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1981
2-3: Lonely Are the Brave
  • ISSN: 1466-0407
  • E-ISSN: 1758-9118

Abstract

The Western is widely seen as a cinematic means of embodying the American culture in which it was produced. The canonical dividing line between ‘classic’ and ‘revisionist’ Westerns coincides with the end of the Hays Code, when the Western genre, and American culture as a whole, underwent their most significant tonal shift. This article is primarily an analysis of a 1958 allegorical, classic and pacifist Western, . This film promotes a revised attitude towards previously accepted moral conventions of violence within the genre and should thereby be understood as a revisionist work. Furthermore, ’s pacifistic revisionism creates a stark contrast with canonical revisionist Westerns and thereby calls into question the criteria for classifying films as ‘classic’ or ‘revisionist’. Ultimately, I argue that the drastic shift in tone and theme in New Hollywood Westerns has obscured the revisionism inherent to the genre and perpetuated a reductive view of the variations, shifts and nuances of the thematic arguments of Westerns from Classical Hollywood.

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2023-10-24
2026-04-22

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