Neo-Westerns of the ’50s and ’60s

By the end of the 1960s, many critics saw the traditional American western as a dying genre, one being revised and challenged by Leone’s spaghetti westerns and Kurosawa’s jidaigeki. However, efforts to transform the heroic imaginaries of the American western came from within Hollywood as well, as evidenced in this selection of five early attempts at updating genre conventions to contemporary 1950s and 1960s settings. These films, still made during the golden age of the western, suggest the incompatibility of past mythologies of masculinity and the frontier with a modern world, as their aging cowboy protagonists struggle to cope with their imminent outmodedness. These films are not wholly critical, however, and despite their revisions still uphold the formulation of the western as a "historical morality play based on the questions of the frontier, the role of the individual in society, and the (dis)continuity of contemporary American society with its mythological past" that defined the genre since its inception, as William McClain has argued. Incomplete critiques as they may be, these films are fascinating glimpses into midcentury Hollywood's reckoning with contemporary political and cultural anxieties, and gritty reflections on a genre in crisis.