Padraig said:
I'd better not venture into D.W. Griffith territory ...
I don't see why you would, when birth of a nation isn't a western but a "historical" drama. (And a deeply flawed and incredibly racist film). Griffith might be worth his own thread, if this weren't the only feature of his i've seen.
Anyway, my girlfriend always takes me to see art films from central&eastern europe, so a couple of weeks ago I took her to see a matinee of Ride the High Country. It's a Sam Peckinpah film, one of his first that was critically well recieved.
I love the way westerns come from a time when studios made so many films there was space for simple cheap b-movies. In that environment you can produce interesting ideas without much fanfare or expectation... diamonds in the rough so to speak
Ride the High Country is full of the things that make American film great. A simple moral tale with good guys and bad guys. The highest thing you can be in this world is a tough guy with honour. The film is about a changing safer west, the men who had made it that way, and the end of their era.
It's also beautifully shot.
I find it interesting that when westerns grew up, they started dealing with more complex storys about change in the west, and ultimately the riddance of lawlessness. It's as if they were also documenting their own demise as popular film style. (Or at least the setting for the genre- the standard story formats of westerns do still arise regularly).