The glamour of grime: revisionist westerns of the 1970s

In 1967, the unexpected worldwide success of Bonnie and Clyde blindsided the Hollywood film industry, which then spent the next half decade attempting to adapt to the changing tastes of the new youth audience it had apparently captured. No matter that the picture took a pair of vicious, sociopathic thrill-killers who in real life were about as appealing as the Manson family and reinvented them as glamorous Robin Hood figures, there was obviously money to be made, and the studios wanted a slice of it.

While Peter Biskind’s 1998 study of the late 1960s and 1970s Hollywood scene, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, covered a more disparate range of American films and subject matter, Peter Stanfield’s engaging and well-researched Dirty Real takes a specific look at a number of westerns and road movies that were often modern-day westerns in disguise. This was a time in which relatively young, often inexperienced directors were given a budget by recently appointed studio moguls sometimes not much older themselves. However, as Stanfield points out, despite a smokescreen of street credibility, the usual recipients of such largesse were not little known blue-collar figures from the underground film scene, but privileged and well-connected insiders such as Peter Fonda, the son of Henry and brother of Jane:

For so many of the new generation of film- makers, Hollywood was already home. They hadn’t strayed from the family hearth to pursue their dreams; they had no need to be picked out by a passing director. It was their world to inherit; the trick they pulled off was to suggest they had gained it by hard-scrabble labour, from experience earned on the road, with sweat and dirt honestly come by.

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The dirt referred to here and in Stanfield’s title provides a core theme of the book, tracing the progress of films such as The Last Movie, Two-Lane Blacktop (both 1971), or Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) which sought to show a grittier reality than that found in the average John Wayne movie, the actors themselves often smeared with grime as proof of their authenticity.