Golden Age of the Western

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The Golden Age of the Western was an era of the Western movie usually identified as starting in the 1930s through the 1950s, though some date it to the 1970s.

Monument Valley, Arizona, a common setting during the Golden Age of Westerns

One early classic of the genre was John Ford's Stagecoach (1939), the first film which he shot in Monument Valley in southern Utah and which lifted the Western from bad B-features to true art, as complex, tense, psychological dramas.

Also after World War II, some of both actors and directors had fought and seen the consequences of violence, and began to question the themes of "classic" Westerns.

Other classics are Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1968) and Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. All of High Noon (1952) and Leone's epic Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) explored terrain "old" Westerns had not, but ultimately with interesting variations and twists such as a marshall (with a Quaker wife (High Noon) who was reluctant to act and the use of an iconic actor, Henry Fonda, is the role of a villain (Once Upon a Time).