Revisionist Western
The Revisionist Western, Anti-Western or Post-Western is a subgenre of the Western film that subverts the standard format or theme of the Western. The traditional Western generally follows a standard format, centered around a strong, male lead character, who through direct action, leads the forces of a civilized people against the uncivilized forces that stand in their way. Traditionally, this pitted the "good guys,” usually lawmen, against the "bad guys,” usually criminals or Native Americans. Revisionist westerns subverted this standard format in a number of ways, such as setting criminals as the protagonist, or presenting morally ambiguous storylines without clear heroes. They often featured antiheroes or sympathetic villains more than in earlier films, blurring the traditionally clear boundaries between "right" and "wrong". In general, these films sought to depict a world in which actions could not be strictly judged as righteous or evil, drawing narrative emphasis away from the struggle between "good" and "bad", and pointing it toward the simple struggle to survive. 

Some of the earliest revisionist Westerns came out in the 1950s in the milieu of McCarthyism and attempted to strike back against the blacklisting of the film industry of the time, notably "High Noon" (1952) starring Gary Cooper. By the time of the loosening, and later abolition, of the restrictive Hayes Code in the 1960s, many directors of the New Hollywood generation such as Sam Peckinpah, George Roy Hill, and Robert Altman took aim at the Western and each produced their own classics in the genre, including Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" (1969), Hill's "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969), and Altman's "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" (1971). Meanwhile, in Europe directors such as Sergio Leone had been making Western films unencumbered by American expectations nor Hayes-code inspired censorship, and these Spaghetti Westerns also provided a new perspective on the Western genre. The revisionist Western has been carried from its traditional setting into modern times, notably the Coen brothers' 2007 "No Country for Old Men", based on the work of Cormac McCarthy, an author known for writing revisionist western literature, such as the novel "Blood Meridian".
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Western
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Native American
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Spaghetti Western
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Cormac McCarthy
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Blood Meridian
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Revisionist Western
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2007-01-01T00:00:00Z^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime
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1969
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