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ryanbrennan wrote:

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atenolol wrote:

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The Overlook Film Encyclopedia gave the top westerns by rentals adjusted for inflation. I think it gives an interesting overview (in millions)

1---Duel in the Sun (1946) (70)
2---Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) (58.4)
3---Blazing Saddles (1974) (49.2)
4---Shane (1953) (44)
5---How the West Was Won (1962) (42.7)
6---Unconquered (1947) (37.1)
7---The Outlaw (1943) (35.7)
8---The Covered Wagon (1923) (35)
9---Jeremiah Johnson (1972) (32.4)
10--The Alamo (1960) (31.6)
11--Red River (1948) (31.5)
12--Little Big Man (1970) (30)
13--True Grit (1969) (28.6)
14--California (1946) (27.3)
15--They Died with Their Boots On (25.5)
16--The Tall Men (1955) (25)
17--The Searchers (1956) (24.5)
18--The Virginian (1946) (23.4)
19--Cat Ballou (1965) (23.3)
20--Vera Cruz (1954) (23)

What I would notice that Spaghetti Westerns or their American siblings were not all that popular. For example, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly in 1966 registered 6.112 million, compared to 7.8 million for Shenandoah in 1965. The Outlaw Josey Wales is the highest rated Clint Eastwood movie, at #39, right behind Across the Wide Missouri, Bend of the River, The Iron Mistress, and Distant Drums, all from 1951 and 1952.

*My conclusion is that young filmmakers turned their backs on what had made the western a sturdy genre in the United States. Perhaps the Spaghetti Westerns were more popular abroad, but clearly they never were in the US, and adopting this style simply turned off more potential fans than it turned on.

**As can be seen above, John Ford was not as popular as a later generation would have guessed, with only 3 films (The Searchers, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) in the top 45 films.

First, let me say that as much as I like looking at box office figures (and recording them on a master list), I will be the first to admit that most reported numbers I've seen I take only as a general guide.  Unfortunately, who reports the figures, and where they get them, can cause wide variations in the numbers.  And dollars adjusted for inflation can be quite skewed as well.  For instance, I presume those Overlook numbers are from many years back as they have changed drastically.  Adjusted for inflation, BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID is now the champ at $552,468,000 adjusted.  This is from Box Office Mojo and to look at their top All-Time 200 list one would conclude that Westerns never were popular at all as there are only four listed (five if you count the Civil War and GONE WITH THE WIND).  The other three are:

BLAZING SADDLES -- $495,071,400.
DUEL IN THE SUN -- $399,489,800.
DANCES WITH WOLVES -- $342,165,500.

The film industry weathered a major sea change of audience taste in the 1960s.  Traditional film fare was on the wane.  Musicals survived in the form of bloated epics and then all but vanished.  The old happy endings didn't seem to reflect what was happening in the real world.  The times they were a'changing.  Westerns in general were already starting on their decline in popularity, the strong moral tone and sense of duty perhaps seen as old-fashioned or out of step with the times.  The Kennedy Assassination and Vietnam changed the outlook of a lot of people.  I believe that the reason Westerns have fallen by the wayside is because audiences have found less and less to identify with,  the stories and character behavior outdated and irrelevant, offering no insight into the present (a view I do not share).  One only has to look at the films that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s and thereafter to see what audiences considered of import. 

Since then only an occassional "A" Western has resonated with audiences on a blockbuster level.  So, numbers don't tell the entire story of Spaghetti Westerns in the U.S.    The Clint Eastwood trilogy, and the other two Westerns directed by Leone, were the big guns (pun intended) of the genre, for sure.  The "Man With No Name" trilogy played around these parts, individually and as double and triple bills, not to mention the "Spend the Night with Clint Eastwood" programs for drive-ins that included HANG 'EM HIGH, up through the late 1970s.  Box Office Mojo has FISTFUL at $14.5 million, MORE at $15 million, and GOOD at $29 million.  For what it's worth, another site adjusts for inflation giving us, respectively, $69.2 million, $83.5 million, and $180.5 million.

