The crowded prairie

by Coyne, Michael film historian

The Crowded Prairie examines the interaction of the Hollywood Western with diverse strands of US society, culture and ideology from the end of the Depression to the Bicentennial in 1976. In these years the Western became a vital medium for exploring many tensions which beset modern America, engaging covertly with such thorny issues as intervention in World War II, miscegenation, generational discord, ethnic ascendancy, McCarthyism, Civil Rights, Vietnam, Watergate and, above all, the individual's ever-increasing alienation from the changing values of American society. With force and fluency, Michael Coyne focuses on a group of Westerns chosen according to commercial success and critical acclaim, charting the Western's thematic transition from an agenda of patriotism and community involvement to fundamental distrust of America's power structure and personal disaffection.