(rough notes on oaters, watched when tired and in need of semi-brainless distraction while re-decorating my flat, and written up at speed without checking except dates and such in hardy on cowboys…)
And “decline” perhaps not so much, this time: as it’s four westerns from just three years, 1959-62, and what’s more interesting I think is the variation, at what afterwards proves to be the downslope of the highest peak — though of course no one quite knows this yet. Television has swallowed up the last of the serials, as well as the oater indies (=Republic Pictures): the qualities that came from mass unpoliced repro have vanished. Plus the Civil Rights Act is beginning to make racial Othering work quite unexpectedly, at least for a while. And for a half a generation, a significant proportion of young white men stop looking at the way older men are in their own families and thinking, “I want to be that”…