From John Wayne on a stagecoach in the 1930s to Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight – set to gallop into cinemas after Christmas – the Western just won’t go away. The Big Issue Australia considers why this genre refuses to ride off into the sunset.

Fans of director Quentin Tarantino will get their next fix just after Christmas, when his new movie, The Hateful Eight, is released. Set in the aftermath of the US Civil War, a sheriff (Kurt Russell) and the criminal in his custody (Jennifer Jason Leigh) seek refuge in a stagecoach stopover on a bleak mountain during a blizzard, along with an assortment of former soldiers, bounty hunters and other unsavoury characters.

Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) – about an ex-slave who seeks retribution for past injustices and tries to rescue his wife from a brutal slave-owner – had many Western elements, but was infused with a distinct Southern Gothic vibe. The Hateful Eight has its roots more firmly planted in the genre. The director has already suggested it is a tribute to the Western serials such as Bonanza that dominated prime time television in the US and also, to a lesser extent, Australia in the 1960s and 70s.

This year has already seen the release of Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman, an interesting take on the hardships of women in the west, and John Maclean’s Slow West, about a young Scot who travels to America in search of the woman he loves. The Revenant – a bleak frontier revenge saga from the director of Birdman, Alejandro G Iñárritu – will hit screens in January and stars Tom Hardy and Leonardo DiCaprio. Meanwhile, a remake of the 1960 classic, The Magnificent Seven, this time starring Denzel Washington, is scheduled for release in the middle of next year, and social media recently lit up with news that US cable TV channel HBO is in preliminary talks for a movie version of its cult Western series, Deadwood (2004-06).

Which all leads to the intriguing question: is the Western making a comeback?

“Not necessarily, because the Western has never gone away,” says Karl Quinn, national film editor for Fairfax Media. “It’s always there, ticking over. It is a rich shell that you can fill with whatever you want.”

Kimberly Lindbergs, a US film critic who writes for Turner Classic Movies, agrees: “Westerns tend to go in and out of fashion with film audiences, but directors always seem eager to return to the genre and creative filmmakers find new ways to mine its rich history.”

Ever since Edwin S Porter’s 11-minute 1903 silent film The Great Train Robbery, which is commonly acknowledged as the first screen Western, the genre has ebbed and flowed in popularity, but never completely faded away. Westerns became common during the silent era, but the advent of sound in the late 1920s saw major studios abandon the genre, leaving it to smaller studios, which churned out countless low-budget films and serials.

The success of John Ford’s classic Stagecoach in 1939 saw major studios tackle the genre again. Featuring John Wayne in his breakthrough role, the film depicts an eclectic collection of strangers travelling in a stagecoach through hostile Apache territory. It ushered in what is referred to as the golden age of the Western, as major directors including Howard Hawks (Red River; 1948), Anthony Mann (Winchester ’73; 1950) and John Sturges (Bad Day at Black Rock; 1955) turned their hands to the genre.

It was also during this period that key features of the Western took shape: stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century and featuring a revolving cast of native Indians, settlers, soldiers, outlaws and lawmen, all struggling for control of unsettled or barely tamed (by white people, at least) frontier territory.

Within this framework, a range of storylines was gradually developed. These include what some have called the ’empire story’; pioneers carving out a ranch from so-called wilderness. A good example of this theme is Hawks’ Red River. The ‘revenge story’, another popular strand, often involved an extended pursuit. The best known of these is Ford’s The Searchers (1956), in which an embittered Civil War veteran, Wayne in his best role, embarks on a journey stretching over several years to rescue his niece, kidnapped as a child by Comanche Indians.

Another common plotline involved the lone lawman facing off against a superior force of outlaws to uphold what is morally just. Ford’s Rio Bravo (1959), in which the sheriff of a small Texas town (Wayne again) arrests the brother of a powerful rancher and holds him in the face of threats from the rancher’s hired guns, is a well-known example and cited by many critics as one of the best Westerns ever made.

In the 1960s, the Western – like the victim in a saloon brawl – took another dive in popularity, brought about by the saturation of the market and shifting viewer demographics and tastes. But Westerns continued to be made and, as they moved into the late 1960s and early 1970s, became more morally ambiguous and revised previously held historical truths. Prominent examples are Sam Peckinpah’s ultra-violent The Wild Bunch (1969) and Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971), in which a gambler and a prostitute become business partners in a remote mining town where they come into conflict with a ruthless corporation.

Michael Cimino’s infamous 1980 film Heaven’s Gate saw the fortunes of the Western sink further. The five-hour long movie, about a dispute between land barons and European immigrants in 1890s Wyoming, was one of the biggest box-office bombs of all time and nearly bankrupted parent company United Artists. The Western would not enjoy serious critical and commercial success again until Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990) and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992).

