Book description
Westerns is the classic account of the emergence, growth and
flowering of one of the most perennially popular film genres. When it
was first published thirty years ago it was welcomed by reviewers in
Europe and the United States as a major work. In this new edition,
fully revised and updated, with a new introduction, both movie buffs
and general readers have the opportunity to engage again with one of
the sharpest film critics of our time. The book focuses on the
political, historical and cultural forces that shaped the western,
dealing especially with the thirty years after World War II. It
considers the treatment of Indians and Blacks, women and children, the
role of violence, landscape and pokerplaying, and it advances the
theory that most westerns of those years fit into four principal
categories that reflect the styles and ideologies of four leading
politicians of the era: John F. Kennedy, Barry Goldwater, Lyndon
Johnson and William Buckley.
Philip French was born in Liverpool in 1933, and after service as an
officer with the Parachute Regiment in the Middle East he read law and
edited The Isis at Oxford before going on to study journalism at Indiana
University. For over 30 years he was a producer for BBC Radio,
specialising in programmes on the arts and American affairs. From the
early 1960s he has been a regular contributor to numerous magazines and
newspapers ranging from Sight & Sound to the TLS, and from the
Financial Times to The Observer, where he's written a weekly film column
since 1978. His books as author or editor include The Age of Austerity
(1963), The Movie Moguls (1969), Westerns (1973), Three Honest Men:
Edmund Wilson, F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling (1980), Malle on Malle
(1992), The Faber Book of Movie Verse (1993), Cult Movies (1999), and
Westerns and Westerns Revisited (2005). He served on the jury at the
1986 Cannes Film Festival, was a Booker Prize judge in 1988, was given a
life achievement award by the Critics Circle in 2003, received an
honorary doctorate from the University of Lancaster in 2006, became the
first critic to be made a Lifetime Honorary Member of BAFTA in 2008, and
in 2009 was named Critic of the Year in the National Press Awards.
