The Wild West is still as popular as ever in the cinema

US historical drama has come a long way from cowboys versus indians, writes Declan Burke

Clint Eastwood as Outlaw Josey Wales

It was a time – as any subscriber to TCM will know – when Westerns were ubiquitous, each Hollywood studio churning out dozens of ‘oaters’ or ‘horse operas’ every year. The formula was simple and wildly popular: a white man with a gun (generally wearing a white hat) shot down the lawless bad guy (black hat) who was threatening civilisation; or, in cavalry uniform, he dispatched hordes of whooping ‘Indians’ to the ‘Happy Hunting Grounds’. Political correctness and historical accuracy were at a premium in these halcyon days, as millions flocked to see their idealised perception of the strong, confident pioneering American confirmed in bullets and blood.

John Ford was the King of the Westerns, frequently casting John Wayne as his leading man in classics such as Stagecoach, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers. Stagecoach (1939) represents the high water mark of the earliest incarnation of the Western, as the Ringo Kid (Wayne) boards a stagecoach for a journey fraught with danger, not least because Geronimo and his marauding Apaches are on the warpath. On the face of it a standard shoot-’em-up already growing stale in Hollywood, Ford turned Stagecoach into a parable for redemption, in the process making the Western a genre to be reckoned with.