Westerns

You've been warned. The month has arrived that we're going to jaw about westerns.  Yep, pardner, the whole month.  That's gonna work out to nine postings... not nearly enough if you like westerns but far too many if you don't.  I appreciate that some of you may not be so fond of them... I've certainly heard it enough in my time.  I only know I was raised on them and some things, I guess, just stick with you.

At first I was raised on mainly B if not C westerns with some of the corniest, most tiresome plots one could imagine and with actors who rarely did anything else.  William S. Hart and Tom Mix were before my time but Hopalong Cassidy, Bob Steele, Tim McCoy, Tim Holt, Johnny Mack Brown, Hoot Gibson, Charles Starrett and Lash LaRue weren't.  Some of them appeared in western serials... little Saturday afternoon teasers that kept one coming back until the finale some 12 weeks later.  

If they weren't enough, there were the singing cowboys Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and their famous horses.  I thought Autry made some of the most horrible westerns I'd ever seen but there I was.  Most of us were either Gene fans or Roy fans.  I was a Roy boy.  I named my first broom Trigger.

Westerns did get much better.  Directors like John Ford, Raoul Walsh, Cecil B. DeMille, Henry Hathaway, Howard Hawks, George Stevens, Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah, Clint Eastwood and others saw to it.  The scripts were better, the scenery and the photography astonishingly beautiful and the actors far more talented than those pioneering gents before them.  To tell you my truth, as a genre and looking over all the years, I think this is a genre that represents Hollywood very well.  There are many exceptional western films.

So then, put on your bandanas and buckskins, chaps, stetson (a black one for attitude), boots, socks, spurs and of course the Colt45 and holster.  Lasso, blanket, canteen?  It's likely we'll come across the familiar small town, dusty main street, sheriff's office & jail, saloon (or two), the livery stable.  Horses are tied up (generally one loose loop over the hitching post).  There's a stagecoach coming into town and lots of foot traffic.  More prosperous towns had the railroad.  Right outside of bigger towns were the ranchers, with owners who were generally greedy, well-dressed thugs.  Out of town, often in the bleak wilderness, were the ramshackle homes, isolated, lonely and usually awaiting some peril.  Speaking of isolated, let's throw in the forts.

The American frontier comprises the geography, history, folklore and cultural expression of life in the forward wave of American expansion that began with English colonial settlements in the early 17th century and ended with the admission of the last mainland territories as states in 1912.   I know the Civil War and colonial periods have been considered westerns but I've always referred to them as southerns and easterns, respectively.  The colonial times were referred to as American frontier times because it was land that was largely unsettled.  To some, I reckon, anything's a western if we can see a horse.  

The western frontier is another matter.  There are all kinds of definitions to describe which lands made up the American west but I have always been happy with all lands west of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.  

A few events helped spur a larger migration west.  As a result of the U.S. victory in the Mexican War in 1848, vast areas of land were acquired.  A year later was the California gold rush.  Then came rich ore discoveries such as Pike's Peak in Colorado, the Comstock Lode in Nevada and the Black Hills in South Dakota.  Settlers arrived by the thousands to strike it rich, not just easterners and southerners (including blacks) after the Civil War, but Europeans, Chinese and more.  The west opened up further with the Pony Express, the telegraph and the railroads.  By the 1890 census, it was determined there was no longer a western frontier.  Civilization had no boundaries.

Western frontier life describes one of the most exciting periods in U.S. history.  Old West stories were spun about lawmen, prospectors, mountain men, trappers, hunters, bounty hunters, gamblers, farmers, ranchers, scouts, cavalrymen, Indians and at the top of the list, the cowboy.  It could be anyone who lived in the 1800's but most tales largely come from the 30-year period of 1865-95, in a time period referred to as The Wild West.  It all boils down to the cowboy and his way of life.  

What is a cowboy exactly?  While it may be a word to take in a number of meanings, the most straightforward answer is it's someone who tends cattle (or horses).  Sometimes they are referred to as cattlemen, cowhands, ranchers, drovers, gauchos or vaqueros.  We'll stick with cowboy. 

