As things stand, you can't go to the movies. So, let Cinema Paradiso bring the movies to you! In addition to posting you the high-quality DVDs, Blu-ray and 4Ks of your choice, we also offer articles on a range of topics and themes to guide you through the thousands of titles in our catalogue and provide some background on the films you love. At the start of 2021, we launch a new strand that suggests 21 Reasons why you might want to get hooked on cinema and Cinema Paradiso.
Between 1926 and 1967, over 4000 Westerns were produced in the United States. This represents around a quarter of the total output of the world's most productive film industry and around half of them were the B movies that were nicknamed 'oaters', 'horse operas' and 'sagebrushers' by the Hollywood trade press. In essence, they were simple morality tales in which good triumphed over evil so that progress and stability could be brought to outlying communities without taming the pioneering spirit. But they didn't always paint a flattering picture of the average American, as they stole land from the indigenous populations and readily joined posses and lynch mobs to persecute strangers and outsiders. Some Westerns even cast a nostalgic glow over the Confederate stance on slavery that had sparked the Civil War in 1861.
Westerns are America's mythology, as the frontier was the place where nation-shaping deeds of derring-do occurred and they still resonate today, albeit not always in the most politically correct terms. These ideas were passed down around campfires and hearths before the legend was printed in magazines and dime novels by such authors as James Fenimore Cooper, Zane Gray, Louis L'Amour and Owen Wister. Artists like Charles Marion Russell, Frederic Remington, Benjamin West, Newell Convers Wyeth, Frank Tenney Johnson, George Catlin. Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt set the visual tone followed by early film Westerns like Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903), which can be found on the BFI's Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers collection and which played a pivotal part in the evolution of screen narrative. Moreover, it spawned the first cowboy star in Broncho Billy Anderson.
Audiences familiar with the Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickcok flocked to the flickers depicting frontier life and the lives and crimes of Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, Belle Starr and the Dalton and Younger gangs. With all the cattle rustling, horse thieving, stagecoach robbing, train heisting and turf warring going on, it's a wonder that upstanding citizens like Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson and Pat Garrett managed to keep a semblance of law and order.
When they first moved to California, film-makers realised the landscape suited the cattle drives and horseback pursuits that looked so spectacular on the big screen. Once the studios had sorted out recording sound on location, they built their own Wild West towns in the wilderness to bring a sense of authenticity to pictures that were either shown on the lower half of a continuous programme or to overexcited kids during Saturday matinees. Yet, the Western gained a degree of respectability when Wesley Ruggles's Cimarron (1931) won the fourth Academy Award for Best Picture. Major stars also occasionally headed West, notably Gary Cooper in Cecil B. DeMille's The Plainsman (1936) and William Wyler's The Westerner (1940), and Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda in Henry King's Jesse James (1939) and Fritz Lang's The Return of Frank James (1940).
Like John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) - which influenced Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) - these features sought to tell more sophisticated stories than the shoot 'em up scenarios that had been recycled since silent icons like Tom Mix, William S. Hart and Harry Carey gave way to such B-movie titans as Bob Steele (The Oklahoma Cyclone, 1930), William 'Hopalong Cassidy' Boyd (The Painted Desert, 1931) and John Wayne (West of the Divide, 1933), as well as singing cowboys like Gene Autry (In Old Santa Fe, 1934), Tex Ritter (Mystery of the Hooded Horseman, 1937) and Roy Rogers (Sunset Serenade, 1942). But the most American of all the genres was about to undergo a radical transformation in the period after the Second World War, when film-makers who had witnessed ferocious fighting at first hand decided to make Western violence more visceral and its ramifications more disconcerting.
Here are 21 reasons to get hooked on these Psychological Westerns:-
1) The Ethos
During the studio era, Hollywood had turned the old frontier into a neverland of square-jawed lawmen, gunslinging rogues, singing cowpokes and scalping warriors. The Western was viewed as an escapist genre, with plenty of gung-ho action to entertain the Saturday matinee crowd and remind older patrons of the Manifest Destiny they had learned about at school and the pioneering spirit that had validated it. Backed by East Coast financiers with a stake in the status quo, all films produced in the United States during the 1930s and early 40s peddled the values underpinning the American Dream, with the Production Code ensuring that the grimmer realities of the Old West were kept off the screen.
The Psychological Western did for cowboys what film noir did for private eyes. It cast a shadow over their world and made them more troubled and introspective. There was still plenty of action in the great outdoors, but greater emphasis was placed on the fact that saddletramps and gunslingers, outlaws and lawmen, cattle barons and railroad tycoons alike had pasts whose demons kept haunting them and forcing them to confront the big issues of life. Steers still stampeded and fights still broke out in barrooms. But conventions like the baddie wearing sported a black hat, while the hero wore white could no longer be taken for granted and the genre was all the more intense, intriguing and influential as a consequence.
The shift in emphasis is readily evident in William A. Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), an adaptation of a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark that is widely considered to be the first Psychological Western. Set in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the story turns on cattle rustling, small-town prejudice and vigilante justice. But stranger Henry Fonda's bid to prevent a murderous miscarriage in a divided Nevada town also examines father-son relations, the corrupting nature of power and the right of might. Few Westerns in the Production Code era got away with discussing these dark themes with such depth and deftness and it remains a landmark in Oscar history, as it's the last film to be nominated solely in the Best Picture category.
2) The Action
As each of Cinema Paradiso's Westerns is available on high-quality disc, what you see is what you get. There's no special effects trickery. Those hooves really did thunder across the plains and the breakneck riding was performed by practiced horsemen. The spectacular falls from galloping steeds were also enacted by skilled stuntmen, who knew how to make tumbles and death rolls look dramatic and authentic. Among the ranks of the unheralded are Jack Williams, Whitey Hughes, Rodd Redwing, Cliff Lyons and Richard Farnsworth, who went on to become an accomplished actor in the likes of Alan J. Pakula's Comes a Horseman (1978) and David Lynch's lawnmower Western, The Straight Story (1999).
