Even when based on actual events, classical Hollywood movies never strive for painstaking factual accuracy. This is best exemplified by the ever-present legal disclaimer “The characters and incidents portrayed and the names used in this work are fictitious, and any resemblance to the name, character and history of any real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental,” which appears not only in horror, sci-fi or musical extravaganzas, but also in biopics and historical reconstructions. In the latter two cases, the contradiction is only apparent. While using the above disclaimer (or variations thereof) to protect themselves from defamation lawsuits, the studios openly acknowledge what any person of common sense knows already: in the filmmaking business, dramatization and other poetic licenses are essential to tell and sell exciting stories to an audience, since reality is too boring and complex for an evening's entertainment. In other words, a commercial film is not a...
- 7/9/2015
- by Michael Guarneri
- MUBI
Where did the western go? The cowboys and gunslingers of yore passed the baton to cops and detectives, hitmen and astronauts
True Grit is going great guns at the American box office, making it the Coen brothers' highest-grossing movie ever. Some might see this as a sign that the western is making a comeback. But, honestly, I don't think it ever really went away.
Observers have been predicting the genre's demise for a hundred years; Edward Buscombe, in The BFI Companion to the western, quotes a trade reviewer who in 1911 dismissed it as "a gold mine that had been worked to the limit". But by 1953 westerns were making up more than a quarter of Hollywood's output, and much of television's, too; my generation was weaned on The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke and Rawhide.
In the 1960s, that figure went into a slump from which it never recovered, though there were still...
True Grit is going great guns at the American box office, making it the Coen brothers' highest-grossing movie ever. Some might see this as a sign that the western is making a comeback. But, honestly, I don't think it ever really went away.
Observers have been predicting the genre's demise for a hundred years; Edward Buscombe, in The BFI Companion to the western, quotes a trade reviewer who in 1911 dismissed it as "a gold mine that had been worked to the limit". But by 1953 westerns were making up more than a quarter of Hollywood's output, and much of television's, too; my generation was weaned on The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke and Rawhide.
In the 1960s, that figure went into a slump from which it never recovered, though there were still...
- 2/4/2011
- by Anne Billson
- The Guardian - Film News
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