Something was happening to the western in the 1960s and ’70s. The old screen heroes were ageing out and so were their moralities. The Shootist (1976) saw John Wayne confronting his age and mortality, while Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and Peckinpah’s Pat Garett and Billy the Kid (1973) cast the western’s classical heroism into an elegiac doubt. This was what came to be known as the revisionist western, a wave of westerns demythologizing, mourning, and critiquing John Ford’s west of good guys in white, bad guys in black, cowboys and Indians. Meanwhile from out of Italy came the so-called, spaghetti westerns, notably those of Sergios Corbucci and Leone, themselves already a kind of cynical deconstruction of the traditional western which replaced morality with greed and heroism with brutality.
Show People (1928) to Quentin Tarantino’s elegiac
Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019) films about Hollywood, and by extension Los Angeles, have been there from the start of movies and continued in various guises throughout its multifarious history, often with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Throughout the sixties and early seventies several films were produced that spoke of the end of Hollywood as a creative enterprise, that is, as a field in which artists could examine their emotions and ideas and their response to the contemporary world – a civilization in crisis that they sought to describe or explore in depth from within. From Pier Paolo Pasolini’s