Western Films: 1940-1949 - Page 11

In 1939, while John Ford's Stagecoach was a critically respectable Western, Henry King's Jesse James was the most influential, leading to numerous outlaw biopics, which, along with World War II, inspired epic Westerns as well. B Westerns like Cowboy Commandos showed direct conflict with Nazis. This list is derived from The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: The Western. edited by Phil Hardy. Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 1995. Hardy notes that most of the B Westerns were little different from those of the 1930s, although Roy Rogers films became more violent than they had been previously. William Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident questioned the glamorization of the outlaw as well as the means of taming the frontier. Noir influenced such Westerns as Raoul Walsh's Pursued. Hardy tells us that even Howard Hawks's Red River had a much darker tone than Cecil B. De Mille's Union Pacific. For Hardy, the genre was in "an uncharactersitc mood of introspection" as the 1950s loomed and as TV embraced it.

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