5 minutes

Western/Cowboy!

Abdullah Al Qamzi

Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com

September 26, 2021

The roots of western or cowboy cinema go back to the silent era, before that stories of cowboys and their conquests west of the Mississippi River were heroic stories across the United States.

However, the characters of the Cowboys are not heroes, but are basically outlaws, most notably Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy and Buffalo Bill (the three are represented by Paul Newman), and not to forget Jesse James and Robert Ford.

Some people watch Western because they are ideological films, especially the films of John Ford and John Wayne, before the corrective phase in the mid-fifties, and they are favorite films of the conservative class, while others do not prefer to watch them because they promote conservative values.

Western films have historically been characterized by racism against Native Americans and Mexicans, and portrayed them as villains, and when they are not evil, they are stereotyped characters.

A taste of the Western is not limited to the stories of a passer-by passing through a town riddled with corruption, whose people ask him to help them eliminate the dominant gang, and is not limited to the US Marshal chasing criminals across the border.

Nor is it confined to the police chief who believes in the values ​​of honor and honesty, who is abandoned by the townspeople when it is attacked by a gang, the Western goes deeper than that and discusses the economic crises arising from the control of the greedy rich on society, or discusses how greed turns the American dream into an illusion.

Western is the only American genre of cinema, as for the rest of the genres, they are not considered American, like horror for example, because its roots go back to Germany.

Western reflected the American character par excellence. Between the two world wars, Western films focused on heroes fighting savages and defending settlements for whites.

During the Great Depression, when American capitalism was in question, the films of the unjustly accused cowboy who sought to prove his innocence appeared, and in the fifties, sixties and seventies, when the United States dominated half the planet, entered pointless wars and was involved in assassinations and coups, we saw a dark side of the cowboy personality.

During the Vietnam War, the cowboy turned into a hero who commits crimes trying to justify them. With the arrival of the late President, Ronald Reagan, to power, a Western bomb called “Heavens Gate” exploded at the American box office, and the producers moved away from the Western even though the president is conservative to the core, and he himself was Western representative in the forties and fifties.

After Washington's victory in the Cold War, Kevin Costner triumphed for Western with "Dancing with Wolves", and won the Oscar, followed by Clint Eastwood with his masterpiece Unforgiven, and won a second Oscar, and revived the genre after the failure of the great Heavens Gate.

In the era of Bush Jr., the genre turned towards art and philosophical symbols, and when Obama succeeded him, we saw the Western victory over the blacks.

Attitude:

The standard adopted in Hollywood in the first half of the twentieth century was that a director who wanted to prove himself had to make one or more Western films, and when European filmmakers fleeing Hitler's hell came to it, they took the test and succeeded well.

Western films have historically been racist against Native Americans and Mexicans, portraying them as villains.

Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com

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Abdulla.AlQamzi@emaratalyoum.com