3) The Subtext
The first Psychological Westerns were produced during the Second World War and some have been read as allegories on authoritarian tyranny and the desecration of democratic ideals. Some critics have credited Fritz Lang with creating a Holocaust allegory with his Brechtian Western, Rancho Notorious (1952), in which Marlene Dietrich's Chuck-a-Luck ranch is compared to a concentration camp. However, the majority of postwar Westerns were concerned with the Cold War, with many commenting on the House UnAmerican Activities Committee's investigation into Communism in the entertainment industry.
In Henry King's The Gunfighter (1950), Jimmy Ringo (Gregory Peck) struggles to shake his past reputation as the fastest gun alive while trying to lay down some roots in the town of Cheyenne, Alan Ladd's eponymous drifter falls foul of a ruthless cattle baron while sticking up for some Wyoming homesteaders in George Stevens's Shane (1953). The residents of Hadleyville refuse to stand alongside Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) when he's confronted by an outlaw gang in Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952), a denunciation of the Hollywood blacklist that earned Coop the Oscar for Best Actor. However, this has since been claimed by US politicians on either side the ideological divide.
Among the other allegories on the paranoia generated by the Red Scare are Allan Dwan's Silver Lode, Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (both 1954), Anthony Mann's The Tin Star (1957), Delmer Daves's 3:10 to Yuma (1958) and Edward Dmytryk's Warlock (1959). We shall revisit these titles in more detail below.
4) Native Americans
The Psychological Western's most important contribution to the genre was its revisionist depiction of the First Americans. As Hollywood was bankrolled by conservative forces anxious to preserve mythic notions of national history and identity, the studios presented a rose-tinted version of the past, in which the native population posed a barbaric barrier to progress. Therefore, in conquering the tribes on screen, avaricious, genocidal bigots became clean-cut icons who claimed land for the greater good rather than stealing it and bestowed civilisation instead of eradicating ancient cultures.
Attitudes among film-makers didn't change overnight and many Westerns continued to peddle the concept of heroic settlers battling murderous marauders. Producer David O. Selznick took the first tentative steps in starring protégé Jennifer Jones in King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946), an adaptation of a Niven Busch novel about Pearl Chavez, the half-Comanche orphan who comes between brothers Jesse (Joseph Cotten) and Lewt McCanles (Gregory Peck) when she comes to live with her second cousins. But Delmer Daves went further in reworking Elliott Arnold's novel, Blood Brother, as Broken Arrow (1950), which sees Union veteran Tom Jeffords (James Stewart) seek to understand the ways of Cochise (Jeff Chandler) and the Apaches in steering them away from a US Mail delivery route.
Nominated for three Oscars, this landmark bid to show indigenous peoples in a more sympathetic light also won a special Golden Globe as the Best Film Promoting International Understanding. However, it has been somewhat eclipsed by John Ford's The Searchers (1956), a Cold War allegory derived from an Alan Le May tome that features an exceptional performance by John Wayne as Ethan Edwards, a Confederate diehard whose intolerance intensifies when he discovers that his niece (Natalie Wood) now identifies with the Comanches who had kidnapped her.
Rod Steiger also takes defeat in the Civil War badly, but comes to learn the ways of the Sioux in Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow (1957), while Randolph Scott begins to wonder where right lies after he rescues Nancy Gates from tribal incarceration and has to protect her from bounty hunter Claude Akins in Comanche Station (1960), the last of Scott's Ranown films with director Budd Boetticher.
Subsequent decades have seen respectful depictions of Native Americans become the norm. Cinema Paradiso offers an unrivalled selection of the key features in formats ranging from DVD to Blu-ray and 4K. So, why not explore how a nation came to terms with itself through such important pictures as Abraham Polonsky's Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), Arthur Penn's Little Big Man, Elliot Silverstein's A Man Called Horse (both 1970), Michael Winner's Chato's Land (1972), Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), Kevin Costner's Best Picture-winning Dances With Wolves (1990), Walter Hill's Geronimo: An American Legend (1993) and Gore Verbinski's The Lone Ranger (2013), which cast Johnny Depp as Tonto opposite Armie Hammer's John Reid, the roles taken by Jay Silverheels and Clayton Moore in Stuart Heisler's The Lone Ranger (1956) and The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold (1958).
5) The Directors
The Hollywood studio system was purposefully conceived as a collaborative network to ensure that everyone under contract was in thrall to the front office. Consequently, few genuine auteurs emerged, as only a handful of directors got to write their own screenplays so that they could explore recurring themes with a personal visual style. Curiously, the Western did allow a number of film-makers to put a personal stamp on their work. Foremost among them was John Ford, who had taken an extended break from the genre after producing such silent masterworks as The Iron Horse (1923). His Cavalry trilogy (see below) introduced a contemplative side to his oeuvre, which hovers around the Psychological periphery, as not all critics agree that Ford's films fit the bill.
Jack of all trades Howard Hawks (see Cinema Paradiso's Instant Expert's Guide here) also made several telling contributions to the new strain of Westerns, as did such stalwarts as William A. Wellman, Henry Hathaway and Raoul Walsh, who was responsible for the first Freudian Western with Pursued (1947). As we shall see, however, two men dominated the Psychological Western.
Previously known for taut noirs that made evocative use of urban settings, Anthony Mann mastered the Western in five teamings with James Stewart, as well as Man of the West (1958), in which Gary Cooper excels as Link Jones, a reformed outlaw who is lured back into his uncle's gang in order to protect Billie Ellis (Julie London), the saloon singer he has chosen to be the new schoolteacher in his Texan town of Good Hope.
