Don’t Get What’s So Great About Westerns? Start Here

(NYTimes) ... Let’s start with wide-open spaces and a genre that has repeatedly been written off for dead: the western, which undoubtedly lives on in revisionist variations (“Unforgiven,” “Deadwood”) and the most enduring of all parodies, “Blazing Saddles.”

When people say they hate westerns, I always think they’re imagining something like “Bonanza” or a movie like “Shane.”
Without too much disrespect to “Shane,” the best westerns are rarely so clear-cut in their delineations of right and wrong. They deal in moral gray areas; they take place when society is still establishing basic laws and codes of honor. Continued