I always found being raised on cowboy culture to be a stroke of good fortune.  They were usually heroic, moral, capable, rugged individualists who gave my young mind something to aspire to.  But they needed to be part of a story that added color and excitement so bring on the bad guys, dancehall girls, Indians, cattle drives, gunfights, runaway stagecoaches and robberies.  

Part of the lore and lure of the cowboy in particular and westerns in general is the enactment of the Code of the West.  It is at the heart of the western story.  It was an unwritten, socially agreed-upon set of informal rules which shaped the culture.  Consider the usual 10...

 (1) Live each day with courage
 (2) Take pride in your work
 (3) Always finish what you start
 (4) Do what has to be done
 (5) Be tough but fair
 (6) When you make a promise, keep it
 (7) Ride for the brand
 (8) Talk less and say more
 (9) Remember some things aren't for sale
(10) Know where to draw the line

Like a number of movie genres, the western owes its roots to  books, including novellas and the very popular dime-store novels. Easterners were gaga over tales of the west.  Fact was usually    
gotten through word of mouth or newspapers but it was the fiction and exaggerations that made those books so popular.   

Western writers such as Bret Hart and Zane Grey were revered and Owen Wistler wrote what is considered to be the first modern western novel, The Virginian, in 1902.  Because of westerns we all know of the exaggerated doings of Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Annie Oakley, the Earp brothers, the James brothers, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, Butch and Sundance, Crockett, Bowie and Boone.  

Whether lawmen or outlaws, sharp-shooters or explorers, these were fairly ordinary people who did some not-so-ordinary things... some good, some bad.  In fact, the good v.s. bad aspect is precisely at the core of the western, regardless of whether book or film.  The tales got richer and richer.  As was summarized so well in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance...  when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.  Folks were ripe for those dime-store novels and a shoo-in for the movies.  

The first cowboy film, a short, really, was 1903's The Great Train Robbery and its star, Broncho Billy Anderson, became the first cowboy matinee idol.  It was so successful that Anderson appeared in dozens more western shorts.  People just couldn't get enough westerns, silents in those days.  Action-packed and visual as westerns are and were, there's little wonder they were so perfect for silent films.

The western enjoyed its greatest popularity in the 1940's and 1950's.  I think some of the genre's best were in the 1950's and we will discuss three of them in greater detail this month.  I will also remember the 1950's due to the proliferation of those B westerns.  Most of them I dearly loved (and they will get some further attention this month as well) but they were formulaic and often cheaply made.  They were made especially for me, too... a kid at a Saturday afternoon double feature.  Thanks Universal-International.

Westerns come in many varieties, too, and always have.  Consider:

the epic western... The Big Country (1958)... by the way, my favorite western of all time;

the historical western... How the West Was Won (1962);

the revisionist western... Little Big Man (1970) and Dances with Wolves (1990);

the sex western... Duel in the Sun (1946),  The Outlaw (1948);

the comedy western... Son of Paleface (1952), Cat Ballou (1965), Blazing Saddles (1974);

the musical western...  The Harvey Girls (1946), Annie Get Your Gun (1950), Oklahoma (1955);

the science-fiction western... Outland (1981), Cowboys and Aliens (2011);

the film noir western... The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Pursued (1947), Rancho Notorious (1952);

the Native American-focused western: Broken Arrow (1950), A Man Called Horse (1970), Windwalker (1980);

the westerns starring horses:  Smoky (1946) and Gypsy Colt and Black Horse Canyon, both 1954;

the contemporary western... Giant (1956) and Hud (1963);

the end-of-the-old-west western... Lonely Are the Brave (1960) and Monte Walsh (1970);

the spaghetti western... half-thanks to Sergio Leone... I know he enlivened the genre but I rarely liked his films;

So many have brought so much to the genre.  I couldn't count the times I sat in the dark watching larger-than-life western heroes like Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, Joel McCrea, Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Alan Ladd and Randolph Scott.  All did other work but they were dynamite in the saddle.