Budd Boetticher's knowledge of bullfighting earned him his big break as an adviser on Rouben Manoulian's Blood and Sand (1941). However, he spent a long time toiling in the B Hive before making good with the Ranown Cycle of Westerns, four of which were scripted by Burt Kennedy. All seven starred Randolph Scott, a screen veteran and former roommate of Cary Grant, who went on to work with Sam Peckinpah, who would become a key figure in the Revisionist Westerns that kicked down the Production Code door that had been opened by the Psychological strand.
6) Black Cowboys
The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 resulted in thousands of former slaves seeking work as ranch hands. Yet Hollywood virtually ignored black cowboys and it was left to the makers of so-called 'race movies' to redress the balance, with independent outings like Richard C. Kahn's The Bronze Buckaroo (1939), which can be found on the BFI's Pioneers of African-American Cinema collection. The title was the nickname given to Herb Jeffries (whose name is misspelt in the credits), who had to darken his skin on camera. But he remained largely in isolation until the late 1950s, even though both George Sherman's Tomahawk (1951) and The Searchers were respectively based on the exploits of black cavalry scout Jim Beckwourth (who also participated in the 1820s expedition that inspired Alejandro González Iñárritu's multi-Oscar winner, The Revenant, 2015) and African American cowpoke named Britt Johnson.
Despite famously incurring the wrath of Spike Lee, John Ford made an effort to bring a black presence to his later Westerns, with Woody Strode taking the lead in Sergeant Rutledge (1960), which really should be available on disc in this country. Ford also cast the former American footballer as John Wayne's cohort, Pompey, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), in which he tellingly omits the phrase 'all men are created equal' when reciting the Declaration of Independence. Strode would go on to make a number of Spaghetti Westerns and be accepted as one of the team by Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan and Lee Marvin when they head into Mexico to rescue Claudia Cardinale from bandit Jack Palance in Richard Brooks's The Professionals (1966).
Ford had resisted studio attempts to cast Sidney Poitier in Sergeant Rutledge. But he finally made his way West alongside James Garner in Ralph Nelson's Duel At Diablo (1966) before directing himself, Harry Belafonte and Ruby Dee in Buck and the Preacher (1972), in which a former Unionist sergeant's task of leading a wagon train of freed slaves to Colorado is complicated by a con man posing as a clergyman. Around the same period, ex-footballer Bernie Casey made his debut in Paul Wendkos's Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969), which presented a somewhat more racially authentic view of the Old West than John Sturges's The Magnificent Seven (1960). although it took until 2016 for Antoine Fuqua's remake to reflect frontier diversity by casting Denzel Washington as an African American marshal, Ethan Hawke as a Cajun sharpshooter, Lee Byung-hun as a Korean assassin, Martin Sensmeier as an exiled Comanche warrior and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as a Mexican outlaw.
Mel Brooks had hoped to cast Richard Pryor as Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles (1974), but Cleavon Little landed the role and excelled after the studio had failed to secure insurance because of Pryor's drug problems. He got to team with Fred Williamson on Adios Amigo (1975), which was written and directed by the onetime NFL legend, who also imposed himself on Larry J. Spangler's Joshua (1976), in which he plays a Civil War veteran who turns bounty hunter in order to find the white outlaws who had murdered his mother.
In the 1980s, Danny Glover made two notable excursions to the badlands, alongside Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn and Kevin Costner in Lawrence Kasdan's Revisionist Western, Silverado (1985), and as Joshua Deets in Simon Wincer's acclaimed TV adaptation of Larry McMurtry's novel, Lonesome Dove (1989). But the genre was now in abeyance and pictures like Mario Van Peebles's Posse (1993) were frustratingly rare, even though they sought to restore some of history's missing pages by focusing on the efforts of the black infantrymen who had deserted during the Spanish American War to deliver Freemanville from the bigots besieging it. Despite the prominent roles taken by Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington and Samuel L. Jackson in Django Unchained (2012) and by Jackson in The Hateful Eight (2015), Quentin Tarantino's Westerns haven't always met with universal approval. But Wes Miller's fact-based Hell on the Border (2019) drew less opprobrium, thanks to David Gyasi's formidable performance as Bass Reeves, the escaped slave who became the West's first African American marshal.
7) The Actors
As Western fans know, several studios had stock companies of actors who specialised in playing frontier types. This was particularly true of Poverty Row outfits like Republic and Monogram and they remained busy in the oaters that were churned out during the genre's golden age. However, Psychological Westerns placed as much emphasis on emotion as action and, thus, required a more sophisticated actorly skill set. Some stalwarts made the transition, notably Gary Cooper and John Wayne, who had worked his passage through B movies after debuting in Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail (1930). But a breed of edgy actors like Robert Ryan, Richard Widmark and Lee Marvin found themselves at home in the new West, where they challenged authority with a noirish sneer.
The duo most associated with the generic shift, however, were James Stewart and Randolph Scott. In his five films with Anthony Mann, Stewart went against the 'aw shucks' persona that had charmed audiences in pictures like Frank Capra's Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story (1940), which had earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor. Indeed, outings like Winchester '73 (1950), in which Stewart plays a frontiersman seeking to avenge his father's murder, sit alongside such dark Alfred Hitchcock collaborations as Rope (1948), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and Vertigo (1958). Scott, who had been on screen since the silent era, was no stranger to the West, having contributed a standout turn as Quantrill's Raider Jim Dancer to Edwin L. Marin's Fighting Man of the Plains (1949), However, Budd Boetticher harnessed his gritty indomitability in seven textbook Psychologicals after he had failed to persuade Wayne to headline Seven Men From Now (1956).
8) Towns
The Western is an escapist genre designed to reconnect urban audiences with the land and its centrality to American history and identity. Towns have proved something of a problem for film-makers, therefore, as they represent stability and the kind of everyday routine that people sought to get away from when they bought a ticket to be transported from the darkness. Moreover, Hollywood had to find ways of making towns seem like a positive step in the nation's evolution, while also acknowledging that they were also sinks of depravity (as they invariably were in crime movies) filled with the perils and temptations that could lead the unsuspecting and the wisecracking hero alike away from the straight and narrow.
