Background
Michael Coyne was born on June 23, 1960 in Broxburn, West Lothian, Scotland, into the family of Michael Joseph and Elizabeth Mary (Gilhooly) Coyne.
Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YW, United Kingdom
Michael Coyne earned a Master in History at Lancaster University in 1994.
Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, United Kingdom
Michael Coyne received a Master of Arts in History (honorary) at the University of Edinburgh in 1982.
(This fresh, stimulating book employs the Western as a vit...)
This fresh, stimulating book employs the Western as a vital medium for examining the many tensions-political, racial, sexual, social and religious-which have beset modern America from "Stagecoach" and the Depression's last years to the decline of the genre in the 1970s.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1860642594/?tag=2022091-20
1996
Michael Coyne was born on June 23, 1960 in Broxburn, West Lothian, Scotland, into the family of Michael Joseph and Elizabeth Mary (Gilhooly) Coyne.
Michael Coyne received a Master of Arts in History (honorary) at the University of Edinburgh in 1982. Then he earned a Master in History at Lancaster University in 1994.
From his vantage point as a British historian interested in American culture, Michael Coyne authored the well-received 1996 book "The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western", a study of how Western movies have reflected, and to some degree influenced, American culture and values since The Great Train Robbery opened up the genre in 1903.
According to Coyne’s hypothesis, the Western film genre has run, and nearly completed, a life-course paralleling that of a human being: early maturity reached in 1939’s "Stagecoach" (John Ford’s classic, which made a star of John Wayne); sexual maturity in 1946’s "Duel in the Sun"; middle age in such 1950s movies as "High Noon" and "The Gunfighter"; midlife crisis in Sam Peckinpah’s early-1960s film "Ride the High Country"; and old age in Peckinpah’s late-1960s film "The Wild Bunch", and in John Wayne’s 1976 film "The Shootist."
Coyne discerns Cold War themes in westerns of the late 1940s and 1950s, including "High Noon", "The Big Country", and "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon." He also makes idiosyncratic observations, such as that Paul Newman has made a more impressive contribution to the genre than Clint Eastwood. Reviewer Philip French, in the Spectator, observed that although “the death knell for the Western has been rung at frequent intervals since the 1940s... nothing has become it like its death.” As for the skill with which Coyne approached his subject, French commented that the historian “brings together a formidable knowledge of the cinema with a shrewd grasp of American affairs.”
(This fresh, stimulating book employs the Western as a vit...)
1996Quotes from others about the person
Coyne is a witty and incisive writer, and makes some striking points.