Comedy and the Dismantling of the Hollywood Western

Abstract

In the 1960s, the Western genre was systematically dismantled from within, not by the cynicism of the Italian Western cycle, nor by the revisionist politics of anti‐Westerns, but by the spate, indeed, the rash, of Western comedies, many of them directed by Hollywood Western veterans such as John Sturges ( Sergeants 3 , 1962; The Hallelujah Trail , 1965), Andrew McLaglen ( McLintock! , 1963; The Ballad of Josie , 1967), and Burt Kennedy ( The Rounders , 1965; The War Wagon , 1967; Support Your Local Sheriff , 1969). Hollywood's 1960s comedy Westerns are often protracted rituals of debasement in which Western characters, contexts, and stars agonizingly perform their schtick in a dollar‐store “studio” mise‐en‐scène that is constantly upstaged and rendered additionally tatty by stunningly photographed Western locations. In the 1960s comedy Westerns, it is as if the little moments played for humor in John Ford's films — the drunken antics of Sergeant Quincannon in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), the fistfight that postpones the wedding in The Searchers (1956), the Dodge City sequence in Cheyenne Autumn (1964) — have metastasized, threatening the maturity and integrity of the host genre.