Late Westerns: The Persistence of a Genre by Lee Clark Mitchell (review)

The Western is a genre that has been declared dead, revived, given its postmortem yet again, and made a comeback countless times since early cinema. Part of this journey has included considering the "post" Western, to explain how the genre has evolved from its so-called classical form. But genres are always unstable categories, and as Lee Clark Mitchell writes in Late Westerns: The Persistence of a Genre, "examples from any period in the past are as incompatible, sometimes irreconcilable and chaotic, as more recent examples brought together to justify a presumed generic claim" (5). As such, Mitchell considers the Western as always being "post," drawing instead on the classification of "late Westerns" to examine the longevity of the genre in "its openness to other mediations, other influences, other genres" (40). These films, Mitchell argues, move toward reflexivity in terms of the genre, particularly through their form—the book pays particular attention to cinematography—and how they address semantic elements such as borders, violence, and masculinity.

The strength of the book is its careful attention to close formal analysis—a model for any film scholar of how to craft arguments that focus on the audiovisual constructions. Mitchell focuses on adaptations in multiple chapters, considering the way films like 3:10 to Yuma (Delmar Daves, 1957, and James Mangold, 2007), No Country for Old Men (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2007), and The Counselor (Ridley Scott, 2013) adapt the written language of the source text to the screen. Thematically, the book connects the often seemingly disparate film examples in terms of how they unsettle or present "misgivings" about "supposedly settled questions of identity" (34). For example, chapters on Lone Star (John Sayles, 1996), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005), and A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005) investigate how issues of male violence, families, and borders—all common to the Western genre—are challenged through shifting genre strategies involving noir, mystery, and melodrama.

The discussions of and connections between the different films Mitchell labels as "late Westerns" help illustrate the subtitle of the book: "the persistence of a genre." While there is no shortage of writing on the Western, Mitchell's genre approach offers a framework for considering why so many films might fall under the categorization of the Western, even while missing some of the assumed "crucial" semantic elements. The evolving syntax of the genre, as Mitchell rightly points out, is what allows films to continue to be recognizable cinematically, while "displaying distinctive visual styles that have as much to do with their immediate historical era as with their generic identification" (241). And so, the Western persists.