Western Movies Since 1960

A NOT-SO-ACCURATE prophet once wrote, "As recently as 1972, there were a tremendous number of quality Westerns being made . . . and since there seems to be a ten-year cycle in Western movie making, I'd say we'll see more in about 1982." ¹ In 1982 only two Westerns were released, and neither was exactly a major success. Barbarosa, starring Willie Nelson, drew some respectable reviews–and some very damaging ones–but nobody went to see the film. The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez appeared first on PBS television, then later went into general release. Today the Western seems to be deader than the California Med-fly. Critics and aficionados of the form can only hear, as with Arnold's sea of faith, its long receding roar.

Everything except fluoride in the water has been blamed for the death of the Western. Even critics themselves have come under attack of late. Stephen Tatum, writing in 1983, called critics such as Brian Garfield and Don Graham "shootists," indicting them for a variety of sins. They are said to hold a "fundamentalist," transcendent conception of the Western. They are "redeemer" critics who wish to stop the clock, deny history, and halt the inevitable evolution of genres. Not only that, Garfield and Graham are moreover accused of being "authoritarian" and suspiciously close to the "moral majority" position.'

It seems quite possible, however, that the roots of the Western's decline lie deeper than in the likes and animadversions of benighted critics. The Western has lost its audience. An entire generation of moviegoers has seen one big-screen Western in their lives, and that, sadly, is Blazing Saddles (1974). For this generation, who as children were glutted with television Westerns, such a legacy makes the Western an impossible form. Blazing Saddles is the final debunking of a long tradition and exposes the Western's moral preachiness, its presumed insensitivity to blacks, reds, women, and other minorities, its good-guy-bad-guy schematic oppositions. Blazing Saddles took the Western into the terrain of the scatological, and from that defamation, nothing could be regained for an entire generation. By the early 1980s, the Western seemed hopelessly irrelevant to the largest share of the moviegoing audience–the teen market. How could it ever compete with the simpleminded eighth-grade prurient voyeurism of Porky's, the futuristic and infantile fantasies of Star Wars, the primal fears of Jaws I, II, III, etc. ? Obviously it couldn't. For all subsequent generations, then, the Western has to be rediscovered, like some store of ancient literature one studies in school.

Reviewing the last twenty-five years of the Western, 1960–1985, is salutary for both aficionados and novices. The sixties began with a great film done in the sparest, most austere classical manner, Budd Boetticher's Comanche Station (1960). The last of the Renown cycle of seven films that Boetticher made with Randolph Scott, Comanche Station reduces the elements of the journey Western to create one of its purest expressions ever. Scott is an aging knight, a man "always alone in Comanche country," who, reminiscent of John Wayne's searcher, hunts endlessly for his wife, taken ten years previously by the Comanches. He buys a woman out of captivity–not his wife, of course, whom he will never find–and escorts her back to her husband. The journey pits him against a charming, evil adversary (Claude Akins), and the trip becomes the occasion for a moral dialectic of the kind for which the Western seems the perfect vehicle. In the end the villain adopts Scott's code, dying honorably, and Scott delivers the wife to her husband. He turns out to be a blind man, a fact that surprises and pleases because all through the film we have worried, along with Scott, about what kind of man would leave such a woman to another's care. It is a great film, and anybody wanting to know what the old-time Western was about would do well to review all of the Boetticher-Scott Westerns.

Boetticher's films froze the genre in a timeless frontier world, but the seminal films of the decade did something quite different; they announced the end of the West. That became the great theme all through the 1960s. Five films from the 1961–63 period are of particular note. The first was a highly literary Western, The Misfits (1961), written for the screen by Arthur Miller from a short story by the same title. Typical of things to come, The Misfits played off the integrity of the old-time cowboy against the confusion, hysteria, and corruption of the industrial age. The wild mustang ponies, now greatly reduced in number and used for the manufacture of dog food, poignantly symbolized the despoliation of the natural wilderness and anticipated the "ecological" Westerns of the future, including The Electric Horseman (1978), a film deeply indebted to another early sixties Western as well, Lonely Are the Brave (1962). Like The Misfits, Lonely Are the Brave was based upon a literary source, Edward Abbey's novel The Brave Cowboy. Kirk Douglas's rendition of Abbey's hero, a modern, ironic version of the lone cowboy Shane, contained some bleak poetry and much nostalgic counterpointing of one era with another. Thus, early in the film Douglas sits astride his cow pony, and in the background, framing and bulking the composition, is a high mound of compressed automobile chassis. This film, like the novel, wears its western sympathies on its sleeve, and there is nothing subtle about the opposition symbolized by the difference between the brave cowboy, emblem of an older, saner time, and the pathetic figure of modern man, expressed unforgettably in Carroll O'Connor's harried truckdriver whose cargo is a load of toilet bowls.

