Alex Cox on the Demise of the Western
by Andre Soares
"A Bullet in the back" - Alex Cox discusses the demise of the Western in The [London] Guardian:
"In 1969, Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol made Lonesome Cowboys, the first "mainstream" gay western. In 1971, Dennis Hopper directed The Last Movie, a fractured film about a Hollywood stuntman left behind in a western set, in Chupadero, Peru. And in 1974, Marco Ferreri directed [Touche pas à la femme blanche aka] Don’t Touch the White Woman!, a spaghetti western starring Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve, which set Custer’s Last Stand in the outskirts of modern Paris. Pictures of President Nixon appear throughout.
"It was a crisis point. The genre, which had once been a celebration of traditional American values of self-reliance and individuality, had forked. Its reactionary tendency - the films of Burt Kennedy and [John] Wayne - had hit a brick wall."
"Classic Westerns" series at London’s National Film Theatre includes Stagecoach, The Searchers, Johnny Guitar, High Noon, and Brokeback Mountain.
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