That arch-disregarder of screen conventions William A. Wellman got around the problem in Yellow Sky (1948) by setting the action in a ghost town and showing that any problems lay with Gregory Peck and his fellow outlaws rather than with the principle of communal living. However, when Randolph Scott rides into the eponymous sleepy town in Budd Boetticher's Decision At Sundown (1957), local bigwig John Carroll is able to turn his neighbours against the newcomer, even though his amorous treachery had driven Scott's wife to suicide.
Mutual suspicion also turns the townsfolk against each other when hired gunman Audie Murphy descends on Lordsburg, Arizona with a twitchy trigger finger in Jack Arnold's No Name On the Bullet (1959). But Kirk Douglas comes to realise he can't expect much co-operation from the people in thrall to cattle baron Anthony Quinn, even after it becomes clear in John Sturges's Last Train From Gun Hill (1959) that Quinn's son was responsible for the rape and murder of Douglas's Native American wife. Despite behaving equally reprehensibly, the taciturn stranger who terrorises the mining town of Lago, California is invited to protect it from a cabal of gunslingers in Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter (1973), which so enraged John Wayne that he wrote a letter of complaint that read: 'That isn't what the West was all about. That isn't the American people who settled this country.'
9) The Outlaws
The mythology of the Old West centres as much on its outlaws as on its heroes. This owes much to the cult of individualism that also led to gangsters being figures of fascination to film-makers and audiences in the early 20th century. As the Production Code couldn't allow crime to pay, desperados were doomed to die, unless they were 'good bad men' like William S. Hart, who can be glimpsed among the fading images in Decasia (2002), which is just one of the mesmerising works available in the BFI's collection, Bill Morrison: Selected Films 1996-2014.
One of the most filmed frontier brigands is Billy the Kid, who is played by Jack Buetel in The Outlaw (1943), as he competes with Doc Holliday (Walter Huston) for the affections of Rio McDonald (Jane Russell). Jules Furthman's screenplay anticipated the Psychological Western focus on character over action, but Howard Hughes (who co-directed with Howard Hawks) was more intent on objectifying Russell than analysing The Kid's mindset. Paul Newman brought more Method insight and intensity to the part in portraying William Bonney as a twitchy man-child in Arthur Penn's first feature, The Left Handed Gun (1958).
There's less depth to Geoffrey Deuel's interpretation opposite John Wayne's eponymous lawman in Chisum (1970), Andrew V. McLaglen recreation of the Lincoln County Cattle War. In chronicling the same episode, Sam Peckinpah puts more interiority into the equation, as the bond between old friends James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson frays in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), which boasts a score by Bob Dylan, who cameos as Alias alongside Barry Sullivan's John Chisum.
The role of The Regulators is further examined in Christopher Cain's Young Guns (1988) and Geoff Murphy's Young Guns 2 (1990), which sees Emilio Estevez as The Kid. But this was more of a Frat Pack showcase than a serious historical study and there was more going on below the surface in Walter Hill's The Long Riders (1980), whose gimmicky selling point was the casting of the Keach, Carradine, Quaid and Guest siblings as the band of brothers known as the James-Younger Gang.
he pivotal bank raid had previously been recreated by Philip Kaufman in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), which teamed Cliff Robertson and Robert Duvall as Cole Younger and Jesse James. And the tendency to revisit the lives of the West's iconic names prompted Spanish director Mateo Gil to follow the fabled teaming of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) by suggesting in Blackthorn (2011) that Cassidy (Sam Shepard) had escaped the tightest of corners and gone to live in exile in a quiet Bolivian village.
10) The Cavalry
With their blue and yellow uniforms, the US Cavalry played a crucial role in the so-called Indian Wars on the Great Plains. Naturally, 1930s Hollywood had presented the likes of General George Armstrong Custer as heroes. But it's worth contrasting the perspectives on the Battle of Little Big Horn offered in Michael Curtiz's They Died With Their Boots On (1941) and Robert Siodmak's Custer of the West (1967), in which the scourge of the Cheyenne is respectively played by Errol Flynn and Robert Shaw.
Mention of the Cavalry will bring to mind the celebrated trilogy directed by John Ford, which dispatched John Wayne to patrol the frontier as Captain Kirby York in Fort Apache (1948), Captain Nathan Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Lieutenant Colonel Kirby Yorke in Rio Grande (1950). In each case, Wayne is required to play a flawed hero whose exploits in uniform do little to ease the problems in his private life. Duke's reputation has suffered since the mid-60s because of his right-leaning politics, but any doubts about his acting ability and his magnitude as a star are dispelled by this fascinating triptych.
Although they may not all fall neatly into the Psychological category, a clutch of other pictures available from Cinema Paradiso is worth seeking out, as Randolph Scott rides out in Joseph H, Lewis's 7th Cavalry (1956); Apache-hating Joel McCrea leads a rabble of raid survivors in Joseph M. Newman's Fort Massacre (1958); a band of raw recruits earn their stripes in Arnold Laven's Sam Peckinpah-scripted The Glory Guys (1965); Candice Bergen favours the Cheyenne over naive private Peter Strauss in Ralph Nelson's Soldier Blue (1970); and scout Burt Lancaster experiences divided loyalties in Robert Aldrich's fact-based, Ulzana's Raid (1972).
11) The Landscape
Such was the Edenic status of the Wild West that it's little wonder John Wayne reckoned that 'God put the West' in Monument Valley. Situated on the border between Utah and Arizona. John Ford set 10 Westerns here, with cinematographer Winton C. Hoch making particularly spectacular use of the distinctive environs in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Searchers (1956). Hoch won an Oscar for the former, which still ranks among the most visually sublime Westerns ever made.
