Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Fans of the Western will say that trope simply proves the purity of the form: that it's a fable, a parable, a chivalric test of manhood. Whatever its historic validity, the notion of the big shootout kept Westerns going strong for the first 70 years of Hollywood cinema. It began with the first smash hit at the nickelodeons, The Great Train Robbery, and continued with Cecil B. De Mille's The Squaw Man and John Ford's The Iron Horse in the silent era. Cimarron, a generational tale from Edna Ferber, was declared Best Picture at the fourth Academy...
...post-war era, virtually every Hollywood director, from George Stevens and Fred Zinnemann on the A list, to Preston Sturges on the way down and Ed Wood who was never up, directed a Western. It was the new film noir - you could call it the anti-noir, trading claustrophobic darkness for blinding light in the wide-open spaces. But it was also a continuation of noir's fascination with the haunted man, the ordinary guy who'd been scarred by violent experiences. It spoke to returning veterans from World War II, young men from cities and farms who'd been...
...Western was by far the most prolific genre in the Hollywood 50s. It put virtually every big star in the saddle: old Hollywood types like Gable and James Stewart, younger rebels like Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Brando and most of the Stanislavski crowd from Broadway. Top actresses - Stanwyck, Dietrich, Crawford, Monroe - they all went West...
...foreigners, it's different. The American West is a fantasyland, a place of endless plains, quaint towns and tough men settling scores. Akira Kurosawa transposed the genre's tropes to medieval Japan, then saw his Eastern westerns remade in Hollywood (The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven) and Europe (Yojimbo as Leone's Fistful of Dollars). Leone followed up with For a Few Dollars More--surely the most honest title ever given a sequel--and the spaghetti western craze was born. Django, director Sergio Corbucci's bleak riff on Fistful, with its hero lugging a coffin that has a machine...
...western directors never had to consider. "John Ford could just run amuck," says Mangold, "carving out trails between sacred burial grounds and monuments. Now the environment is so protected in these national parks that we had 350 rangers watching every move if we step on one indigenous plant." Hollywood has also lost its teeming cavalry of saddle-up stars and stuntmen. Peter Fonda, who directed the fine western The Hired Hand in the 1970s and appears in the new Yuma, recalls that before shooting began, "they had what's called cowboy camp. A lot of the younger actors hadn...