The End of the Western? 

 Despite new themes and new talents it was apparent that the Western was running out of steam. Hollywood no longer depended on this one genre the way it had. Not only had the Western ceased to be central; the constant searching for new angles showed that it no longer had a centre.

The conventional wisdom now is that the Western was killed off overnight by the monumental extravagance of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980). This must be an over-simplification. There have been Westerns since then, some of them successful. But both the huge cost of Heaven's Qate and its almost total failure at the box office seem to have convinced Hollywood executives that the Western was a bad risk. Even so, the Western was clearly in trouble long before 1980. It's easy enough to find reasons why, though harder to know what weight to give them. In the first place, Hollywood itself was in trouble; had been, perhaps, as early as 1948, when the 'Paramount decision' of the Supreme Court forced the divorce of the studios from their captive markets, the chains of theatres which they owned. Once the audience began to be seriously eroded by television and other alternative entertainments the studios had to search for new formulas. Something as traditional as the Western was bound to be at a disadvantage. Other genres such as the crime film, the horror film and the science-fiction film were rejuvenated. They appeared to offer excitements that were either more realistic or more fantastic than the Western, but in any case were different. The Western had always offered violence as the solution to the threat of lawlessness, but in a ritualized form, removed from everyday reality by the distance of time and place. Now the crime film shifted its premises, and invaded the Western's territory. In the gangster films of the 1930s crime had been a specialized activity, reserved to criminals, who by and large left the ordinary citizen undisturbed. Then in the 1960s the city became the frontier, and the savages - the muggers and the rapists - were already inside the gates. Don Siegel's Coogan's Bluff, made in 1968, made this shift explicit, as an Arizona sheriff pursues his quarry through the streets of New York. The casting of Clint Eastwood, the last great totem pole of the Western, in this contemporary role appeared to authenticate the transference of the Western's traditional themes to the crime film, and Eastwood's subsequent career as the policeman Dirty Harry confirmed it. A more immediate explanation of the Western's decline may lie in demogra?phics. As is well enough known, many of the changes Hollywood has undergone since the beginning of the 60s have been led by a fundamental shift in the constitution of the audience. Overwhelmingly now the cinema audience is a youthful, even teenage one, especially in America. It was always likely that the Western would suffer in such a situation. Although from time to time the Western had tried to hitch itself to the wagon of youth, flirting with the juvenile delinquent theme in films such as The True Story of Jesse James (1957), or building up the baby-faced Audie Murphy into a Western star, it had always been a genre dominated by maturity and experience, nowhere better symbolized than in the recurrent motif of the shooting lesson in which gun lore is imparted by the wise to the not always willing. Once the stars themselves began to change unmistakably from mature to old, with few youthful replacements apart from Eastwood (and even Eastwood was 37 by the time Per an pugno di dollari was released in America), the genre began to lose its grip on the youth audience. BBC Audience Research Department figures from 1965 confirm this. Asked to name their preferred type of film, respondents in the 16-19 age group replied 24 per cent for horror films, 29 per cent for science fiction and only 16 per cent for Westerns. The corresponding figures for the 20-29 ^age group were 3,13 and 25 per cent. And yet many elements of the culture of the Western maintain their appeal. Western clothes remain in fashion, not only in the heartland of the western states where stetsons, jeans and high-heeled boots are still everyday wear, but with young people around the world. 'Country and Western' music is more popular than ever. Advertising copywriters still assume familiarity with the world of the Western; a recent hoarding for a bank proclaims it as 'The loan arranger. And pronto.' If the Western was truly a despised or forgotten form nothing would disappear more quickly than such knowing references. More significantly, in the field of serious literature the Western myth retains its power, enriching the work of writers as diverse as Larry McMurtry and Thomas McGuane. While novels of the order of Lonesome Dove and Something to Be Desired can still be written about the West, who can say the Western is dead? Perhaps we too readily import into our discussions inappropriate biological metaphors. The Western is likened to a tree, with its roots in the soil of American history, its trunk the central structuring opposition of savagery and civilization, its branches the thematic variations of cattlemen vs. farmers, cavalry vs. Indians, and so forth. Each season new films appear, like new leaves. The sturdy sapling grows to maturity, but eventually it must wither and die. It is an appealing conceit, but perhaps a misleading one. The history of Hollywood production is best understood not through metaphors of organic growth, but in terms of economic cycles, of boom and slump. As we have seen, the Western was declared exhausted as long ago as 1911; in the late 1930s the major studios appeared to have almost given up on Westerns. So far the genre has always managed to renew itself. Despite changes in the audience its underlying appeal may still be strong enough for a new cycle to emerge. No one can say with confidence that this will happen, still less what kind of spark might rekindle Hollywood's enthusiasm. Only one thing is sure in the cinema: fashions change. The Western may surprise us yet.