What amazes me about viewing these old westerns on Encore Westerns is how they hold my attention. Yes, yes, yes, there is much sameness in locales, plots, sidekickery, etc. Yet, there is a quality of freshness (more on this later on).
Many of these films fall into the "B Westerns" genre. In my ignorance, I always thought "B" referred to inferior quality. It just might, but that is not where the name came from.
"B" movies came from the days of the Great Depression. Funds were tight, and people were not spending any discretionary funds on movies as they had when money was plentiful. The moguls of the film industry hit upon giving the movie viewer more "bang for their buck." Ah, the endless blessings of capitalism.
Along with the "A" film, i.e., the feature film, they began running a less expensive and shorter "B" film for the same ticket price. Westerns dominated the "B" film genre.
As for quality, they were very variable, depending on the quality of scripts, quality of actors, and the quality of directors. Looking back now, what is seen is not how bad they were, but how good they were. I have had to bail out of just one so far because of poor quality.
Theaters were owned in the main by the studios, so the studios could insist that theatres take their "B" features, and that kept the genre very much alive until after WWII. Here came that King Killjoy, the Supreme Court, enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, busting up the studio-theater monopolies. [Maybe we'll get into why the anti-trust laws have always been evil one of these days].
This was a big kick in the wallets of the studios, and it spelled the beginning of the end of the "B Westerns." That wasn't all, of course. Probably these films had run their course, like we see these days with television series (Seinfeld, MASH, Frasier, etc.). A third factor guaranteed their demise, and that was television.
Nevertheless, the so-called "greatest generation" and their progeny grew up on "B Westerns," and that was highly significant, as we shall get into soon. The cross-over years were 1950-1955 when the "B Westerns" vanished. What replaced them reflected colossal change in the dominant cultural ideas of America. The "Western noir" movie appeared, with anti-heroes, anti-values, and nihilism. The Baby-Boomer generation grew up on these.
To be continued...
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