Hammer Films had one of their few flops with the much ridiculed but not entirely uninteresting Moon Zero Two (1969), which relocates the elements of a Western on The Moon.
The Western has made some odd crosshatches with the science-fiction genre over the years. This has been nicknamed the Weird Western. However, there is another entire sub-genre of films that conduct genre crosshatches and mix the Western with fantastical elements such as vampires, zombies, aliens etc. The Western is an inherently non-fantastical genre (unless one considers its rewriting of history). There have been various attempts to revive the Western since, usually with historically revisionist works like Dances with Wolves (1990), Unforgiven (1992) and tv’s Deadwood (2004-6), although none of these have succeeded in taking the genre back to the popularity it enjoyed in its heyday.
Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1974) roundly spoofed the genre and it took the overinflated flop of Heaven’s Gate (1980) to finally kill the Western at the box-office. Works throughout the 1970s moved in a similar direction deconstructing the mythology. The 1960s saw a lessening of the popularity of the Western with works such as The Wild Bunch (1969) – a violent work that showed the heroes as outlaw killers. The genre created numerous tropes from the town dominated by its raucous saloon filled with dancing girls and gambling games, the quickdraw shootout on the main street at high noon, the stagecoach journey and so on. The popularity of these films was enormous – it could be said they were roughly the 1930s-50s equivalent of today’s action films. The stories favoured tough, hard won individualism and a sense of individual morality and justice. Westerns featured black-and-white heroes (it was often literally the case that the hero wore a white hat and the villain a black hat) in simple horse adventures on the frontier, saving the damsel, tracking down the outlaws, fighting off incursions of the Indians.
During this time, a number of actors – John Wayne, Roy Rogers, Clint Eastwood, Gene Autry, Tom Mix and others – built their fame on this. By the 1920s and 30s, the Western had become a major genre and continued that way for the next three decades, branching out into television in the 1950s and 60s. A great deal of mythology that became the Western had begun during the actual period of the West with many of the real-life gunfighters and outlaws from the era becoming regarded as folk heroes.īeginning with The Great Train Robbery (1903), cinema of the early half of the 20th Century turned the six-gun toting cowboy into a hero. Historically, this took place between 1865-1895, the period when towns were being settled westward across North America, where population of the towns had begun in varying degrees but the area was still a lawless frontier. Westerns refer to the genre of films that take as their setting the American West (also known as the Wild West).
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