Besides, more genres than Westerns show wear and tear. Some screwball comedy classics, so called, are unbearable today. To see Bringing Up Baby today is to choke on its archaic archness, despite Grant and Hepburn. When I watch Fred Astaire films on TV, which I do as often as possible, I press the Mute button between musical numbers. I just wish that more of them would at least flash bright.
Film is less so.
Many, myself included, have tried to understand that gap, unthinkable thirty years ago. It is still truly unexplained, but Thomson has helped by connecting the breach with the fact that many films are frozen in now-discarded beliefs. Perhaps, too, the young generations of the past century were spoiled because they lived in times when geniuses kept appearing, here and abroad, in a dazzling cascade. The fate of film in the future may depend on that old romantic hope, the arrival of genius. The future of past film, assuming that the physical objects themselves are preserved, seems to me not much more settled than the future of any art.