Cinema and Society
2 total works
This text employs the Western as a vital medium for examining the many tensions - political, racial, sexual, social and religious - which have beset modern America from "Stagecoach" and the Depression's last years to the decline of the genre in the 1970s. The book focuses on a group of great Westerns, showing how they engaged covertly with such issues as miscegenation, labour-management relations, generational discord, codes of masculinity, the Cold War, McCarthyism, Vietnam, increasing individual social alienation, and explains why a celebratory genre veered, during a generation of unprecedented power and prosperity, from sagas of national achievement to bleak, virtually asocial visions of life in the United States.
"My distinguishing talent", David Lean once observed, " is an ability to put people under the microscope, pehaps to go one or two layers farther down than other directors." This book attempts to do the same with the director's films. Coyne focuses on the films themselves, uncovering their themes, meanings and relation to other popular films and to Lean's life and times, as well as their place in world and cinema history.