Other foreign Westerns didn't do as well but that doesn't mean they couldn't bring in some dough.  Given their lowly reputations based on their high violence quotient one wouldn't expect these films to have done as well as Hollywood "A" pictures but to have a box office draw commensurate with other films on the exploitation circuit.  It is true that they were more popular overseas where more than 400 of these Westerns were produced.  But in general we only saw the highest profile of these films, the ones with American stars.  I do remember the Tony Anthony "Stranger" series playing at first run downtown theaters here as well as some others.  Even lacking blockbuster box office, Spaghetti Westerns were good investments for American studios because they were largely pick up deals, the films already financed and produced by others, so the U.S. distributor invested little relative to a homegrown production.

Regardless of their popularity, it seems that they had their effect  on many future Westerns.  The biggest influence had to be in the tone of a film.  Not only were Westerns dirtier looking than every before but so was the language, the character, and their behavior, often crude in its depiction.  Graphic violence went up, committed against both men and women.  There was often just a mean spirited feel to some of these movies whether domestic or foreign.  Critics often cited these films as amoral if not immoral.  Many people found these movies downright unpleasant.  I've never heard anyone lay the death knell of the Western at the feet of the Spaghetti Westerns but I suppose in some corners a case could be built. 

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Your criticisms of this list are well taken and I should have explained where it was taken.  The list is from 1981, the RENTAL totals taken from Variety, and the fellow who did the study used the Govt inflation multiplier.  Don't know for certain, but would guess that the 14.5, 15, and 29 figures are GROSSES rather than rentals, which are usually two to three times higher.  Those bloated last group of figures must reflect 30 extra years of inflation.

There is no getting around though, if Variety is mainly accurate, films such as The Professionals (8. and Shenandoah (7. were more popular than The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (6.1) or For a Few Dollors More (4.4) or A Fistful of Dollars (4.3).  Hang 'em High was Clint's biggest sixties US success (6..  It was spaghetti influced, but sort of traditional in values.  Even an ordinary film like The Sons of Katie Elder (6.0) made a bigger box office splash than 3 of the 4 big Leone films. 

I also have a list of the 200 top ticket-selling movies of the 20th century.  This is probably the most accurate possible measurement.  See below

"look at their top All-Time top 200 list one would conclude that Westerns never were popular"

Yes and No-

Yes--In the list of top ticket selling films of the 20th century, these Westerns were listed:

1---Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (35)
2---Duel in the Sun (68)
3---Blazing Saddles (72)
4---How the West was Won (103)
5---Shane (128)
6---Dances with Wolves (153)
7---The Covered Wagon (157)
8---Old Yeller (161)

With also a number of fringe Westerns, depending on definition--Giant (71), Boom Town (113), The Gold Rush (158)--which I wouldn't include.  My take is that Westerns were rarely a blockbuster genre with the biggest grossers--epics, musicals, war films, disaster films, etc--produced the really big hits more often than Westerns.

No--but the Western was THE bread and butter genre from the beginnings of Hollywood up to the sixties.  Somewhere between 20% and 33% of all movies in any given year were Westerns (for example, 1935-145 Westerns of 525 films.  1940-143 Westerns of 477 films.  1950-130 Westerns of 393 films.  etc.

My guess is the Western was the favorite genre of small town America.  When that market shrank, with folks moving off farms, the Western receded as a genre.  The Spaghetti Westerns, aiming at nihilism and cynicism, were fishing where there weren't any fish.  I recall reading about Randolph Scott going to a double-feature in a rural town in Arizona.  They were showing a Buck Jones western doubled with a sophisticated comedy.  There was a big crowd.  They watched the Buck Jones movie and then many of them left before the comedy.  Scott drew the lesson that there was a whole different market out there, and he had a very successful career catering to that market despite acting limitations.