No tribute to westerns should ever be done without mentioning five names... two actors, two directors and one actor-director.  Without a doubt John Wayne is the top cowboy star ever.  While he certainly appeared in other types of films, he will be forever remembered for five decades of work in the saddle.  We will look at what many consider his best film this month.

Director John Ford is also the top director of westerns.  What he brought to the form is legendary... Wayne, among them, but my greatest thanks goes to the look he created by filming so much in Monument Valley (on the Utah-Arizona border).  Another auteur is Anthony Mann who famously worked with James Stewart in the 50's in a series of deeply psychological westerns.  Stewart, another superb cowboy star, took on an angry persona he'd never shown on the screen.

Clint Eastwood can't be dismissed either... an actor-director who made some of the best westerns imaginable in decades after the 50's.  In many respects, he kept the western in theaters.

As for actresses, it seems that I saw a slew of westerns with Julie Adams, Joanne Dru, Dorothy Malone, Virginia Mayo, Vera Miles, Maureen O'Hara and the undisputed queen of the genre, Barbara Stanwyck,  She made so many famous movies but said that she was never happier than when making a western.

Dramas deal with conflict at their core and westerns have their heroes pitted against one or more of three standard things... nature, lawlessness and Indians.  And the dark side of my romance with westerns is Hollywood's undeniably rude depiction of Native Americans... the maltreatment was thoughtless and uninformed.  To fully explore this subject would take more time than I have to live but there's a couple of things of note from my prospective.

With few exceptions, Indians were depicted as half-naked, dumb savages and blood-thirsty killers so often that the stain, to a large degree, remains.  I remember seeing Charlton Heston in The Savage in 1953 and just last year saw Christian Bale in Hostiles.  Seems like not a lot has changed.  Neither film's title refers solely to Indians but you can bet the folks who market them knew the images they wanted generated with those titles.

I'm not blanket-opposed to making Indians the bad guys in westerns.  Westerns need bad guys and it's not that plenty of whites didn't fill the roles as well.  I think the stain comes from the fact that Hollywood never seemed to let up.  One could count on two hands the number of stories that favored the Indian.  Not only were they not favored but their side of the story was rarely told.  

Another injustice was the lack of Native Americans playing leading Indian roles.  Tribesmen may have usually been Indians (although often Mexicans), but not the lead brave.  He has been Victor Mature, Rock Hudson, Burt Lancaster, Charles Bronson and others.  I'd like to think this has changed with Native American actors such as Wes Studi, Graham Greene and others on the scene.

I would never miss seeing a good western and if there are Indians yelling and screaming while at the point of starting to circle the wagon train, I won't walk out but I'll be reminded again of how basically silly that is.  The western culture, no matter the color of one's skin, seemed to be about ambush (that means secretive which means quiet).

There was one other silly thing in westerns that is at the heart of the folklore.  I call it shoot the horse.  Ponder how truly different westerns would have been if someone had just shot the horse.  Poof.  Chasing a stagecoach at the foot of the peaks in Monument Valley wouldn't have been quite so exciting if someone would have just shot the team of horses.  Poof.  How about the Cavalry going one-by-one in a deep canyon with Indians hiding higher in the rocks?  Just shoot all the horses... you know in the real times they did just that because, frankly, only a bad shot could miss a horse.

Frankly, westerns always exaggerated their points.  We'll chalk it up to dramatic license, perhaps, but historians tell us the level of violence in the real old west was not what Hollywood would have us believe.  Additionally, most people didn't carry guns and the average cowboy wasn't very skilled with one.  

No matter how one cuts it, the western is the quintessential American film genre, envied, copied and famous the world over.  The taming of the American frontier has provided colorful stories that have fascinated moviegoers for generations.  With its indelible, mythic images, the western is the most beloved and recognizable of American cinematic genres.  



Next posting:
One of the best westerns ever