Yes. And Gene Hackman killed them.
Shane, The Searchers, Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Josey Wales......could go on forever...
I think it was Hollywood's PC mentality that largely did in the Western. Progressives feel negatively about American history and are largely disinclined to study the past. At the same time, the Baby Boom 60's ushered in an age of self-absorption glorifying the culture of groovy, cool, psychedelic hipness and rejecting all else as "square" at best, and evil at worst. That tendency toward inward-focus has only hardened with time while its practitioners seem to grow ever more unsatisfied, requiring progressively larger doses of weirdness to deliver the same rush of purposeful distraction.
Many Westerns were and are passion plays, meaning they dealt in moral judgment, with duels between good and evil, and timeless struggles between right and wrong. What helps make a Western great is the moral ambiguity experienced, and often suffered by its characters.
Clint Eastwood, one of the few people able to keep the genre that he helped shape as an actor alive as a director, has used this theme frequently, as in his film "Unforgiven".
But here are other hallmarks of Westerns - sweeping vistas, dramatic fight sequences, intense dialogue, explicit religious symbolism and moments of unexpected revelation - that have been taken up in recent years by films that are not Westerns: specifically I'm thinking of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, whose author imbued his stories and characters with many of the same timeless themes and qualities, respectively, as existed in classic Westerns by directors like John Ford and Sergio Leone.
A culture such as Hollywood's that eschews moral judgment and religious symbolism naturally turned away from the Western as a mode of artistic expression, but it remains a uniquely American art form and one whose revival would be welcomed by many of us grown weary of the state of our popular cinema.
OMG! You are so right. You must be referring to Unforgiven. Gene Hackman as a sherrifg ...yeah..LOL
That “revisionist” western was awful—Eastwood committed sacrilege by undermining the elements best westerns post 1960 - Leone’s spaghettis -
At least he used to kick ass in that green pancho...