TODAY we say the world has changed; we have evidence that all sorts of things have changed, and movies especially have changed. But there is little to learn from such statements. Any real usefulness of such statements exits more in seeing HOW changes occurred, HOW values in movies have changed, and that means seeing ‘old’ films with a fresh eye. Hudson’s films merit such evaluation because of the serious voice of man’s best values they are. Hudson’s unique Westerns
The first point which separates Hudson’s Westerns (and a good many other Westerns) from the routine bulk of repetitive, stereotyped, and predictable ‘cowboy’ films is the harsh social and character conflicts they deliver, explore, and resolve.
The second point, which supports the first, is that these adult Westerns were all made by some of Hollywood’s best directors, not simply generic ‘cowboy’ filmmakers. One such director was Raoul Walsh, whose films, Westerns or not, almost always released morally instructive adventures with brilliant structural and psychological logic.
Hudson’s first Western with Walsh was ‘THE LAWLESS BREED’ of 1952, then ‘GUN FURY’ of 1953. The latter is justly regarded as one of the most unique, advanced and deeply touching adult Westerns ever made, which I will deal with later in detail.
Another director Hudson was privileged to work with  was Budd Boeticher, in two Westerns: ‘HORIZON’S WEST’ of 1952,  co-starring Robert Ryan, one of Hollywood’s greatest character actors; and ‘SEMINOLE’ of 1953, co-starring Anthony Quinn, another of Hollywood’s best character actors.
Boeticher’s films, particularly the six Westerns he made with Randolph Scott, have gone down in film history as one of the best artistic examples of scene structure, colour, writing and timing in American cinema. Their terse, crisp compactness, precise duration and visual innuendoes made them unique and startling in the Western genre, to the extent that it is their influence which we see transplanted in the most accomplished modern French New-Wave film directors like Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Lelouch, Chabrol, and Melville.
The third outstanding director of Hudson’s Westerns is Douglas Sirk, a director he would do some of his best and most characteristic work under, but ‘TAZA, SON OF COCHISE’, Hudson’s lone Western made with Sirk, remains one of his most memorable and admirable, which defined his cinematic exploration of the best values of Man.

Walsh’s ‘Lawless Breed’
However, Hudson’s role in Walsh’s ‘The Lawless Breed’ brought him closer to a theme he would explore throughout his career: That of the individual everyone is, but whose inevitable social interactions affect, however small, the overall enjoyable or disturbed collective atmosphere of society.
Director Walsh’s noted consistent concern for persons who, as children or adults, lose their way in the world’s various infringing lawlessness and cruelties, produced exciting films where cause and effect are worked out both realistically and morally.
In ‘The Lawless Breed’, Hudson acts as the once real wayward gunfighter in the Wild West frontier, John Wesley Hardin, whose name became legend when, incarcerated for years, he began to study Law, and succeeded as an attorney upon release.
Walsh is not interested in Hardin’s macho real life so much as in using art’s cinematic structure to demonstrate a point he can get out of Hardin, played sensitively by Hudson, who, through flashback visual storytelling, instructs his young son on the various pitfalls of his reckless and lawless life.

The useful Western
This is the effective usefulness of most of Walsh’s films, and whatever  use  North Americans chose to make of them in those decades between 1952 and the mid 1970s, ‘The Lawless Breed’ was just one of countless Westerns shown repeatedly in British Guiana and Independent Guyana, especially for children of both sexes from the age of reason, which is seven, at 9am matinees on holiday mornings at all cinemas, where those of the proletarian, middle-class or upperclasses received equal visual and practical cause-and-effect moral instruction as individuals.