Westerns

Aspects of a Movie Genre

Philip French

• Publisher: Carcanet Film
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781857547474
• eBook ISBN: 9781847778192
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The political, historical, and cultural forces that shaped the development of the Western film genre—especially the 30 years after World War II—are explored in this book. Addressing the treatment of Native Americans, African Americans, women, and children, the role of violence, the landscape, and poker playing, this cultural analysis advances the theory that most Westerns of those years can be put into four principal categories that reflect the styles and ideologies of the four leading politicians of that era: John F. Kennedy, Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson, and William F. Buckley. The argument further contends that this genre continues to be highly influential in reflecting the social and psychological currents in American life.

PART ONE

Westerns (1973; 1977)

(1973; 1977)

Introduction (1973)

This ruminative monograph is neither another defence of the western nor a further attack upon it. My aim, I suppose, is to share with the sympathetic reader some of the reflections on the genre that I’ve had after thirty-odd years of moviegoing. The brevity demanded by the format of the ‘Cinema One’ series, and my resolve to concentrate upon areas where I feel I have something moderately original to say, have resulted in some fields of possible inquiry being ignored.

My concern here is entirely with American theatrical westerns, mostly those made since 1950. The explanation for this decision is simple. First, I dislike TV horse operas (though a deal of what I say about screen westerns applies to them too). Westerns need a large screen and are best enjoyed in the company of a thoughtful and occasionally noisy audience. Secondly, I cannot abide European westerns, whether German, Italian or British, and I don’t much like American westerns filmed in Spain.1 Thirdly, while many of my favourite pictures were made before the coming of sound, I have never cared for silent westerns. Cowboy pictures need the pounding of hooves, the crack of Winchesters, the hiss of arrows, the stylised, laconic dialogue (which looks so terrible on paper, but is in fact the only consistently satisfactory period speech that the movies – or for that matter contemporary dramatic literature – have found), and the music, which if rightly used can give a picture the quality of a folk song. There are anyway several books – Fenin and Everson’s, Charles Ford’s, Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout’s – which trace the genre’s history from the turn of the century to the 1960s, and combine with it a quantity of frontier history (in the case of Rieupeyrout’s book, a great deal).

Partly through ignorance, partly through inclination, I do not belong to any particular school of criticism. Those versed in psychoanalysis could have, indeed have had, a field day with the western, but in considering the central significance of, say, gunplay, I am reminded of Freud’s comment that ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’. There is, I am sure, a consistent Marxist interpretation of the western, and I am aware that a good many structuralists currently find it fruitful to operate at a point where the apparatus of Lévi-Strauss and company of Paris impinges upon the apparel of Levi Strauss and Co. of San Francisco. Readers will find little reflection of this here, nor will they be regaled with a Leavisian Great Tradition of the horse opera. My approach is largely a social, aesthetic and moral one.

For reasons of space, because I am dealing with general tendencies and characteristics of the genre, and as there already exist numerous studies in French and English of single movies and the leading filmmakers’ oevres, there are no detailed discussions here of individual pictures and directors. Moreover, some indifferent films may seem to have been mentioned or given disproportionate attention when far superior ones are ignored or scarcely touched on. So to indicate where I stand, let me say that I think the best western ever made is the 1939 version of Stagecoach; that my favourite directors in the genre are John Ford (whose best movies perhaps are non-westerns) and Anthony Mann (none of whose works outside the genre is particularly distinguished); and that, to show the catholicity and orthodoxy of my taste, my favourite twenty postwar westerns (limiting myself to a single film per director) are, in chronological order: Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948), John Ford’s Wagonmaster (1950), Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), George Stevens’ Shane (1953), Robert Aldrich’s Vera Cruz (1954), Charles Haas’ Star in the Dust (1956), Samuel Fuller’s Run of the Arrow (1956), Delmer Daves’ 3.10 to Yuma (1957), Anthony Mann’s Man of the West (1958), John Sturges’ The Law and Jake Wade (1958), Arthur Penn’s The Left Handed Gun (1958), Budd Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome (1959), Don Siegel’s Flaming Star (1960), Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Sam Peckinpah’s Guns in the Afternoon (1962), Gordon Douglas’ Rio Conchos (1964), Henry Hathaway’s The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), Martin Ritt’s Hombre (1966), Robert Mulligan’s The Stalking Moon (1968) and William Fraker’s Monte Walsh (1970).

