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'Westerns Ride Into the Sunset'
This is a eulogy for the old-time westerns, which have almost totally faded from the screen. The revisionists and multiculturalists declared that they needed to be killed and have almost completely done the job. Gone, but not forgotten, these films at least deserve a decent burial. Their genre went through a brief revival when TV came into prominence, as "Gunsmoke," with Marshall Matt Dillon, and "Have Gun, Will Travel" and its Shakespeare-quoting Paladin, entertained us. Few knew what a paladin was, but the audience liked him. (A paladin was a knight-errant.)
"Centennial," a masterpiece of research which embodied nearly all of the mythic West, was even better on television than in print. The same can be said for "Lonesome Dove." Too bad they never played on Cinemascope, which could better capture the vastness of the American West. Recent decades witnessed few good westerns gracing the tube or the silver screen. The spaghetti westerns produced in Italy and Spain were mostly slow-motion brutality without a message.
Those seniors who grew up on westerns during the Depression years of the 1930s uniformly loved the cowboy films and remark how those early westerns sustained them and gave them hope and diversion from the problems of difficult everyday life. The early inexpensive and quickly made B-films, produced in black and white, often were prefaced by one of its cowboy stars urging children to obey their parents and be good to others. Many of these pictures served the roles of morality plays of medieval times, teaching character and integrity.
"The Virginian" was a prototype. The law was the law for the title character, as he hanged his best friend turned rustler. "Red River," the story of a cattle drive with dissension among its leaders, as John Wayne clashed with Montgomery Clift, revealed how stubbornness became a vice rather than a virtue. The 1950s brought what critics called the first adult western--"High Noon"--in which Gary Cooper won an Academy Award for his role as Marshal Will Kane. Shot in black and white, the movie was a metaphor for the fanatical Red-hunting of the times. The film's message was the need to do one's duty', regardless of the consequences. The lead had been offered to John Wayne, who turned it down. He even condemned his friend Cooper for taking the role. Wayne was shocked at the final scene, which depicts the marshal contemptuously casting his badge in the dust. "High Noon" has consistently been voted the best western. The film subsequently was colourized, but not until forced by lawsuits. The starkness of black and white was lost in the colour version.
"Shane" and "Monte Walsh," both written by Jack Schaeffer, were offbeat westerns. The first combined the stunning beauty of the Grand Tetons with the struggle for land use between cattlemen and sodbuster homesteaders. The actors were stars who showed why they were stars--Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, Jean Arthur, Jack Palance, and Brandon de Wilde. "Monte Walsh" portrays the love and commitment of a cowboy to his job during economic depression. Lee Marvin is superb as the simple cowhand, and Jeanne Moreau exudes the futility of hope in trying to transcend her "profession" as a soiled dove. The theme music is positively haunting.
"The Gunfighter" was as close to film noir as westerns got. There is no glorification of the criminal, only a portrait of self-loathing by Gregory Peck. Ironically, his character's attempt to reform himself was cut short by a back-shooter. John Ford's discovery of Monument Valley in Arizona provided the stupendous backdrop for a series of movies, such as "The Searchers" and "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon." The sun-drenched buttes and their dark shadows gave one a symbolic feel for the Great Southwest. One other film that deserves mention because it is a "thinking man's western" is "Ulzana's Raid," a sleeper that came close to becoming a cult movie. Starring Burt Lancaster as an old scout showing the ropes to a religiously oriented and newly minted cavalry lieutenant, it tracks an Apache breakout. The idiocy of war was never shown more effectively.
The symbolic white hats vs. black hats in most of these films taught a clear-cut difference between good and evil. The lessons learned were that virtue was its own reward and that good eventually would triumph over evil. (Clayton Moore, who played the Lone Ranger on radio and in film, said the role made him into a virtuous man.) The western presented reality in simple (not simplistic) terms. Justice was swift, as revealed in the miner courts, and, although there were excesses, vigilantes served a needed role where there was no formal law.
In the western, the individual made the difference, bearing out the insight by Albert Schweitzer, the famed medical missionary to Africa, that "the individual is the sole agent responsible for the renewal of civilization." The actor's part in each movie was clear. Bosses were bosses; ramrods were ramrods; and hired hands were just that. Women were women, and men treated them with respect. The women took care of their men, their kids, and their homes, and were rewarded with love by all. The western showed that a spacious, clean, non-urbanized world was still out there, waiting for those with pioneer guts to win a share of its largesse. The West revealed itself as a different culture from the rest of the country. On the silver screen, the big sky of the West, its high plains, and its shining mountains beckoned the post World War II migrations.
The westerns are dead. It wouldn't hurt to shed a tear as we say requiescat in pace and turn on an all-cowboy movie TV channel featuring the good old days.
Bumpkin Productions
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Copyright © 2003 Bernie Bumpkin. All Rights Reserved