The Silver Saddle

Introduction: Westerns of all stripes have long been my movie “comfort food”. However, one period of the genre that particularly fascinates me is from the 1960s to the 1970s, and for several reasons. The Western movie was changing along with changing times. Stars like John Wayne, Joel McCrea, James Stewart and Henry Fonda were aging, and their scripts began to acknowledge that, often depicting these cowboy stalwarts becoming outmoded in a frontier that ran out of badlands to ride. Although “classical” westerns were still produced well into the 1960s, one could cite Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country as the first of the “old man westerns” that would come. The Western also reflected America’s changing social conscience, as films explored themes of race and gender. Native Americans would be portrayed in a more sympathetic light: one could very easily read a parallelism to Vietnam in movies depicting the white man’s treatment of the natives. It further became difficult to tell the white hats from the black hats: heroes were often painted in shades of grey. It may be said that the surge of Italian “spaghetti” westerns lent to the burgeoning moral ambiguity in America’s westerns. (We’re going to explore the spaghetti western in its own section.) As you’ll see, the Western kept evolving with interesting films well into the 1970s, and perhaps would have continued, were it not for the box-office disaster of 1980’s Heaven’s Gate, which all but put a moratorium on the genre. I hope you enjoy this section, as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.