and westerns remained popular and prevalent throughout the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. But in the 1970s, the genre’s reign over multiplexes began to end. The Watergate scandal and the Vietnam ...

From 1903’s The Great Train Robbery—arguably the first American action movie—until the 1950s, Westerns accounted for anywhere between 20 and 40 percent of all American-made films.