Horizons West

Book excerpt: When first published in 1969, Horizons West was immediately recognised as the definitive critical account of the Western film and some of its key directors. This greatly expanded new edition is, like the original, written in a graceful, penetrating and absorbingly readable style. It provides definitive critical analysis of the six greatest film-makers of the Western genre: John Ford, Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood. And it offers illuminating accounts of such classic Westerns as The Searchers, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Once Upon a Time in the West, Shane and many more. Among the completely new material in this edition is Kitses's magisterial account of the work of the greatest of Western directors, John Ford. Kitses also assesses how the Western has been challenged by revisionist historical accounts of the West and the Western, and by movement such as feminism, postmodernism, multiculturalism and psychoanalysis. The product of a lifetime's labour and love, Horizons West is a landmark of scholarship and interpretation devoted to, what is for many, Hollywood's signature genre. It provides a compelling account of the powerful mythology of America's past as forged by Western films and the men who made them.