Let us not pretend most of those 30s-40s-50s Westerns were exactly the zenith of filmmaking achievement. Gene Autry made a total of 93 movies over two decades, an average of five per year and yeah, they were pretty much all exactly the same. Singing cowboy teams up with Smiley Burnett and a pretty girl to save the world from outlaws/corrupt sheriffs/greedy oil and mining companies. Not that it mattered to his main target audience (ie. 10 yo males).
I mean, people like to romanticize that era as the golden age of Hollywood, but the Gone With The Winds and the Citizen Kanes were far more the exception than the norm and they didn’t even make that much box office money at the time.
GWTW was the highest grosser of all time.
I had such a crush on Gene Autry when I was 6 years old.