Throughout this study I have attempted to describe through recourse to a small but significant number of Westerns some of the contexts within which the genre has engaged with the myth of the West. Clearly this study is not definitive, but it was never intended to be. Its intention has always been to scrutinise existing film scholarship on the Western and to highlight the complexities of some of the genre's most celebrated examples – even the most ostensibly triumphalist – and observe the complex of ways in which such films have interacted with contemporary culture, politics and historical perspectives. I have taken up the critical thread of those like Janet Walker, who have argued for a strong historiographic element in the Western. I have also sought to assess the interdependent relationship held between history and myth. Above all, I have sought to repudiate the widely held belief in a pattern of consistent development within the genre as it has been defined within terms of popular evolution theories that tend to categorise groups of film texts rather bluntly into classical, revisionist and post-Western phases.

Some of the ‘classical’ Westerns that I have discussed (and the many more that I have not) often come across as more complex than most of those that have followed, including the allegedly ‘revisionist’ exemplars, Unforgiven and Dances with Wolves; both of which are less complex than The Searchers.