Nineteen sixty-two also saw John Ford's next-to-last Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, drawn from Dorothy Johnson's fine short story of the same title. A highly self-conscious film, full of self-reference to the Fordian canon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance addresses openly such themes as the transformation of the wilderness into a garden. The effect is sometimes as though the script had been co-written by Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx. The greatest Western of this period was Ride the High Country (1962), Sam Peckinpah`s second essay in features and a crowning achievement for its stars Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea. Another journey Western, seemingly much indebted to the structure of Boetticher's journey films, Ride the High Country celebrated all the old-time Western values, in the person of McCrea, yet revealed a depth of understanding of the degree to which rigid idealism needs the tempering of pragmatism, represented by Scott's character.

The last of this group of end-of-the-West films was Hud (1963), but Hud was different from all the others; here one's sympathies lay with the antipathetic character instead of with the virtuous old order. Director Martin Ritt certainly never intended for that to happen; all his sympathies were with the grandfather, Homer Bannon, and his sensitive grandson Lonnie, not with Hud the unprincipled and rapacious son. Ritt was surprised at the degree of favor Hud found among audiences. Paul Newman's raw, edgy portrayal of Hud was one reason for the positive reaction; another was that the old man's moral certainty grated upon an American audience growing suspicious of received pieties. If the other films pointed backwards to the assured truths of the past, Hud looked forward to ironic and morally unstable fissures within the genre.

In the middle of the decade, a new force was loosed upon the genre, the spaghetti Western. In a densely textured, learned, and absorbing study of the European Western, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, Christopher Frayling does a splendid job of tracing the influence of certain American Westerns–High Noon, Vera Cruz– upon the European imagination, but no one has yet written anything of consequence about the influence of the spaghettis upon the American Western. Such a study would doubtless focus on the role of Clint Eastwood in such films as Hung 'Em High ( 1967) and High Plains Drifter (1972).

The spaghetti Western may have liberated the American Western in the closing years of the decade and into the seventies, for a burst of creativity equal to the greatest cycles of the genre in the past took place. Sam Peckinpah delivered on the promise of his early work and created in The Wild Bunch (1969) a great tragic work built around a decision that, in the words of actor Robert Culp, "was neither Good nor Bad . . . simply a Right decision, balanced on a hair." ³ The Wild Bunch gave the ancient concept of honor a new validity and presented an ultraviolent West in unforgettable, stylized images. Beside it, runaway hits such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) were attractive cream-puffs. But all bore the sign of the Italian: violence, irony, and self-reflexive commentary on the genre.

In the next decade, 1972 was another of those bench mark years in the history of the Western. Radically revisionist films like The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid vied with traditional works such as The Cowboys, one of John Wayne's better films of this period. Each showed a keen awareness of the fundamental strengths of the genre. The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, directed by Philip Kaufman, reinterpreted the Jesse James legend, depicting James as a rabid anti-yankee paranoid crazily self-absorbed in the creation of his own legend, while turning Cole Younger into a visionary hero who understands the new world of machines, baseball, and finance capitalism. Mark Rydell's The Cowboys exploited John Wayne's persona of an aging westerner who has many truths to impart to those of the younger generation who are willing to listen. In this cattle-drive story of an old rancher taking his herd to market with the help of children cowpunchers, many of the glories of the early trail-drive films were evoked, from North of 36 (1924) to Red River ( 1948).

Probably the greatest of the 1972 Westerns was a cavalry film, Robert Aldrich's Ulzana's Raid. In the previous decades several cavalry films were attempted, but neither Ford's Cheyenne Autumn (1964), the master's last Western, nor Peckinpah's Major Dundee (1965), nor Ralph Nelson's Soldier Blue (1970), an example of wretched excess, could match the splendor of the cavalry films of the past, such as Fort Apache (1948) or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). Ulzana's Raid, however, does; it belongs with the best of the genre. It was also one of the few films of the era to translate the horrors of the Vietnam War into oblique but convincing western allegory. Soldier Blue, and to a lesser degree the overrated Little Big Man (1970), used the Vietnam analogue sentimentally, resulting in cardboard cutout good-guy Indians and monstrous Anglo cavalry. In Ulzana's Raid, though, the Apaches are simply one alien culture at war with another. This is a film that takes sentimentality, especially its Christian liberal version, and impales it upon the cactus thorns of the realities of desert guerilla warfare.

