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. The immediate impetus is a series of unexpected hits: CBS's high-rated 1989 mini-series Lonesome Dove, based on Larry McMurtry's novel; the popular frontier series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman; and a pair of Oscar-winning films, Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven. They have been more than enough to set off a modern Hollywood version of the Oklahoma land rush.
Costner, Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster and Kurt Russell are among the stars who will don Western duds for upcoming movies. Two films based on the Wyatt Earp legend are in the works; so are movie versions of the popular TV series Bonanza and Maverick. In prime time the western is making a slow but notable return, with shows such as Fox's The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Ken Burns (The Civil War) is overseeing a 10-hour documentary series on the Old West, due in 1996. Lonesome Dove, meanwhile, has spawned one TV sequel, Return to Lonesome Dove (airing on CBS over three nights next week), and the promise of a second, based on McMurtry's own (and very different) follow-up, Streets of Laredo, published last summer.
But if the Old West is back, it's not necessarily the West of old. Call it political correctness or a long-overdue historical corrective, but Hollywood's picture of the West has a grubbier, less celebratory, more multicultural look this time around. The moral verities are not so clear-cut. Indians -- now Native Americans -- are more likely to be tragic heroes than whooping villains. Women and blacks, long ignored, are major participants at last. These adjustments reflect the revisionist bent of much recent historical writing about the West -- the view that America's westward expansion was not the triumphal taming of the frontier but a morally dubious enterprise in which a race of people was conquered, the environment ravaged and democratic values frequently trampled.
Hollywood's depiction of the West, of course, has always changed according to the times. In the years before and after World War II, westerns were poetic, patriotic odes to the frontier spirit. In the 1950s, westerns like High Noon served as allegories through which contemporary social issues could be played out. During the Vietnam era, the genre turned more cynical and ambiguous, reflecting doubts about America's might and the morality of violence.