Was 2007 really such a good year for the Western? Down at the Zeitgeist Corral, aka the November 11th issue of the New York Times Magazine, Daniel Day-Lewis gazes steely-eyed from the cover, above the headline (in modified Ponderosa font) “Hollywood Goes West.” Even a skeptic like the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman acknowledges the phenomenon, if only to dismiss it: “No matter what anyone says, the western is over; eight years of cowboy presidency notwithstanding, it will take a time machine to bring it back.” Hoberman means that the handful of 2007 films self-identifying as Westerns can’t embody the genre, only grapple with its implications as America’s preferred myth.

So I’ll rephrase: Was 2007 really such a good year for the revisionist Western? That is, have we actually learned anything about the genre than we didn’t know this time last year, with the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Sam Peckinpah series and with Robert Altman Memorial screenings of McCabe & Mrs. Miller fresh in the minds of NYC cinephiles?

Renaissance hack James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma has some claim to “classical” status, being a remake of a ’57 original about family values and Christian steadfastness. (And also by dint of its curiously underreported dash of vintage racism: among the many shoot-‘em-up set pieces with which Mangold augments the original is a sneak attack from a night-stalking band of Apaches. They “like killin’”, we’re told, and we have to take that on faith since the Apaches are speechless, undifferentiated blurs of feathers and facepaint, and that’s all we have time to notice before Russell Crowe’s Ben Wade affirms his manhood by slaughtering them.) The premise is as old as the frontier: a man, farmer and homesteader Dan Evans (Van Heflin then, Christian Bale now) proves his mettle by protecting his family from the threat of violence and sexual violation (in the person of the outlaw Wade) and remaining pure against the other side’s Mephistophelean overtures.