Outlaw (Gunfighter) Film
A type of western that deals with the outlaw gunfighter and the mythology that surrounds these western archetypes. The action usually centers on the gun battles of western folklore and the gunslingers who were deadly with a six-shooter, as well as the effects of such battles on the participants. The gunfighter figures prominently in the western genre, from the very first western (Porter's The Great Train Robbery) to the era of Tom Mix and William S. Hart, to the westerns of early John Ford and Allan Dwan; the gun enforced the code of the West in these oaters. Usually the gunfighters were villains, dressed in black and taking advantage of their gift with a gun to bully and terrorize people. In the '50s and '60s, as filmmakers like Henry King, Budd Boetticher, and Anthony Mann began to re-examine the conventions of the genre, the gunfighter became humanized; and as the era of the revisionist westerns began to slowly take hold, movies like The Gunfighter, I Shot Jesse James, and The Left-Handed Gun shed new light on the neuroses and redemptions of the new breed of screen outlaws. The revisionist look at westerns continued well into the '70s, but the Spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone helped to lionize the gunfighter once again in the late 1960's with his man-with-no-name vehicles starring Clint Eastwood (The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, A Fistful Of Dollars). Eastwood exploited his super-gunfighter persona for years afterward (The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider) before finally helming the revisionist western Unforgiven, a deconstructionist swan song of the gunfighter myth and possibly the last great western of the 20th century.
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