlers and contemptuous soldiers. Indeed, because the western is central to popular American culture, it is arguably the cradle of American art and literature—containing some of the best and much of the worst fiction ever written—and all of it a fascinating mirror of American life and society. In this regard, The Western: Parables of the American Dream is the first comprehensive historical survey of the western in all of its various manifestations, from the earliest Indian captivity narratives and pioneer biographies to the most contemporary western novels, films, and television series. But more, this entertaining and highly readable text also contrasts the fictional and the real West. Well-conceived and focused, Wallmann’s sweep through the western is a careful, incisive, and blessedly non-theoretical examination of the implications of the western from the beginning to the present, taking the reader deep into the heart of the subject and offering original and perceptive theories of how the western reflects the evolution of America. No other book on westerns has succeeded so eloquently in capturing facts and ideas, comment and analysis, on the role of westerns in influencing—and being influenced by—the historical and cultural forces that determine belief, identity, and status in America. The Western is a significant and major contribution to American Studies, and will surely become a standard work to be reckoned with by scholars of Western American literature. |
Will Wright. The Wild West: The Mythical Cowboy & Social Theory. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001.
From Amazon: This book, written by the author of the celebrated volume Six Guns and Society, explains why the myth of the Wild West is popular around the world. It shows how the cultural icon of the Wild West speaks to deep desires of individualism and liberty and offers a vision of social contract theory in which a free and equal individual (the cowboy) emerges from the state of nature (the wilderness) to build a civil society (the frontier community). The metaphor of the Wild West retained a commitment to some limited government (law and order) but rejected the notion of the fully codified state as too oppressive (the corrupt sheriff). |
Will Wright. Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975.
From Google Books: The purpose of this book is to explain the Western's popularity. While the Western itself may seem simple (it isn't quite), an explanation of its popularity cannot be; for the Western, like any myth, stands between individual human consciousness and society. If a myth is popular, it must somehow appeal to or reinforce the individuals who view it by communicating a symbolic meaning to them. This meaning must, in turn, reflect the particular social institutions and attitudes that have created and continue to nourish the myth. Thus, a myth must tell its viewers about themselves and their society. This study, which takes up the question of the Western as an American myth, will lead us into abstract structural theory as well as economic and political history. Mostly, however, it will take us into the movies, the spectacular and not-so-spectacular sagebrush of the cinema. Unlike most works of social science, the data on which my analysis is based is available to all of my readers, either at the local theater or, more likely, on the late, late show. I hope you will take the opportunity, whenever it is offered, to check my findings and test my interpretations; the effort is small and the rewards are many. And if your wife, husband, mother, or child asks you why you are wasting your time staring at Westerns on TV in the middle of the night, tell them firmly—as I often did—that you are doing research in social science. |