What is behind the incredible durability of the Western? Partly, the fact they dish up thrills, action and adventure in a way that not only entertains but taps directly into America’s pioneer myths. But Westerns have also proven to be remarkably good at reflecting the times in which they were made. “There’s no other genre that reflects the decade that they were made and morals and feelings of America during that decade [more] than Westerns,” Tarantino told America’s National Public Radio in July 2013. “Westerns are always a magnifying glass as far as that’s concerned.”

Westerns trace America’s shifting self-image, from the 1950s, when the country was morally confident and enjoying an economic boom, to the 1960s, when it began to lose faith in its role as global sheriff, to the 1970s, when domestic blowback from Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, coupled with economic recession, resulted in public cynicism and self-doubt.

Hollywood can still knock out a hairy-chested Western in the classic mould, such as 3:10 to Yuma (2007), but the genre has been transformed. Time periods have shifted, increasingly sophisticated themes have been tackled and a wider range of identities has been incorporated. Dances with Wolves, in which Costner’s lone soldier befriends local Indians, has a distinct multicultural feel and is an obvious attempt to make amends for the harsh treatment of Native Americans in so many previous Westerns. Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men (2007) not only examined America’s declining economic fortunes and mood in the first decade of the 21st century, it puts a chillingly dark spin on the traditional trope of the decent lawman out to track down and apprehend a vicious outlaw.

While there has never been a shortage of assertive female characters in Westerns – think Joan Crawford’s strong-willed saloon keeper in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954) and Katharine Ross as Etta Place in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) – until recently stories in the genre have been told mostly from a male perspective. The Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit (2010) examined the role of women in the West, as did The Homesman. Hollywood even tackled gay cowboys in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005).

While Lindbergs agrees there is some truth that Westerns are a reflection of the times, she argues: “We’re currently in a reflective period when many writers and filmmakers seem interested in re-examining the past with new insight and asking difficult questions about our often romanticised history. The Western genre is a great platform for exploring lots of ideas about current events as well as past events that we haven’t come to terms with yet.”

Quinn, meanwhile, points to another crucial element. “I think landscape is another powerful aspect of the Western. It becomes a character and an obstacle, the greatest challenge to the success or otherwise of the central character. This is not the case with every Western. In Dances with Wolves the scenery is just picturesque background. But go back to The Searchers and films like it – the landscape is a major factor.”

Quinn’s view helps explain another intriguing aspect of the Western’s trajectory: its appeal outside of the US, particularly in Europe. The Western was popular in Communist Eastern Europe, which produced a number of so-called ‘Red Westerns’, such as The Sons of the Great Bear (1966). When Westerns fell out of favour with American audiences in the 1960s, the genre was reinvigorated through the work of European directors such as Italian Sergio Leone, whose films were known in the West as ‘Spaghetti Westerns’. Leone’s use of widescreen close-ups and highly stylised visuals in films such as The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) were copied by Hollywood. Tarantino’s Django Unchained was inspired by another Italian job, Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966).

“Europeans live in a densely populated continent, for the most part, a place where the idea of a vast open plain is just a foreign concept,” says Quinn. “They are able to view the landscape and the genre with fresh eyes.” Among the crop of upcoming Westerns is the Dutch production Brimstone, now being shot in Romania, Spain and Germany, which tells the tale of a young woman accused of a crime she didn’t commit being hunted down by a vengeful preacher. The Salvation (2014), starring Mads Mikkelsen, was set in the American West, made by a Danish director (Kristian Levring) and shot in South Africa.

Not surprisingly, given Australia’s violent frontier history, Westerns have also been popular here. Bushrangers – convicts who had escaped and survived Australia’s brutal environment to become outlaws – were a popular subject of the nascent local film industry early last century. Rolf Boldrewood’s novel Robbery Under Arms – the tale of a renegade English nobleman known as Captain Starlight and his exploits on the goldfields of Australian in the 1880s – has been filmed six times. John Hillcoat’s brutal film, The Proposition (2005), starring Guy Pearce, in which an outlaw apprehended by police is given the choice of killing his older brother or seeing his younger brother executed, is a regular fixture on best-of lists of modern Westerns.

Whether the current crop of Westerns is the start of a sustained engagement with the genre or just another of the frequent spikes in interest, one claim can be made with confidence: don’t ever expect the Western to go riding peacefully into the sunset.

Courtesy of INSP News Service www.INSP.ngo / The Big Issue Australia