western Films
Following the deaths of Peckinpah and Leone, the tradition of the film western has been maintained most consistently by Clint Eastwood, who as star and director has returned to the genre with some regularity. If Eastwood's first American westerns seemed like pale imitations of Leone, later works such as the gothic High Plains Drifter (1972) and the wistful The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) were admired by fans and some critics before widespread acknowledgement of Eastwood's contribution to the genre came with Unforgiven (1992), created in some sense as the "last western" insofar as it functions as both apology and elegy for the genre. Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves (1990) successfully revived the sympathetic Indian film: surprisingly, it and Unforgiven earned Oscars ® for best picture, the first for the genre since Cimmaron . Recent attempts at politically correct revision such as the African American Posse (1993) and pseudo-feminist Bad Girls (1994) have seeme...