In 1967 film critic Pauline Kael, exasperated by a spate of recent Hollywood releases, proclaimed ‘the new western is a joke’. In El Dorado (Howard Hawks, 1966), the remake of Stagecoach (Gordon Douglas, 1966), The Way West (Andrew V. McLaglen, 1967), and The War Wagon (Burt Kennedy, 1967), Kael saw the agony of a Hollywood genre whose tired conventions and ageing stars had lost relevance in the social climate of the late 1960s: ‘The code of the old western heroes probably wouldn't have much to say to audiences today.’ At the time, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement and anti-war protests were challenging the ideology of narratives that celebrate a violent Anglo-Saxon masculinity and register the weakness, irrelevance and often destruction of women and characters of other ethnicities. The standardised studio production that favoured genres was also coming to an end, and television had superannuated the production of ‘B’ westerns and serials. Statistics bear out Kael's assertion. In 1958 the Hollywood studios released westerns at a rate of more than one per week, but by 1962 the rate would fall to only eleven for the entire year. A few years later Kael struck a more definitive elegiac note: ‘a few more westerns may straggle in, but the western is dead’.

Kael falls into a long line of critics who have been announcing the western's demise since the early 1910s, and with hindsight her obituary, too, seems premature. True, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980) flopped on an unprecedented scale, leading to devastating losses for United Artists and skittishness among producers towards the genre. However, in the following decade Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990) and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) each reaped multiple Oscars, in both cases including the best picture and best director awards. Subsequent releases include, among others, the auteurist turns Dead Man ( Jim Jarmusch, 1996) and No Country for Old Men (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2007), well-received remakes of 3:10 to Yuma ( James Mangold, 2007) and True Grit (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2010), vehicles for major stars like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007) and The Revenant (Alejandro Iñárritu, 2015), and revisions of the genre's representation of race, gender and sexuality in Posse (Mario Van Peebles, 1993), The Ballad of Little Jo (Maggie Greenwald Mansfield, 1993), Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2012), and The Power of the Dog ( Jane Campion, 2021).