Ford also joined forces with Henry Hathaway and George Marshall on How the West Was Won (1962), which shared the same location in Lone Pine, California as the last of Budd Boetticher's Ranown Westerns with Randolph Scott, Comanche Station (1960). Among the other Westerns shot here were Henry Hathaway's Steve McQueen revenge saga, Nevada Smith (1965), and Clint Eastwood's turf war epic, Joe Kidd (1972).
Moving into Utah, Ford filmed part of Rio Grande (1950) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964) in Moab. But it's Kenab, Utah - where Ford took Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert for Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) - that has earned the nickname 'Little Hollywood' for its appearances in films as different as The Lone Ranger (1956) and Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). Another recurring landscape can be found in the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, with the town of Jackson Hole cropping up in pictures as different as Shane (1953), Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Django Unchained (2015).
12) Mexicans
Just as Hollywood has blurred the truth over black cowboys, it has done the vaquero a similar disservice. That's to say nothing of the Spanish-born Americans known as 'criollos', the mixed Native American and Spanish 'mestizos' settlers or the gentlemanly 'caballeros' who established estates in New Mexico. And what about the 20,000 Chinese who have virtually been airbrushed out of the Western altogether? One third of all cowpokes in the late 1800s were Mexican and, yet, their contribution was scarcely recognised by studios more interested in lofty projects like Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata! (1952), which was scripted by John Steinbeck and paired the Oscar-nominated Marlon Brando and the victorious Best Supporting Anthony Quinn as revolutionary brothers Emiliano and Eufemio Zapata.
Having erupted half a century earlier, the revolution led by Benito Juárez against the Emperor Maximilian provides the backdrop for Robert Aldrich's Vera Cruz (1954), which takes mercenaries Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster across the border in search of easy pickings. But, when Coop next ventures south, the scene shifts to the 1916 war against Pancho Villa for Robert Rossen's They Came to Cordura (1959), which centres on the hypocritical behaviour of the soldiers billeted at Rita Hayworth's hacienda. The same year saw Robert Mitchum don a sombrero to give one of the best performances of his career in Robert Parrish's The Wonderful Country, as a pistolero who becomes caught up with Buffalo Soldiers and Apaches when he crosses into the United States to purchase weapons for general Víctor Manuel Mendoza and his governor brother, Pedro Armendáriz.
A decade later, James Stewart and Dean Martin play the siblings who fall foul of some gringo-hating bandits when they blunder across the border in Andrew V. McLaglen's Bandolero! (1968), which co-stars Raquel Welch, who resurfaces as a revolutionary torn between Mexican bank robber Burt Reynolds and African American sheriff Jim Brown in Tom Gries's 100 Rifles (1969). Later that year, Civil War adversaries John Wayne and Rock Hudson are forced to settle old differences after their rival forces encounter some uncompromising Juaristas in McLaglen's The Undefeated. However, the standout Mexican Western of 1969 was Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, which pitches ageing outlaw William Holden and his band against some of Pancho Villa's supporters in a noirish, post-Code treatise on anti-heroism that reflected the disillusion with the American Dream that had fuelled protests in favour of Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War.
The start of a new decade brought the contrasting duo of Don Siegel's Two Mules For Sister Sara, which paired Clint Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine in a battle of wits set against the overthrow of Maximilian, and Alejandro Jodorowsky's avant-garde classic, El Topo (both 1970), in which the director plays the mysterious gunslinger who is hired to find the gun masters who have terrorised a desert town. Burt Lancaster plays another one-man army, as an ageing Mexican American lawman pursues ruthless rancher Jon Cypher and hired gun Richard Jordan in Edwin Sherin's Valdez Is Coming (1971). And retribution is viewed through the bottom of a tequila glass in Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), as maverick Warren Oates is hired by the avaricious Gig Young and Robert Webber to collect the $1 million reward being offered by a powerful patrón for the capture of the absconded father of his daughter's child.
13) Bounty Hunters
Capturing fugitives with a price on their heads was a lucrative business in the Old West. Moreover, it afforded many a reformed gunslinger and trigger-happy war veteran a shot at redemption, while also putting their murderous talents to good use. The ruthless cunning displayed by James Stewart in Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur (1953) also serves Henry Fonda well when he comes to the aid of greenhorn sheriff Anthony Perkins in Mann's The Tin Star (1957)
Impoverished rancher Van Heflin is reduced to seeking the bounty on outlaw Glenn Ford's head in Delmer Daves's 3:10 to Yuma (1957), which was remade by James Mangold in 2007, with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe as the hunter and the hunted. Randolph Scott has to contend with Lee Van Cleef's efforts to rescue his brother in Budd Boetticher's Ride Lonesome (1959), while it takes one to know one in Monte Hellman's The Shooting (1966), as retired bounty hunter Warren Oates suspects the motives of shady operator Jack Nicholson when he joins a small band crossing the desert.
Not everyone was in it for the reward, however. Fury often leads to legal posses turning into lynch mobs, as in The Ox-Bow Incident and in Allan Dwan's Silver Lode (1954), which sees sheriff Dan Duryea abuse his power by having his men interrupt a Fourth of July wedding to arrest John Payne for the murder of his brother. A posse from Waco, Texas is equally guilty of mistaken identity, as cowhands Jack Nicholson and Cameron Mitchell are accused of robbing a stagecoach in Monte Hellman's Ride in the Whirlwind (1965). Vigilante justice misfires in an even murderous manner in Ted Post's Hang 'Em High (1968), as crooked lawman Ed Begley leaves Clint Eastwood for dead after he's gunned down and strung up on a charge of rustling.
