On Tue, 15 Nov 2005, Yoshie wrote:
> I'd say then that The Searchers was the beginning of the end. Thriller,
> Film Noir, Sci-fi, Horror, Action, etc. have survived the civil rights
> movement and the sexual revolution better than the Western did.
I'd argue the opposite. I'd argue the heart of film noir was the femme fatale. And the femme fatale was based on the fact that a woman couldn't possibly be asked to leave her husband and her status for mere lust. Once divorce and women getting jobs and women lusting all become normal, Double Indemnity becomes unthinkable -- there's no insoluable trap that it takes murder to solve. When feminism solves the Woman Problem, it dissolves the Femme Fatale problem too.
Meanwhile Once Upon a Time in the West, the best western of all time, survived those movements just fine.
I think the reason the Western died out has nothing to do with its lack of correspondence to culture (since lord knows too many of us still dream in black and white about good and evil and lone men on a horse). It's rather a problem of its invariable setting: by definition, it has to be set in a dead past that gets ever further away. Whereas all those other genres can be set in the present or future. Secondly, TV. The perfectly standard western was hugely popular for decades on TV. It soon became impossible to persuade people that they should shell out money to see that kind of western in the theatres when there were so many available for free. Leading to three, being cliched to death by overuse -- which was a function of the invariability of its setting and its popularity, not of its increasing unpopularity. It just got done to death. And anyone wanting to lure people to shell out money had to make something more baroque.
Michael