The Lost 70s Westerns You Won't Find on Any Best-of List

The 1970s were not kind to the western. Studios that had built fortunes on Stetsons and stagecoaches watched their audiences drift toward science fiction, paranoia thrillers, and counterculture road movies, and a generation of New Hollywood directors took the genre apart on the way down. Some of them made the most quietly devastating westerns of the decade. Almost nobody saw them. This is a tour through thirteen forgotten westerns from the 1970s, films buried by bad timing, hostile critics, indifferent studios, or audiences that had simply moved on. The casts are remarkable. Hackman, Heston, Lancaster, Peter Fonda, Marvin, Coburn, Caan, Bridges, Jane Fonda, Keach, Dunaway, Hopper, Douglas, Dern. The directors include Robert Aldrich, Frank Perry, Robert Benton, and Alan J. Pakula. These were not B-movies. They were serious major-studio dramas that happened to land in the wrong week of the wrong year. We start in 1971 with a directorial debut so slow and beautiful that the studio gave up on it before the second reel, and close in 1978 with a Pakula-directed elegy shot in golden hour by Gordon Willis. In between are revisionist Tombstone retellings, a Vietnam allegory disguised as a cavalry picture, a Watergate-era political western, and a few of the strangest, sourest, most uncategorizable American films of the decade.