From The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: The Western, edited by Phil Hardy, The Overlook Press, 1991, 1995, 322-355. This chapter is "The Western in Transition," and seems to follow the criticism that the genre was in decline by including only 170 films vs. the over 400 each for the 1930s, '40s, and '50s chapters, and another 170 1970s Westerns relegated to the appendix, all while pushing back against critics who saw self-concious Westerns as pretentious, but which Hardy describes as a "late flowering." Hollywood assimilated ideas (and violence) from Italian Westerns and focused on rigors of frontier life. Some contemporary Westerns romanticized imitation cowboys, while other showed them reduced to advertising symbols. Westerns emerged from blaxploitation, while others focused on indigenous people, and wilderness films tried to attract the shrinking family audience. Hardy considers The Shootist the most resonant, while Blazing Saddles was the most commercially successful Western to date.
