Back From Boot Hill

After years in eclipse, westerns are in vogue again. But it's the West through a new '90s prism.

Alan Ladd rides off into the vast Western sky in Shane. Henry Fonda, as Wyatt Earp, kicks up his feet in front of the saloon in My Darling Clementine. Marshal Dillon stares down Dodge City's main street, and the boys of the Ponderosa sit tall in the saddle together. Few images in popular entertainment have the primal resonance of those from the classic westerns. Or at least they used to. The western, a genre that once proliferated on the big screen and small, until quite recently seemed to be one step away from Boot Hill.

Today westerns are back, guns blazing....

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