Acid Western - History of The Genre

History of The Genre

Rosenbaum used the term Acid Western to describe a "cherished counterculture dream" from the Sixties and Seventies "associated with people like Monte Hellman, Dennis Hopper, Jim McBride, and Rudy Wurlitzer, as well as movies like Greaser's Palace; Alex Cox tapped into something similar in the Eighties with Walker."

The Western pictures of Hollywood director William A. Wellman may have been an early influence on the genre. The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and Yellow Sky (1948) feature characters that are forced to step out of society and take a stand against it. Yellow Sky in particular set up many elements that director Monte Hellman picked up two decades later.

Monte Hellman's cult film, The Shooting (1966) could be considered the first Acid Western. The film stars Will Hutchins, Warren Oates and a young Jack Nicholson, and was anonymously financed by Roger Corman. The Shooting subverts the usual priorities of the Western to capture a sense of dread and uncertainty that characterized the counterculture of the late 1960s. Hellman quickly followed up with Ride in the Whirlwind (1966). Rudolph Wurlitzer is considered "the individual most responsible for exploring this genre, having practically invented it himself in the late 60s and then helped to nurture it in the scripts of others," such as McBride's Glen and Randa, Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, Cox's Walker, and Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Wurlitzer worked on the script of Gone Beaver, which Rosenbaum describes as "a visionary script" for Jim McBride. It was an extremely ambitious big-budget Western about early American trappers and Indians, for which a virtually invented language of “trapper talk” was devised. The film was aborted one day before production. Wurlitzer's unproduced 70s screenplay Zebulon inspired Jarmusch's Dead Man. Wurlitzer later transformed his script into the novel The Drop Edge of Yonder.

Early 1970s films such as Robert Downey Sr.'s Greaser's Palace, George Englund's Zachariah, and Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (The Mole) blend religious allegory, John Fordian Americana, Thomas Pynchonesque satire, and counter-cultural fantasy. Luc Moullet directed A Girl is a Gun (Une Aventure de Billy le Kid) featuring French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud as Billy the Kid. The film swings wildly between slapstick insanity and delirious experimentation set in a bizarre, elemental wilderness. The acid western reached its zenith in the 1970s, depicting the Old West as an imaginary, post-apocalyptic wilderness populated by degenerate hippies and loners. Grim Viet-era acid Westerns include Robert Aldrich's Ulzana's Raid, Robert Benton's Bad Company, James Frawley's Kid Blue (starring Dennis Hopper), Stan Dragoti's Dirty Little Billy, Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand, and Sydney Pollack's Jeremiah Johnson.

Rosenbaum calls Dead Man a "much-delayed fulfillment" of the Acid Western, "formulating a chilling, savage frontier poetry to justify its hallucinated agenda."