14) Whirling Wheels
Strangely, railroads don't feature prominently in Pschological Westerns, in spite of the existential threat they posed to the cowboy. The majority followed the lead of Cecil B. DeMille's Union Pacific (1939) in focusing on the battle to lay the tracks in the face of hostile opposition from the local tribes or cattle barons. Similarly, the mail service has received short shrift, although Cinema Paradiso users can catch Buffalo Bill (Charlton Heston) and Wild Bill Hickok (Forrest Tucker) breaking records to establish a route between St Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento, California in Jerry Hopper's Pony Express (1953). Equally ill-served are escort details, although few could add more to the topic than sophomore Sam Peckinpah's masterly Ride the High Country (1962), which sees the wide open spaces beckon for ageing lawmen Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott (in his last picture) after they agree to accompany a gold shipment across the Sierra Nevada.
It's been argued that John Ford's Stagecoach was the first Psychological Western and Martin Ritt returned to its themes of hypocrisy, superficial judgements and the true nature of heroism in Hombre (1967), in which Paul Newman barely conceals his contempt for the fellow passengers who spurned him because he was raised by Arizona Apaches. Defeated Confederate major Randolph Scott begins to have second thoughts about the seven soldiers under his command after they hide out in a stagecoach way station after stealing $250,000 in Union gold in Roy Huggins's Hangman's Knot (1952).
Another relay station provides the setting for a key scene in Budd Boetticher's Seven Men From Now, as Randolph Scott reveals to fellow travellers Walter Reed and Gail Russell that he is seeking the men who killed his wife during a robbery in Silver Springs. The Ranown duo explored a variation on this theme in The Tall T (1957), in which Scott's cowboy hitches a ride on the stage out of Contention and winds up defending copper heiress Maureen O'Sullivan against scheming bandit Richard Boone.
Fascinated by all aspects of frontier life, Ford also turned his hand to the trek picture with Wagon Master (1950), which harks back to 1849, as Mormon elder Ward Bond asks horse traders Ben Johnson and Harry Carey, Jr. to see his congregation from Crystal City to the San Juan River in Utah. Wagons also roll under the guidance of James Stewart in Anthony Mann's Bend of the River (1951), as a reformed border raider strives to escape from his past by leading a party of Missouri pioneers along the Oregon Trail to the Columbia River Basin.
Civil War veteran Kirk Douglas has to choose sides when the greed of Walter Matthau and Lon Chaney, Jr. endangers the wagon train he is escorting through Sioux country in André De Toth's The Indian Fighter (1955). Douglas would return as a senator reliant on scout Robert Mitchum to ensure settlers heading from Missouri to Oregon arrive in one piece in Andrew V. McLaglen's The Way West (1967). And trust is also an issue in Delmer Daves's The Last Wagon (1956), as Richard Widmark (who has been reared by Comanches) leads the survivors of an Apache massacre through treacherous terrain.
15) Lawmen
A tin star came with few guarantees on the frontier and graveyards across the West were strewn with sheriffs, marshals and deputies who had paid the ultimate price for trying to uphold order in lawless times. The odds of Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) surviving look slim after his neighbours abandon him to face the Miller gang alone in High Noon (1952). However, help can sometimes prove a hindrance, as Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) discovers when he takes on the landowning Burdette clan with the help of the drunken Dude (Dean Martin), the callow Colorado (Ricky Nelson) and the scrappy Stumpy (Walter Brennan) in Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1958).
Wayne would don a patch and win an Oscar for his portrayal of the one-eyed marshal aided by Texas Ranger Glen Campbell in tracking down those responsible for the murder of headstrong Kim Darby's father in Henry Hathaway's True Grit (1969), and Duke reprised the role in Stuart Miller's Rooster Cogburn (1975), as he helps missionary Katharine Hepburn avenge the slaying of her own father. Not all critics would consider these to be Pscychological Westerns, but they explore backstories and inner lives so that the audience can get to know the characters.
We learn a good deal more, for example, about Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) and Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas) in John Sturges's Gunfight At the OK Corral (1957) than we do as Henry Fonda and Victor Mature take the same roles in approaching a showdown with Neman Haynes Clanton (Walter Brennan) and his sons in John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946). The relationship between Earp (Harris Yulin) and Holliday (Stacy Keach) is viewed from the perspective of the latter in Frank Perry's Doc (1971), while George P. Costmatos's Tombstone (1993) widens the perspective to include Virgil (Sam Elliott) and Morgan Earp (Bill Paxton), as Wyatt (Kurt Russell) and the tubercular Doc (Val Kilmer) prepare for a showdown with the Cochise County Cowboys. But these true-life badge wearers never had to tackle the cannibalistic monsters threatening the 1890s town of Bright Hope protected by Sheriff Franklin Hunt (Kurt Russell) in S. Craig Zahler's Bone Tomahawk (2015).
16) Outsiders
Community is a rather nebulous concept in the Hollywood Western, as the emphasis is so often placed on individuals negotiating the landscape under a neverending sky. However, even the most dedicated loner has to encounter civilisation from time to time and they almost always find trouble. Arriving in Coronado, stranger James Stewart seems bent on stirring up the hornet's nest over Donald Crisp's ranch, as he seeks his brother's killer in Anthony Mann's The Man From Laramie (1955). And the clue's in the title in Budd Boetticher's Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), as Randolph Scott stops off in the remote settlement of Agry, California and takes the side of a Mexican who has been wronged by a powerful ranching family.
Cattleman Robert Ryan urges his neighbours to forget their feud and join forces against trouble-maker Burl Ives and his cohorts in André De Toth's Day of the Outlaw (1959). But Marlon Brando refuses to forgive and forget when he emerges from prison to discover that onetime partner Karl Malden has used their ill-gotten gains to become the sheriff of Monterey in One-Eyed Jacks (1960), which Brando agreed to direct after Stanley Kubrick had quit the project for creative reasons.
