Introduction (1973) This ruminative monograph is neither another defence of the western nor a further attack upon it. My aim, I suppose, is to share with the sympathetic reader some of the reflections on the genre that I’ve had after thirty-odd years of moviegoing. The brevity demanded by the format of the ‘Cinema One’ series, and my resolve to concentrate upon areas where I feel I have something moderately original to say, have resulted in some fields of possible inquiry being ignored. My concern here is entirely with American theatrical westerns, mostly those made since 1950. The explanation for this decision is simple. First, I dislike TV horse operas (though a deal of what I say about screen westerns applies to them too). Westerns need a large screen and are best enjoyed in the company of a thoughtful and occasionally noisy audience. Secondly, I cannot abide European westerns, whether German, Italian or British, and I don’t much like American westerns filmed in Spain.1 Thirdly, while many of my favourite pictures were made before the coming of sound, I have never cared for silent westerns. Cowboy pictures need the pounding of hooves, the crack of Winchesters, the hiss of arrows, the stylised, laconic dialogue (which looks so terrible on paper, but is in fact the only consistently satisfactory period speech that the movies – or for that matter contemporary dramatic literature – have found), and the music, which if rightly used can give a picture the quality of a folk song. There are anyway several books – Fenin and Everson’s, Charles Ford’s, Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout’s – which trace the genre’s history from the turn of the century to the 1960s, and combine with it a quantity of frontier history (in the case of Rieupeyrout’s book, a great deal). 1 There’s a body of opinion which would argue that this disqualifies me as a true student of the genre. So be it. In fairness, therefore, I should direct the reader to the August 1970 double issue of Cinema (nos 6 and 7) which contains a concordance of the Italian western by Mike Wallington and a study of the Italian western by Chris Frayling. The July 1971 issue of Films and Filming has an article by David Austen on Continental westerns and a filmography of 155 of them, which to me reads like a brochure for a season in hell.