“Becoming Queen: Barbara Stanwyck’s Postwar Westerns,” The Oxford Handbook of American Cinema, Jon Lewis ed. Oxford University Press, 2025.
The Hollywood Western in the 1950s was overhauled in many ways, including the widescreen color aesthetics that helped the film genre persist despite the rise of TV Westerns. After the war, as the civil rights movement gained ground, a renewed relationship with Indigenous peoples and an ever-so-slight retraction of the myth of Manifest Destiny enabled the genre to entertain more complex narratives in which psychology, moral ambiguity, and social justice were increasingly prevalent. It could be argued that the postwar Western was a revisionist genre across the board, as it became more about the myth of the “Last Western” than about the settling of the West itself.
