Last Roundup: Randolph Scott in Comanche Station

While it might have only been visible in hindsight, it's hard to deny that westerns in the '50s and '60s had an elegiac tone that grew slowly but implacably. It was there in Shane and The Searchers and suffused The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Wild Bunch. By the time Sergio Leone completed his reinvention of the western with the Dollars trilogy and made Once Upon a Time in the West it was the whole premise of the movie. Budd Boetticher made the six acknowledged westerns in his Ranown Cycle between 1956 and 1960 and by the time...