Book Review: Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood

Authors

• Joanna Hearne, University of Missouri-Columbia

Date of this Version

2006

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 26:1 (Winter 2006) Copyright © 2006 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Abstract

First published in 1969, Horizons West was one of the early structuralist treatments of a Hollywood genre and a pivotal text in American writing on the Western. Borrowing from anthropological studies of myth, Kitses outlined a series of binary oppositions between the individual and the community, nature and culture, the West and the East, and wedded this thematic outline to a stylistic exploration of three directors: Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, and Sam Peckinpah. The book signaled serious academic consideration of Westerns not only as a legitimate art form but also as a complex and meaningful expression of American cultural history. Other studies followed - by authors such as Will Wright, John Cawelti, and Richard Slotkin - and criticism based on plots and themes in the films dominated scholarly conversations about Westerns for decades.