The demise of the Western?

I recently came across a discussion on the demise of the Western genre. Where did all the great Western novels and movies go?

But has there actually been a demise? For data, I turned to rottentomatoes.com, who have a list of the top 66 Western films, based on movie critic reviews. Their list is headed by The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), High Noon (1952), The Searchers (1956), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), True Grit (2010), The Wild Bunch (1969), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Unforgiven (1992), and Sweetgrass (2009).

This histogram shows an increasing number of Western films over time:

But this is not the full story. Being based on movie reviews, the list is biased toward recent films, plus some “greats” of the past. In the histogram, colour shows film rating, with dark colours indicating higher ratings. Many of the recent films are clearly mediocre. Plotting the top 20 films tells a clearer story – there are about 2 good Western films each decade (except for the 80’s), with a peak of 8 during the 60’s:

The 60’s peak contains 3 Sergio Leone films, being composed of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), The Wild Bunch (1969), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the original True Grit (1969), The Magnificent Seven (1960), and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Perhaps that was a golden age for the genre.

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