1 There’s a body of opinion which would argue that this disqualifies me as a true student of the genre. So be it. In fairness, therefore, I should direct the reader to the August 1970 double issue of Cinema (nos 6 and 7) which contains a concordance of the Italian western by Mike Wallington and a study of the Italian western by Chris Frayling. The July 1971 issue of Films and Filming has an article by David Austen on Continental westerns and a filmography of 155 of them, which to me reads like a brochure for a season in hell.

1 Politics, etc. and the Western

Hardly anyone alive can remember a time when there weren’t western movies. One of those who could was G.M. ‘Broncho Billy’ Anderson, star of Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery in 1903, and founder (with George Spoor) of Porter’s Essanay Company, pre-World War I specialists in cowboy pictures, and he died early in 1971 at the age of 88. Despite the temporary competition of gangster films, science fiction and spy movies, the western continues to thrive, the subject of abuse, sometimes justified, sometimes not, but increasingly a matter for serious critical attention, some of it useful, some of it exceedingly heavy-handed.

There are two things that every schoolboy knows about the genre. First, that the western is a commercial formula with rules as fixed and immutable as the Kabuki Theatre. Second, that the events depicted have little to do with the real nineteenth-century American frontier life, that the rituals are enacted in a timeless world where it is always high noon in some dusty cow town west of St. Louis. Rather like, in fact, the Never Land of Barrie’s Peter Pan, populated by children who refuse to grow up, fugitives from the urban nursery, marauding Indians and menacing bands of pirates.

Like most things that schoolboys so confidently know, neither of these simple contentions is wholly true, and there is general agreement that for better or worse the western has changed significantly since World War II, becoming more varied, complex and self-conscious. We now have little difficulty in identifying the reasons for this change. There was the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigation of Hollywood in the 40s and 50s, which caused the film industry to lose its nerve and look for safe subjects or a framework in which controversial issues could be handled in less obviously contentious fashion. There were the two generations that had passed since the official closing of the frontier by the US Census Bureau, two generations reared on cowboy pictures. Television gradually siphoned off the routine B-feature western, compelling the makers of movies for theatrical distribution to innovate. The introduction of wide screen formats in the early 1950s immediately benefited the western movies while initially posing problems for other subjects. The increasing availability of better, cheaper colour processes also favoured the western. Then there was the steady decline of censorship until, with the replacement of the Hollywood production code by a series of guidelines in 1968, it virtually ceased to exist. All these factors have played their part.

In 1946, C.A. Lejeune in The Observer took the producers of The Virginian to task for attempting a more sophisticated approach to the genre: ‘It is the greatest mistake to suppose that people want novelty in their cowboy pictures.’ By 1950, Dilys Powell in the Sunday Times was able to write, with mild disapproval, of The Gunfighter as being made ‘in the current intellectual, Western style’.

Of course there had been westerns before which had dealt in a serious, responsible and often fairly complex way with adult themes, tragic situations and important aspects of the frontier experience. These films were exceptional, however, and regarded as such, and very few of them can be viewed today without a good deal of indulgence. What I am talking about here is a major transformation which took place over a relatively short period, and which, in my view, revitalised the genre and opened up new possibilities which might be described as boundless were it not that one recognises certain inherent limitations in the form.

In retrospect we can see those post-war years, which gave us John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946) and his so-called cavalry trilogy (Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande), King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946) and Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948), as leading to the watershed year of 1950 when, in a mere four months, Hollywood released Delmer Daves’ first western, Broken Arrow, Anthony Mann’s first two cowboy movies, Devil’s Doorway and Winchester’73, Ford’s thoughtful Wagonmaster and Henry King’s The Gunfighter. One French critic has even referred to 1950 as being ‘a little like the 1789 of the genre’s history’. Shortly after, there came a stream of new-style westerns, including the two immediately acclaimed instant ‘classics’; Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and George Stevens’ Shane (1953), both by distinguished directors who were new to the genre and never returned to it.

