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x Westerns wise and just. In the spring of that year doubts arose and well before the end of 1965 I was a firm opponent of the war. My allegiances switched from the Washington political establishment to the radical opposition among American students that had begun on the University of California’s Berkeley campus. This new and hopeful attitude seemed to be bringing together the dormant postwar demands for social change re-awakened by Kennedy, the Civil Rights Movement, the opposition to what Dwight Eisenhower in one of his last presidential speeches had named, and cautioned against, as ‘the military-industrial complex’, and a crudely confrontational approach to the Cold War. In the autumn of that year I spent five weeks in America on a BBC assignment – in New York, California and Texas – and, at a time when small-talk was in abeyance, found people talking of nothing but politics and social change. My feelings about the United States became extremely confused and I worked on this book for a couple of years thinking I wasn’t getting anywhere, unable to pin things down. Eventually in order to fulfil an obligation to The Times on which I was about to renege, I offered the chapter on politics and the western, which only existed in draft form. It was published in 1971 as a ‘work in progress’ in The Times and attracted some attention. In the following week the head of the Department of Comparative Studies at the University of Texas, Don Weissman, phoned me from Italy where he was enjoying a sabbatical, and invited me to be a visiting professor at Austin the next year (coals to Newcastle, steers to Texas). Two days later the editor of Art in America, Brian Doherty, who had also read the piece, asked me to write an article on the Indian in the western for a special edition of his magazine on the culture of what we now call Native Americans. I suddenly realised that what I was engaged in was of interest on both sides of the Atlantic and that in writing about the western I was clarifying my life-long feelings about the United States. For these reasons Westerns seems located in its time, and I’ve decided to change nothing in the original text of 1973 or in the Afterword that accompanied the revised edition in 1977. In a long, appreciative and appreciated review of the augmented version in Sydvenska Dagbladet, the paper’s witty critic observed that if every three years I added the same amount of new material, by the turnof-the-century a 170-page monograph would have swelled to 420 pages. However in the years immediately following his piece there
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Preface xi did not seem to be an urgent need for major additions, and indeed there was a widespread feeling that the box-office calamity and critical failure of Heaven’s Gate in 1980 had dealt the genre the coup de grâce and dispatched it to Boot Hill for good. This has happily not proved to be the case, and the further reflections I’ve added as Westerns Revisited deal with some trends, changes and developments that continue into the new century. The circumstances in which movies were seen and experienced have changed radically since I wrote Westerns, a matter I touch on in the penultimate paragraph of my 1973 text, though I had no idea just how profound this change would be. There were no VHS cassettes then or DVDs (I now get more than a dozen review copies a week, and several times these past couple of years I’ve received ten westerns in a single package). There was no colour television until 1970 and then only on BBC2 (I couldn’t afford a colour set until 1978), relatively few movies on TV, and only one person of my acquaintance owned a 16mm projector. Until 1970 the National Film Theatre had a single auditorium, and it was extremely rare for westerns to be shown there. Except for some private screenings laid on for me by the British Film Institute in their small viewing theatre (most of which I attended with Jim Kitses, then working for the BFI and like me writing a book for the BFI’s ‘Cinema One’ series), I saw the movies I wrote about in cinemas. At that time westerns were largely to be found in independent suburban movie houses that specialised in revivals or more recent movies that had either completed their major commercial distribution or been rejected by the major circuits. These places, often out of the way, insalubrious and poorly maintained, had three changes of programme a week (on Sunday, Monday and Thursday) and showed films in continuous performances, the general practice in those days at most cinemas except for the occasional blockbusters that were given separate, bookable screenings. This led to a more casual form of movie going and to the now historic expression ‘this is where we came in’. At these small movie houses (and indeed in suburban cinemas generally) movies of average duration were customarily shown in double-bills. The western was most often found on the lower half, and the prints were frequently in indifferent or bad condition. It was necessary to take a close look each week at the guide What’s On? in order to catch a rare Budd Boetticher film that might be showing just on Sunday at the Essoldo, East India Dock Road, or an Anthony Mann film at the Tolmer off the Euston Road near Warren Street

x

Westerns wise and just. In the spring of that year doubts arose and well before the end of 1965 I was a firm opponent of the war. My allegiances switched from the Washington political establishment to the radical opposition among American students that had begun on the University of California’s Berkeley campus. This new and hopeful attitude seemed to be bringing together the dormant postwar demands for social change re-awakened by Kennedy, the Civil Rights Movement, the opposition to what Dwight Eisenhower in one of his last presidential speeches had named, and cautioned against, as ‘the military-industrial complex’, and a crudely confrontational approach to the Cold War. In the autumn of that year I spent five weeks in America on a BBC assignment – in New York, California and Texas – and, at a time when small-talk was in abeyance, found people talking of nothing but politics and social change.

My feelings about the United States became extremely confused and I worked on this book for a couple of years thinking I wasn’t getting anywhere, unable to pin things down. Eventually in order to fulfil an obligation to The Times on which I was about to renege, I offered the chapter on politics and the western, which only existed in draft form. It was published in 1971 as a ‘work in progress’ in The Times and attracted some attention. In the following week the head of the Department of Comparative Studies at the University of Texas, Don Weissman, phoned me from Italy where he was enjoying a sabbatical, and invited me to be a visiting professor at Austin the next year (coals to Newcastle, steers to Texas). Two days later the editor of Art in America, Brian Doherty, who had also read the piece, asked me to write an article on the Indian in the western for a special edition of his magazine on the culture of what we now call Native Americans. I suddenly realised that what I was engaged in was of interest on both sides of the Atlantic and that in writing about the western I was clarifying my life-long feelings about the United States.

For these reasons Westerns seems located in its time, and I’ve decided to change nothing in the original text of 1973 or in the Afterword that accompanied the revised edition in 1977. In a long, appreciative and appreciated review of the augmented version in Sydvenska Dagbladet, the paper’s witty critic observed that if every three years I added the same amount of new material, by the turnof-the-century a 170-page monograph would have swelled to 420 pages. However in the years immediately following his piece there

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