The Western on screen: from John Wayne to No Country for Old Men

For more than a century, the Western has been Hollywood's most enduring myth-machine, a dream factory for lone riders, frontier justice, and the violent taming of an imagined wilderness. From the silent era's two-reel oaters to the brooding, sun-bleached nihilism of the Coen brothers, the genre has absorbed America's shifting anxieties about empire, race, masculinity, and land. Yet the story of the saddlebag saga is also one of reinvention, exhaustion, and unexpected revival, a tale told as much through box-office receipts as through six-shooter smoke.

In Australia, where the bush has its own mythology and cattle stations stretch further than many American ranches, audiences have long had a peculiar relationship with frontier tales. Local viewers grew up watching Errol Flynn ride off into sunset-coloured horizons, and they returned the favour by lending their own sunburnt landscapes to Hollywood productions. The genre's trajectory, from golden-age icons to modern gloom, plays out just as vividly in Melbourne's ACMI retrospectives as it does in Texas picture palaces.

The birth of the frontier myth

The Western emerged from the same cultural soil that produced Buffalo Bill's travelling shows and dime novels in the late nineteenth century. Edwin S. Porter's 1903 short The Great Train Robbery is widely treated as the genre's founding gesture, an eight-minute burst of hold-ups, gunfire, and pointed-camera menace that taught audiences what a Western felt like. Throughout the silent period, names such as Broncho Billy Anderson and William S. Hart turned the cowboy into a recognisable moral archetype, a stoic drifter whose moral compass was as reliable as his trigger hand.

By the 1930s, the Western had acquired a recognisable grammar of dusty towns, sheriff's badges, and climactic shoot-outs in empty streets. Yet these early films were rarely considered prestige fare. They were cheap programmers, churned out for Saturday matinees, and their mythic America was often filmed closer to Pioneertown in the California desert than to any genuine frontier town. Australian exhibitors picked them up cheaply and ran them as filler alongside imported comedies and newsreels, helping to seed a taste that would only grow.

Golden age: John Wayne and the studio system

The genre's transformation into a national scripture is usually dated to 1939, when John Ford's Stagecoach thundered into cinemas and pulled the Western out of its doldrums. The film turned Monument Valley into sacred geography, established the framing shot that would define the genre, and lifted its star, a blue-eyed former college footballer called Marion Morrison, into the role for which history would remember him. As John Wayne, he would spend the next four decades embodying an uncomplicated vision of frontier virtue, the laconic hero who spoke slowly, drew quickly, and walked away from women as routinely as he walked toward gunfights.

Wayne's reign coincided with the studio system at its most efficient. During the 1940s and 1950s, the major Hollywood lots released dozens of horse operas a year, many of them shot back-to-back on the same studio ranches in places like Iverson and Apacheland. Westerns were dependable, ideologically tidy, and exportable. In Australian theatres, they slotted neatly into Saturday double features, and the genre's stiff moral posture suited a country whose own outback romance often leaned on similar pieties about bushmen, battlers, and the man-alone. Drive-in operators in suburban Sydney and country Victoria relied on Westerns as reliable mid-week draws.

Spaghetti shoots and global reinvention

The Western's first great crisis arrived when a handful of European filmmakers decided to dismantle its iconography rather than inherit it. Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy, filmed largely in the Tabernas Desert of southern Spain and scored by Ennio Morricone's laments of whistle, trumpet, and electric guitar, treated the American myth as something to be desecrated and remade. Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name was everything Wayne was not, an amoral drifter who ambushed the very conventions that had supported the genre's older heroes.

The so-called Spaghetti Western arrived in Australian cinemas during the late 1960s, distributed through local roadshow circuits that brought continental films to suburban picture palaces. Australian audiences, already attuned to stories about outsiders in harsh landscapes, responded strongly. Leone's films also encouraged a local appetite for revisionist takes, planting seeds that would eventually flower in productions like The Proposition (2005), where Nick Cave's screenplay dragged the frontier myth into the dust of the actual Australian outback and refused to let it ride off clean.

