The Western Real and Imagined

Arguing that Western movies have for more than a century “reflected American history and culture,” Richard Aquila’s ambitious new book, The Sagebrush Trail: Western Movies and Twentieth-Century America, surveys over a thousand films in 361 pages, resulting in an impressively panoramic view that too often settles into synoptic survey, neither particularly insightful nor even original. This is a pity because when he pauses to delve more substantially into a film or filmmaker, Aquila’s writ