As director and screenwriter, Richard Brooks adapted two popular, postwar Western novels about destructive financial conditions at the closing of the American frontier: Milton Lott's The Last Hunt (1954) and Frank O’Rourke's A Mule for the Marquesa (1964). Both novels confront human greed and excessive violence as inherently American traits, as well as part of its Manifest Destiny to achieve territorial and economic conquest. Both novels reveal the necessity of men to adapt to menacing natural and commercial environments in the West. Both novels focus upon the technical skills of hunting, whether bringing down bison or bringing down men. Both the novels and Brooks's adapted films—The Last Hunt (1956) and The Professionals (1966)—involve the sexual kidnapping of a woman as the central metaphor for ruthless capitalistic conquest of the American West. At work in the novels and films can be found an economy of adaptation that plays out in unchecked overconsumption and systems of brutal exchange. Economics of adaptation for America includes not just man in the wilderness, but also the wild within mankind. Risk, whether bringing buffalo hides to market or returning for pay a wife to her capitalist husband, does not function by the simple gain–loss mechanics of equilibrium, but rather by irrational, unpredictable greed and fear. Ironically for Brooks, the film productions took on extreme risk–reward consequences of their own, whereby he discovered that blood-guilt of American Western history did pay off at the box office, and that a heist-like caper would proffer significant financial and artistic gains. In some respects, then, Brooks's relationship to the industry oddly mirrored the economic fixations in the novels.

Brooks wrote the adapted screenplays for both The Last Hunt and The Professionals. As with his other adaptations from the fifties and sixties, such as The Blackboard Jungle (1955), The Brothers Karamazov (1958), Elmer Gantry (1960), and Lord Jim (1965), Brooks did not shy away from controversial and iconoclastic subject matter. The Last Hunt and The Professionals represent Brooks's attempts to redirect the image of the West, to reinterpret the underlying values of the Western, to create new archetypes of Western masculinity, and to critique assumptions about economic progress in American Western history.