Scholarly books about the Western film seem to thrive as much as the film genre itself. As Lee Clark Mitchell (English, Princeton Univ.) observes in his introduction, “The question that keeps reemerging ... is why this narrowly based vehicle—with among the most limited historical setting of any familiar genre—should continue to win over audiences more than a century after the lone cowboy had faded from view.” Mitchell’s response to this question is delineated in seven insightful chapters that closely analyze nine “late Westerns,” two-thirds of them produced since 2005. Explicitly rejecting the notion Neil Campbell expresses in Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West (Choice, May 2014)—that recent Western films are transforming the generic conventions of their antecedents—Mitchell argues that the Western film genre has remained largely intact, even as it “continues to reinvent itself, sometimes through idiosyncratic scenes, or odd characterizations, or unusual formal dimensions." In prose that never becomes pedantic, Mitchell explores the central themes, narrative structures, protagonists, and even cinematographic features of some of the most significant “late Westerns,” explicating the inherent pleasures of their generic practices.
