The glamour of grime: revisionist westerns of the 1970s

In 1967, the unexpected worldwide success of Bonnie and Clyde blindsided the Hollywood film industry, which then spent the next half decade attempting to adapt to the changing tastes of the new youth audience it had apparently captured. No matter that the picture took a pair of vicious, sociopathic thrill-killers who in real life were about as appealing as the Manson family and reinvented them as glamorous Robin Hood figures, there was obviously money to be made, and the studios wanted a slice of it.

While Peter Biskind’s 1998 study of the late 1960s and 1970s Hollywood scene, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, covered a more disparate range of American films and subject matter, Peter Stanfield’s engaging and well-researched Dirty Real takes a specific look at a number of westerns and road movies that were often modern-day westerns in disguise.