After the prolific outpouring of innovative Westerns of the early 1970s, something happened to the genre that is very difficult to pin down. Some fine Westerns were made during the middle years of the decade, including the best of them, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and the quirky, highly original The Missouri Breaks (1976), but none created the kind of box office that Hollywood genres require if they are to flourish. Then, in 1980, came Heaven's Gate, Michael Cimino's ballyhooed followup to The Deer Hunter, which itself owed much to the Western, especially to John Ford and The Searchers. As everybody knows, Heaven's Gate was a $40 million flop. Since that failure, the tendency has been to blame the Western's demise on the fate of this one film, but to do so seems a vast oversimplification.

Other reasons must be brought to bear to explain the Western's decline, which may in the long run prove to be only temporary. Some suggestions, highly speculative and subjective, include the following: (1) The narrative pace of the Western cannot hope to appeal to children whose narrative expectations have been influenced by the intergalactic space races of Star Wars, the quick crosscutting and dime-store surrealism of MTV, the electronic pulses of self-directed narratives in video games. A man on a horse, moving across a wilderness wasteland, must seem unbelievably pokey to such a sensibility. (2) The moral dichotomy and some of the special features of the Western have been easily absorbed by other genres such as science fiction. Star Wars, for example, played cutely upon specific Western motifs, as in the saloon scene; the serials adventure Raiders of the Lost Ark redid the old Stagecoach feat of the hero performing dangerous deeds on a speeding vehicle; Outland, or "High Noon on 10" as it was known in the trade, translated High Noon to outer space; and, in a different genre, Jaws was itself a kind of Western with the shark as the gunfighter come to terrorize a peaceful community. (3) Theloss of a sense of landscape is another possibility. Westerns have always been praised for their cultural insight in reflecting images of American space, though admittedly such insights invariably come from intellectuals and Europeans. It may be that the hunger to see wilderness landscapes has been diminished by modern travel, suburban deracination, and the multiplicity of landscapes in the profane world of television advertising. Monument Valley, for example, is shrunken, despoiled, and trivialized in ads for dog food, insurance, and automobiles. Some of the magic of American wilderness space may be lost by such profanations. (4) Finally, there is that problem of the R rating. The Western used to be a family film; fathers (and mothers) took their sons (and daughters) to see Westerns; in some families it was a weekly ritual. But this was long ago, in a time when families attended movies together. That quaint practice is no more, and now a vast gulf separates the attendance habits of youths and their parents.

The best Westerns of the recent past have been made outside the United States. In Australia's great explosion of film masterpieces in the mid-to late 1970s, the Western was a strongly felt influence underlying such works as Breaker Morant (Ford's cavalry films), The Road Warrior (a great futuristic riff on Stagecoach), and the charmingly old-fashionedly romantic The Man from Snowy River (in which landscape and horses again came to the fore). Canada contributed The Grey Fox, one of the best of the end-of-the-West films, and the U.S. chipped in with a kind of third-world Western, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, which critiqued the Texas Ranger legend and created the possibility of a new hero for the genre, the Texas Mexican. But for fans and novices alike, such moments were rare. In 1984 not a single Western was released, and in December of that year Sam Peckinpah died. Gone, probably forever, were the days of twenty Westerns being released per year. It remains to be seen whether Stephen Spielberg or Clint Eastwood or anybody else can revive the Western for a new generation of filmgoers.

DON GRAHAM, University of Texas

Notes

1. Don Graham, "A Medley of Fearless Forecasts," Next (July–August 1980): 34.

2. "The Western Film Critic as `Shootist,"'Journal of Popular Film & Television 11 (Fall 1983): 115, 118–120.

3. "Sam Peckinpah, the Storyteller and The Wild Bunch," Entertainment World 2 (January 1970): 11.

Selected Bibliography

Frayling, Christopher. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Rigorous intellectual examination of the meaning of the American Western in the European imagination. Indispensable for understanding the spaghettis.

French, Philip. Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre. Revised Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Last chapter is one of the most enthusiastic appraisals of post-sixties Westerns to be found anywhere.

Garfield, Brian. Western Films: A Complete Guide. New York: Rawson Associates, 1982. Highly opinionated and vigorously written. Especially valuable for its insistence upon the importance of the writer in the creation of good Westerns.

Graham, Don. Cowboys and Cadillacs: How Hollywood Looks at Texas. Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1983. Focuses on changes in the Western as reflected in its preoccupation with Texas and its various myths.

Hardy, Phil. The Western. New York: William Morrow, 1983. A large, handsome book containing lively annotations of Westerns through 1983. Invaluable for anybody wanting either quick reference or the big picture.

Hyams, Jay. The Life and Times of the Western Movie. New York: Gallery Books, 1983. Useful if unexciting survey of the Western from its beginnings to 1983.

Lenihan, John H. Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. Definitive study of how the post–World War II Western reflects such contemporary issues as civil rights, the Cold War, and Viet Nam.

Pilkington, William T., and Don Graham, eds. Western Movies. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979. Contains explications of several major films released during the 1960s and '70s.