Hollywood's West: The American Frontier in Film, Television, and History (review)

Hollywood's West: The American Frontier in Film, Television, and History brings together thirteen essays originally presented at the 2002 Film and History conference in Kansas City, Missouri. It also includes an introduction by the editors, a filmography, and a bibliography. Editors Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor divide the essays into four sections. Part One, "Early Sound Era Westerns, 1931–1939," includes essays on Cimarron (1931), unconventional films by little-known filmmaker Jed Buell, and the Lone Ranger. Part Two, "The Post–World War II Western, 1945–1956," covers British empire films' influence on John Ford's cavalry trilogy, women in Red River (1948), Anthony Mann's Devil's Doorway (1950), and George Stevens's Giant (1956). Part Three, "The Cold War Western, 1950–1981," concerns High Noon (1952) and three law-and-order films it influenced—The Tin Star (1957), Warlock (1959), and Firecreek (1968); women in The Professionals (1966); and Western parodies—Cat Ballou (1965), Blazing Saddles (1974), Rustlers' Rhapsody (1985), and Shanghai Noon (2000). Part Four, "The Postmodernist Western, 1980–2000," includes essays on history in films of the Reagan era, John Sayles's Lone Star (1996), and westerns made for Turner Network Television. (TNT does not clearly fit into the book's focus on Hollywood films.)

Since these essays grew out of a conference, the collection suffers from a problem that conferences often produce and that is a disparity between essays that deal with small, often insignificant, issues and others that focus on large questions and use important examples. The essays here on Cimarron, Red River, High Noon, Giant, and Lone Star provide illumination for significant films and are among the most helpful ones in the book. Rollins and O'Connor provide a comprehensive introduction that tries to pull these essays together by focusing on the book's thesis that Western films form and mirror the issues of their eras. They survey the major scholarly works that have shaped the critical discussion of Westerns over the last fifty years (Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land, John Cawelti's Six Gun Mystique, John Lenihan's Showdown, Patricia Nelson Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest and Something in the Soil; and Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation). This concise discussion is flawed by an unnecessary swipe at Slotkin's work, calling it a "wrongheaded" book and using an anonymous quote from an "informal reviewer" on Amazon.com to support the point. The discussion in Part Four would have been much better had it included films that were released at or past the cutoff date of 2000, since several significant Westerns such as All the Pretty Horses (2000), The Missing (2003), Open Range (2003), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), and the HBO series Deadwood have appeared in the last few years to confirm the editors' thesis. Although the filmography and bibliography are helpful and have been a necessary part of books on film over the years, the current availability of information on films through such online resources as the International Movie Database (imdb.com) makes a filmography less necessary.

Still, the book makes a useful addition to studies of Western film, especially to readers and scholars interested in the relationship between history and film. The forty black-and-white illustrations complement the essays well.