In 1949 there was only a single important box-office star whose name was associated principally with the western and that was John Wayne, and only a single major director, John Ford, and he had only directed five westerns in the sound era, four of them starring Wayne. Up to the early 1950s there were separate industry polls for the ‘Top Ten Box Office Stars’ and the ‘Top Ten Western Stars’ (the latter reserved for low-budget performers), as if they were different sides of the business. All this was to change. Westerns began to attract the best acting talent, the most skilled writers and accomplished directors, not just for occasional forays but regularly and with decreasing condescension. Critical attitudes, however, did not change overnight. Individual westerns marked by a manifest seriousness or an obvious contempt for the routine were admired or attacked less on their merits than according to the critics’ view of what a western should be. Meanwhile, in the English-speaking world at least, the two most notable bodies of work from the 1950s – the westerns of Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher – went almost unnoticed, to be resurrected in the 1960s after Mann had turned his attention to epics and Boetticher had retired to Mexico to make a documentary about bullfighting.

The sense of unease in the presence of the western that still existed in the 1950s is well caught by Truman Capote in his New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando. Capote visited Brando in Kyoto, where he was filming Sayonara. Discussing his future the star observed:

Movies do have a great potential. You can say important things to a lot of people. I want to make pictures that explore the themes current in the world today. That’s why I’ve started my own independent company.

Capote asked about the company’s first picture, on the script of which Brando was then labouring.

And did A Burst of Vermilion satisfy him as a basis for the kind of lofty aims he proposed?

He mumbled something. Then he mumbled something else. Asked to speak more clearly, he said ‘It’s a Western.’

He was unable to restrain a smile, which expanded into laughter. He rolled on the floor and roared. ‘Christ, the only thing is, will I ever be able to look my friends in the face again.’ Sobering somewhat, he said, ‘Seriously, though, the first picture has to make money. Otherwise there won’t be another, I’m nearly broke…

A little later Brando returned to the subject.

‘But seriously though,’ said Brando, now excessively sober, ‘Burst isn’t just cowboys-and-Indians stuff. It’s about this Mexican boy – hatred and discrimination. What happens to a community when these things exist.’2

A Burst of Vermilion eventually reached the screen some five years later as One-Eyed Jacks, directed by Brando himself when Stanley Kubrick departed after a couple of days’ shooting. The film was no laughing matter, and Brando has less reason to be ashamed of it than he has for many of his pictures since On the Waterfront.

In 1961, One-Eyed Jacks accorded with a new pattern which had developed in the western. Some brooding, over-indulgent sequences, a strong undertone of masochism – these could be, and were, attributed to Brando’s direction. But in viewing this study of the relationship between two former friends – one who retained his integrity as an outlaw, the other who revealed his weakness and hypocrisy through taking a job as lawman in a settled community – no one thought the elaborately detailed characterisation, the carefully worked out symbolism of cards and bullets, the loving creation of mood and the situating of people in the landscape, the atmosphere of dark pessimism and the suggestion of homosexuality, particularly new or remarkable. And anyway the film’s considerable length was punctuated by set-pieces – a bank robbery, two jail breaks and several gunfights – which were exemplarily staged enactments of familiar events.

Clearly a certain innocence had been lost: the children had got hold of Dr Spock and the nursery would never be the same again. A Catch-22 situation developed in which the charge of fausse naïveté could be brought against those who attempted to recapture a lost simplicity, while the too knowing or ambitious would be accused – not always unjustly – of being pretentious, decadent over-reachers. Nevertheless, moviegoers and filmmakers alike have continued to carry in their minds a firm notion of the archetypal western where everything goes according to a series of happily anticipated moral and dramatic conventions – or clichés. Perhaps there was a time when this was so, though it is certainly no longer true. What created this feeling (and has sustained it) is the way in which westerns good, bad and indifferent have always tended to coalesce in the memory into one vast, repetitious movie with a succession of muddled brawls in bar-rooms, tense and inscrutable poker games in smoky saloons, gunfights in empty streets, showdowns among the rocks with whining bullets, cavalry pursuits and Indian ambushes, mysterious strangers riding into town in search of vengeance or redemption, knights errant galloping to the relief of the oppressed. This simple image of the ‘traditional western’ provides the moviemaker with a model upon which to ring variations and the audience with a yardstick by which to judge the latest product.

The lat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART ONE : Westerns (1973; 1977)
• PART TWO : Westerns Revisited (2004)
• Index of Films
• Index of Names
• About the Author
• Copyright