17) Civil War
The shadow of the 1861-65 war between the states and its aftermath has loomed large over Hollywood because President Woodrow Wilson had declared that DW Griffith had written 'history with lightning' in The Birth of a Nation (1915). Decades later, the battles were still being refought, most notably in Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939), while West Point classmates Jeb Stuart (Errol Flynn) and George Custer (Ronald Reagan) fall out over abolitionist John Brown (Raymond Massey) in Michael Curtiz's Santa Fe Trail (1940). The following year, Flynn would portray Custer in Raoul Walsh's flattering biopic, They Died With Their Boots On (1941). Yet, despite the emotive issues at hand, the conflict rarely featured in the Psychological canon.
Naturally, John Ford cast an eye over the Civil War in The Horse Soldiers (1959), in order to reflect on the differing standpoints of career cavalry officer John Wayne and surgeon William Holden, as the prepare for a raid on the Confederate supply depot at Newton Station. Released the same year as this fact-inspired saga, Budd Boetticher's Westbound sent Randolph Scott into a small Colorado town to ensure that a Union gold shipment goes through. But Scott had it easy compared to fellow officer Charlton Heston in Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee (1965) as he has to corral a ragtag force of Union troopers, Confederate prisoners and freed slaves in order to cross the Rio Grande in pursuit of an Apache war party.
Not that William Holden has a cushy passage in Edward Dmytryk's Alvarez Kelly (1966), as his bid to play one side off against the other is confounded by one-eyed rebel colonel Richard Widmark. And the going is just as tough for James Caan and the other members of the Cochise County Comanches, as they trek across the Deep South to join the Confederate army in William Hale's Journey to Shiloh (1968). But striving to remain neutral also came with its complications, as James Stewart's abolitionist Virginia farmer discovers when goes in search of the son who has been taken prisoner in Andrew V. McLaglen's Shenandoah (1965).
Wounded Union soldier Clint Eastwood is nursed back to health by Southern teacher Geraldine Page in Don Siegel's The Beguiled (1971), although he changes sides in the self-directed Revisionist classic, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), as a Missouri farmer joins up with the bushwhacker outfit led by Bloody Bill Anderson (John Russell) after his wife is murdered by a band of pro-Northern Jayhawkers. Elsewhere in the same state, Barry Brown falls in with Jeff Bridges and his renegades while striving to dodge the Confederate draft in Robert Benton's Bad Company (1972).
The focus has subsequently strayed away from the frontier aspect of the war and on to enlisted men in films like Edward Zwick's Glory (1989) and Ronald F. Maxwell's Gettysburg (1993) and its sequel, Gods and Generals (2003). However, guerilla bands were to the fore in Ang Lee's Ride With The Devil (1999), while the Confederate militia impinge upon Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain (2003) and prove powerless to prevent Newton Knight (Matthew McConnaughey) from ceding from the 11 Southern states in Gary Ross's historical reconstruction, Free State of Jones (2016).
18) Gunslingers
In the mythical Westerns of the 1930s, gunfighters were invariably baddies whose backstory was almost an irrelevance, as long as he bit the dust in the last reel. The Psychological Western required hired killers to have a motive for venturing on to the dark side, whether it was a violent death in the family, the theft of some land, a tribal trauma or a legacy of the Civil War. As they were often strong, silent types, such men tended to shoot first and ask questions later. But their brooding menace made them unpredictably dangerous, even if they were on the side of right.
Following on from Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter and Alan Ladd in Shane, John Ireland rides into town to help sheriff's widow Beverly Garland exact some revenge in Roger Corman's Gunslinger (1956), which brought a little low-budget exploitation to the Wild West. Sureshot Henry Fonda and habitual gambler Anthony Quinn ride into an 1880s Utah mining town and cause trouble before dealing with a marauding gang of thugs in Edward Dmytryk's Warlock (1959). The Oscar-winning Lee Marvin has to win battles with the bottle and his gun-toting brother in Elliot Silverstein's Cat Ballou (1965) and con man James Garner stays on the lighter side of the hired gun business, as he passes off loose cannon Jack Elam as a dead-eye in Burt Kennedy's Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971), which reunited star and director after Support Your Local Sheriff (1969). But the mood is more sombre as an era comes to an end in Don Siegel's The Shootist (1976), as dying gunfighter JB Books rides into Carson City, Nevada on the day that Queen Victoria dies in order to give the ailing John Wayne a poignant swan song.
19) Cattle Drives
Whether it's horses, cattle or buffalo, there are few more totemic sights in the Hollywood Western than that of thundering herds on the hoof. Imagine what the film-makers of the postwar period would have made of drone cameras. Without such gadgets, Howard Hawks still captured the spectacle of livestock being driven along the Chisholm Trail between Texas and Kansas in Red River (1948), which turns on the deteriorating relationship between Tom Dunson (John Wayne) and Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift), the orphan questioning his benefactor's authority.
The clash of acting styles adds to the interest of this Oedipal Cold War allegory, which remains one of the genre's glories, and the contrasting methods of Roberts Mitchum and Preston similarly stokes the tension in Robert Wise's Blood on the Moon (1948), after cowpoke Mitchum takes exception to Preston's plan to stampede Tom Tully's cattle as part of his bid to drive him off his land. Hanging judge John McIntire threatens to thwart James Stewart's plan to drive a herd from Wyoming to the Yukon so that he can try his luck during the Klondike Gold Rush in Anthony Mann's The Far Country (1954).
Joseph Cotten's stock need to get from Mexico toTexas in Robert Aldrich's The Last Sunset (1961), but hot-headed drover Kirk Douglas's task is not made any easier by the fact that he is being pursued for murder by sheriff Rock Hudson. Cook's assistant Gary Grimes learns that life on the Colorado trail is a world away from the romantic notions that had filled his teenage head in Dick Richard's The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972), which was released the same year as Jeremiah Johnson, Sydney Pollack's paean to the great outdoors that follows the education that Robert Redford receives from trapper Will Geer after he seeks a slower pace in the Rocky Mountains at the start of the 19th century.
