This fresh, stimulating book employs the Western as a vital medium for examining the many tensions--political, racial, sexual, social and religious--which have beset modern America from ""Stagecoach"" and the Depression's last years to the decline of the genre in the 1970s. Michael Coyne focuses on a group of great Westerns, showing how they engaged covertly with such thorny issues as miscegenation, labor-management relations, generational discord, codes of masculinity, the Cold War, McCarthyism, Vietnam, and the increasing individual social alienation.

Fantasy and politics are familiar dancing partners that rarely separate, even in the face of post Election Day realities. But Hollywood has a tradition of punching holes in the fairy tales of electoral promises with films that meditate on what could have been and should have been. With Hollywood Goes to Washington, Michael Coyne investigates how the American political film unravels the labyrinthine entanglements of politics and the psyche of the American electorate in orderto reveal brutal truths about the state of our democracy.
From conspiracy dramas such as The...