The darkening of the saddle

By the 1970s, the moral confidence that had powered the classical Western had rotted from the inside. The Vietnam War, civil rights struggles, and Watergate had stripped the genre's Manichean simplicities of their credibility. Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) opened with a children's party and ended in slow-motion carnage, suggesting that the heroic violence of the older Western had always been closer to slaughter than to justice. Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) replaced the sunlit frontier with rain, mud, and the quiet despair of two failures trying to build something warm in an indifferent town.

In Australia, where television had begun siphoning away cinema audiences and drive-ins in places like Brisbane's still-operating Yatala were showing their age, these darker films found a receptive mood. Local critics writing for publications such as Cinema Papers began to argue that the Western's decline was really a maturation, a chance for a tired form to grow up and face its own history. The heroes of the 1950s, with their clean codes and clean chaps, looked increasingly like relics of a vanished national mood. Audiences who once cheered uncomplicated victories began to sit with the uncomfortable silences of films that refused to wrap up neatly.

Revisionists and the long reckoning

The next wave took the genre's self-examination further. Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves (1990) tried to recover sympathy for the Lakota, only to provoke arguments about who had the right to tell whose story. Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992), decades after his Italian adventures, dismantled the mythology of the fast gun with the rigour of a man dismantling a false legend he had helped build. Then came No Country for Old Men (2007), the Coen brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy, in which the Western's most famous tropes, the sheriff, the outlaw, the showdown, the inheritance of land, collided with a modern, almost suburban dread.

Tommy Lee Jones's sheriff, watching a world he no longer recognises drift past his porch, became an unlikely emblem of the entire genre, standing in for an older moral America that the film insisted had quietly disappeared. Australian reviewers read the picture as an elegy for older rural communities too, drawing obvious parallels to the slow fading of country pubs and single-screen picture shows across regional towns, where an inherited order of dance halls, footy clubs, and Saturday matinees seemed to be slipping out of reach at roughly the same speed.

The neo-Western turn

Rather than dying, the Western mutated into shapes suited to a different century. Contemporary neo-Westerns such as Hell or High Water, Wind River, and Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone cycle have transplanted the genre's concerns, land, blood, inheritance, the collision between old ways and new economies, into strip-mall parking lots, reservation roads, and drilling rigs. Television has extended the saga across hour-long episodes with series such as Godless and 1883, where the lone rider still rides, but now he texts his ex-wife from a stolen pickup and worries about prescription costs.

Australian streaming platforms have quietly stocked this revival, and viewers who grew up watching Wayne and Eastwood on free-to-air television are now discovering the genre's latest phase on services like Stan and Binge. Cinemas in the capital cities, including heritage picture houses such as Sydney's Hayden Orpheum in Cremorne and Melbourne's ACMI, continue to programme Western retrospectives, suggesting that the genre still commands a curious and loyal audience even when its commercial heyday is well past.

Australian frontiers: local takes on a foreign myth

Australian cinema has its own, smaller Western tradition, often called the bushranger film. From the silent era's exploits of Captain Starlight to the bushranging legends of Ned Kelly, the local frontier myth has always run roughly parallel to the American one, with its own swagmen, troopers, and ambushed coaches. Films such as Peter Weir's Ned Kelly (1973), starring Mick Jagger, and Gregor Jordan's Ned Kelly (2003), with Heath Ledger, sit comfortably alongside American Westerns in any honest survey of the genre.

Quigley Down Under (1990), shot in the Breakaways and Coober Pedy regions of South Australia, remains perhaps the most honest attempt to merge the two mythologies, casting Tom Selleck's American sharpshooter into the heart of the colonial outback. The film flopped in the United States but became something of a cult favourite at Australian screenings, where audiences appreciated its odd hybrid charms. Today, a renewed interest in locally produced frontier stories, including Indigenous-led productions that recast the Western from the perspective of those on the receiving end of settlement, suggests the genre's Australian chapter is far from finished.

Essential viewing for the curious saddle