Sheep come between land baron Preston Foster and strong-willed daughter Veronica Lake in André De Toth's Ramrod (1947), so she hires reformed drunk Joel McCrea to help protect her flock. Saddled with an alcoholic husband, matriarch Beulah Bondi relies on sons Robert Mitchum, William Hopper and Tab Hunter to tame the beast preying on her cattle in William A. Wellman's Track of the Cat (1954). No-nonsense rancher Jeanne Crain also knows her own mind, but finds drifter Kirk Douglas opposing her plans to increase her herd by fencing off her neighbours' land in King Vidor's Man Without a Star (1955)
It's water rather than barbed wire that proves the problem for schoolteacher Jean Simmons, when her bid to revive her father's homestead is jeopardised by a river dispute that pits ranch foreman Charlton Heston against sea captain Gregory Peck in William Wyler's The Big Country (1958). It's Heston's trail hand who seeks the aid of rancher's wife Joan Hackett after he falls foul of some rawhiders in Tom Gries's doughty drama, Will Penny (1968), which has much in common with Peter Fonda's elegiac acid Western, The Hired Hand (1971), in which Fonda's saddletramp receives a cool welcome from estranged wife Verna Bloom after he returns to the family farm for the first time in years.
Plagued by horse rustler Jack Nicholson, landowner John McLiam hires Irish American'regulator' Marlon Brando to restore order in Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks (1976). Thievery also bothers the members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, who plan to clamp down on the European immigrants straying on to their turf in Michael Cimino's much-maligned epic, Heaven's Gate (1980), a reconstruction of the Johnson County War that also boasts a fine performance by Isabelle Huppert, as the Quebecois bordello keeper, who accepts stolen cattle in return for her girls' favours.
The same year also saw Steve McQueen make his penultimate appearance in William Wiard's Tom Horn, as he plays the fabled tracker who had helped capture Geronimo before becoming a stock detective who specialises in retrieving rustled beasts for cattle barons like John C. Cobie (Richard Farnsworth). More recently, Kevin Costner and boss Robert Duvall lock horns with anti-common grazing land baron Michael Gambon in 1880s Montana in Costner's under-appreciated Open Range (2003).
20) Tough Women
Aware that cinema-going was a family pastime and a popular form of dating, the Hollywood studios frequently slipped romantic subplots into even the doughtiest Westerns. For every prim schoolmarm, spoilt rancher's daughter and preacher's niece, however, there were gung-ho gals like Gene Tierney's bandit queen in Irving Cummings's Belle Starr (1941) who were more than a match for the menfolk. Some even had time to break into song, such as Judy Garland's waitress in George Sidney's The Harvey Girls (1946), Betty Hutton's Annie Oakley in the same director's Annie Get Your Gun (1950) - which had been planned as a Garland vehicle - and Doris Day's Martha Jane Cannary in David Butler's Calamity Jane (1953).
Having so much enjoyed seeing what the boys in the backroom will have as Frenchy from Bottleneck in George Marshall's Destry Rides Again (1939), Marlene Dietrich ventured West again to play Altar Keene, the saloon chanteuse presiding over the sinister Chuck-a-Luck ranch in Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious (1952). Saloon owner Joan Crawford and rancher Mercedes McCambridge show how low women out West can stoop as they battle for control of both their patch of Arizona and pistol-packing troubadour Sterling Hayden in Nicholas Ray's gender-bending genre gem, Johnny Guitar (1954).
Barbara Stanwyck also knew how to play dirty on the plains, as she proves in helping land baron husband Edward G. Robinson feud with Civil War veteran Glenn Ford in Rudolph Maté's The Violent Men (1955) and in fronting up to US Marshal Barry Sullivan for control of Cochise County, Arizona in Samuel Fuller's Forty Guns (1957). Business and pleasure also mix with a hint of sexual frisson, as Warren Beatty and Julie Christie seek to set up a gambling joint-cum-brothel in the north-west mining town of Presbyterian Church in Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971). However, Civil War survival is paramount for sisters Britt Marling and Hailee Steinfeld and their slave, Muna Otaru, when they are threatened by renegade troopers in Daniel Barber's The Keeping Room (2014).
The scene shifts from 1902 to 1845, as Michelle Williams takes control of a wagon train when guide Bruce Greenwood appears to lose his way in the Oregon High Desert in Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff (2010). Power games are also the order of the day in David and Nathan Zellner's Damsel (2018), as Mia Wasikowska tries to convince suitor Robert Pattinson that she doesn't need rescuing from the siblings who appear to have abducted her. This picaresque has an episodic structure in common with Paul Greengrass's News of the World (2020), which riffs on The Searchers as German settler Helena Zengel resents being returned to her kinfolk after being rescued from the Comanche by Confederate war veteran Tom Hanks, who makes a living by reading newspapers aloud in remote frontier towns.
21) Legacy
Despite helping reshape the genre, the Psychological Western remains something of an enigma. No one has conducted a definitive survey, which is why it has been possible for this Cinema Paradiso survey to play fast and loose with the terminology and traits. After all, what matters most is that users discover new enthusiasms and new movies across the DVD, Blu-ray and 4K formats. No one has such a range of Westerns available to rent and the choice confirms the impact that the features of the postwar period had on the Spaghetti Westerns produced in Italy in the 1960s and the Sauerkraut, Paella and Borscht equivalents made in Germany, Spain and the Soviet Union.
In addition to such Sergio Leone masterpieces as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), do try the works of Sergio Corbucci, Antonio Margheriti, Enzo G. Castellari, Ferdinando Baldi and Gianfranco Parolini. Just type their names into the Cinema Paradiso searchline while you are looking up such neo-revisionist Hollywood titles as Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead (1993), Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995), Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford (2007). Joel and Ethan Coen's True Grit (2010) and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992), which remains the last Western to have won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
