As far back as 1954, critic Robert Warshow went on record to say : "The two most successful creations of American cinema are the gangster and the Westerner : men with guns.;' When a few actual robberies of the late 1960s seemed to have been modeled closely on those in Bonnie and Clyde, that question was raised once again to how seriously screen violence could affect public behavior.
Subsequent studies of mass responses to violence, most of which have concentrated on TV have suggested that a great deal depends on the extent in which audiences identify with a violent character, whether a gangster or a particularly common trend to movies from the sixties onward a law enforcer, In the Sixties, for the very first time, film audiences were exposed to extremely attractive heroes whose status was bound up with a special ability to kill people, such as the spaghetti western hero The Man With No Name and James Bond, ' licensed to kill.'
 |
| Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand? |
As the decade progressed, so its political mood became darker with Western society increasingly split into factions and pressure groups, often violently opposed. The Establishment's opposition to the younger generation and vice versa was manifested by the violence that was inherent in such successes as Wild in the Streets and If... (both 1968), Easy Rider and Joe (1970). With violence increasingly accepted as a fact of everyday life, films like In Cold Blood, Targets (both 1967) belatedly attempted to discover the motivations behind particularly nasty mass murders. But whether its causes were psychological or socio-political there was no such denying that violence was candy for the big, bad box office