At the Criterion blog, Imogen Sara Smith writes about Noir Westerns. “Westerns cover a lot of territory. Dramatizing the most romantic of American myths, they also give form to the darkest inversions of those myths. The genre that celebrated rugged pioneer values and civilization’s conquest of the wilderness always had its noir side, revealing the frontier’s promise of freedom and unlimited opportunity to be a mirage shimmering over bone-dry dust, on earth cracked by the heat of feverish dreams. From the start, the cinematic West was corrupted and enlivened by lawless towns, lynch mobs, range wars, and the frenzied greed of gold strikes; the cowboy hero was always a man whose self-reliance and integrity could shade into neurotic isolation and monomania. After World War II, westerns went down ever bleaker and stonier paths, finding in the vast, arid, craggy landscapes of the west a counterpart to the claustrophobic, labyrinthine spaces of urban film noir.”

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