Saturdays with the Stars: When Cowboys Ruled Hollywood

For the past four years, every Saturday we have profiled a monthly star, someone who was part of a year-long theme for our series "Saturdays with the Stars."  Our first season was devoted to "the leading ladies of Classical Hollywood...That Oscar Forget" featuring leading ladies of the 1940's & 50's whom Oscar never nominated.  In our second season, we turned our gaze on famous Classical Hollywood sex symbols, actresses like Jean Harlow, Rita Hayworth, & Raquel Welch who despite fascinating careers, frequently were reduced to their cup size.  In our third season, we looked at the leading ladies who made Alfred Hitchcock the legend that he is, and this past year, we've been taking a look at the actors who made their fame in the early days of television.

As I looked ahead to a fifth season, I honestly wasn't sure what I'd have in terms of ideas, and it took me a lot longer than I normally had to make a decision about what to do.  These series are a lot of work, and increasingly hard to find twelve stars that can come together in a way that would make narrative sense for a full year-long season (and who had made enough movies I was interested in seeing).  But I decided a few months ago that I wanted to do at least one more year, and I came across an idea for a series I've toyed with in some capacity for a while, but hadn't quite found the venue.  This year, we are going to focus once again on Classical Hollywood, but with it the stars that made their name dominating one of the quintessential genres of the era: the western.

While we still have westerns today, by-and-large the western has gone out of fashion as a genre that Hollywood relies upon, only occasionally (like last year's Power of the Dog) using it for storytelling.  But from the early 1930's all the way to the 1970's, the western was a mainstay for American filmgoers.  If you went to the movies, you went to westerns.  And with that, we got a certain brand of star, some of which became wholly synonymous with the genre, while others it made up just a considerable part of their legend.

In a similar fashion to our past four seasons, we will pick 12 stars that we have never profiled for any past month, and we will look at their collective careers through films that I have never seen before.  Unlike past seasons, though, we will focus predominantly on westerns that they made to tell this story. While each month will (for the most part) feature at least a couple of titles from these stars that are not westerns, every month will feature 2+ films from the genre, and all twelve of these stars are going to be figures that we largely associate for their work in this genre.  

Using these rules means two things.  For starters, I've seen a lot of westerns, and while I'm missing some classics (which we'll get to), films like The Searchers, Shane, Once Upon a Time in the West, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Red River, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, all movies I love, will not be profiled because I've seen them before.  Secondly, for the first time our series will focus almost exclusively on the careers of men.  While I made room for one female star from the genre, if you look at the era we're going to explore (from the early 1930's through to the mid-1970's, the Golden Age of the westerns), recurring female leads were not common in westerns, and so we will have our first-ever majority male season of the series.  We'll be finishing up Season 4 with Barbara Stanwyck in the coming weeks (proving I didn't pick this topic idea until well into 2022, one of the few leading ladies of her era to star in multiple westerns & therefore someone I otherwise could've picked), and then come January, we'll be heading out on a cattle call for a year of horses, saloons, & last stands.