The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western / Edition 1

by Michael D. Coyne

Overview

This text employs the Western as a vital medium for examining the many tensions - political, racial, sexual, social and religious - which have beset modern America from "Stagecoach" and the Depression's last years to the decline of the genre in the 1970s. The book focuses on a group of great Westerns, showing how they engaged covertly with such issues as miscegenation, labour-management relations, generational discord, codes of masculinity, the Cold War, McCarthyism, Vietnam, increasing individual social alienation, and explains why a celebratory genre veered, during a generation of unprecedented power and prosperity, from sagas of national achievement to bleak, virtually asocial visions of life in the United States.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781860642593
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	12/15/1998
Series:	Cinema and Society
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	260
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

Michael Coyne is a writer and film historian. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Table of Contents

Mirror for Prewar America: Stagecoach and the Western, 1939-1941
• Puritan Paradigms: My Darling Clementine and Duel in the Sun
• "The Lonely Crowd," Catholicism and Consensus on the Prairie: Red River, Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
• Dysfunctional Family Structures in Classic Westerns, 1950-1961: The Gunfighter, Shane, The Searchers and The Last Sunset
• Politics and Codes of Masculinity in Late 1950s Star Westerns: The Big Country and Warlock
• "No More West to Win": How the West Was Won and the Elegiac Westerns of 1962
• A Genre in Flux, a Nation in Turmoil: The Vietnamization of the Western in Mid-1960s America
• Receding Frontiers, Narrowing Options: The Wild Bunch and the Western in Richard Nixon's America
• Legends Revisited, Legends Revised in "Bicentennial Westerns": Buffalo Bill and the Indians, The Outlaw Josey Wales and The Shootist
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index

Editorial Reviews

Michael Coyne...heft[s] his pickax in search of intellectual nuggets...The Crowded Prairie's real strength lies in Coyne's passion. The Washington Post

From the Publisher

Coyne (history, Univ. of Edinburgh) brings forth a bracing analysis of what he terms the golden age of Hollywood Westerns, from Stagecoach (1939) to The Shootist (1976). As the title suggests, he targets an academic or highly literate audience, for whom lingo such as "patriarchy" and "Manichacan" signifies much. Minimally, readers must be familiar with most grade A Westerns and television miniseries of the era. Coyne is well versed in this material, and the diligent reader will welcome his ability to emphasize his points through the judicious use of dialog, contemporary critics' reviews, and box office receipts. Equally appreciated are reevaluations of Duel in the Sun (1946), The Big Country (1958), and Warlock (1959). Films are placed in context to their times and each other, but more important, combed for subtexts that create or reflect American identity. Race, male supremacy, dysfunctional families, and Vietnam are all stirred into a stimulating soup. For all academic film collections.Kim R. Holston, American Inst. for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters, Malvern, Pa.

Library Journal