Westerns – Part 4 – Demise

The western died out in the early 1980s following the monumental disaster of Heaven’s Gate (1980). Not only did it bring a film studio to its knees financially but it made other studios extremely wary of investing in the genre. The underlying reasons though are not so much about the financial profligacy of the film [...]

The Expansion of Violence

It is quite common now to see graphic violence in films. You can even watch it on prime time television in the UK – just sit through a few episodes of Rome. We are used to going to the cinema now and seeing buckets of blood and gore, limbs and heads being hacked or sawed [...]