The article considers whether *The Undefeated*, John Wayne’s 1969 western with Rock Hudson, symbolised rather than caused the genre’s decline. It argues that the film arrived when traditional Hollywood westerns were losing their cultural force, as audiences increasingly favoured grittier, more revisionist takes on the American frontier.

Wayne plays a former Union colonel who joins forces with Hudson’s defeated Confederate officer after the Civil War, in a conventional story of rivalry, reconciliation and cattle-driving. Released in the same year as Sam Peckinpah’s far more violent *The Wild Bunch*, it reflected an older style of western whose values and formulae were beginning to seem outdated; the article suggests this contrast exposed how much the genre had changed.