Word: hollywooders
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...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...
...form also dominated TV production, which had just shifted from New York to Hollywood, and from live to filmed entertainment. Out went the hour-long, Broadway-style dramas; in came the strutting gunman with a ornery streak of justice. In the 1958-59 season, six of the seven top-rated shows were Westerns. That's where the B-movie oaters went to live again, and where Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds and dozens of others stars-in-the-making came from. Steve McQueen, fresh from the Actors Studio, became a bounty hunter in Wanted: Dead or Alive. He moved...
...spaghetti western changed that. Sergio Leone filched the plot from Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (Hollywood had already remade Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven) for his 1964 Fistful of Dollars. Clint ambles into a rotten town commandeered by rival miscreants and takes both gangs down. In Fistful and the Leone-Eastwood followups For a Few Dollars More (surely the most honest title every slapped on a sequel) and The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, society was run by outlaws. The moral choice was among various shades of black. Anarchy ran riot, and the only recourse was martial...
...because Clint was so damn cool, he established the new mode: hero by default. The good guy was the one with the fastest gun, the meanest scowl and top billing. And that perpetual three-day beard that Toshiro Mifune had worn in the same role in Yojimbo; in Hollywood Westerns, the hero's visage was typically hairless, while villains sported a dastardly mustache. Eastwood's scruff became a fashion statement that lives today on the carefully unshaven faces of pop stars and young actors. And his surliness, transposed to the Dirty Harry Callahan character he played in five films, lent...