The Modern Popular Western

Radio, Television, Film and Print

FEW STORY FORMS have gone through as many transformations as the Western story, from its origins in the nineteenth century to contemporary variations on classic themes. Over the last seven decades the American Western story has fulfilled more social and cultural functions for its audience than has any other American story form. Indeed, the Western can be seen as a record of America's national self-awareness.1

By the mid-1970s, the popular Western in its several forms of print, radio, television and film had just begun to receive the intensity and depth of critical analysis it deserves. There is little doubt that popular Westerns up to that point had not dealt with the historical West as it was, but with the West as we wish it had been. Thus, the evolution of the idealistic Western to the more realistic contemporary one reveals much about the state of American society along the way. The persistence of the Western format, even in its evolved state, indicates American preoccupation with a time of optimism about the American Dream, thus placing the popular Western of both yesterday and today in the American romantic tradition.

Critics are quick to point out a basic flaw in the popular Western– that the authors have used the same basic plots and character types since the beginning days of the genre. What the critics fail to acknowledge is that it is this very repetition of the "formula" that is aesthetically satisfying to audiences. A Western fan, upon hearing or seeing a Western, is like a person meeting an old friend. He simply expects to share old news. John Cawelti has illustrated the viability of this formulaic approach to the study of popular story forms in The Six-Gun Mystique 2 and Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories us Art and Popular Culture. 3 Both books should be required reading for anyone who attempts critical analysis of the popular arts.

THE RADIO WESTERN

The transformations the Western formula experienced in its transition from radio to television led to the current nature of modern popular Westerns. As J. Fred MacDonald so aptly points out in Don't Touch That Dial! Radio Programming in American Life from 1920 to 1960, 4 Western programming on radio up until Gunsmoke in 1952 was primarily aimed at children. Television's ultimate threat in the 1950s served to impel the Western genre on radio to innovate and attempt to recapture the adults.

In the children's Westerns, as MacDonald writes, "the most common types of moral messages were those that implored listeners to work hard, to respect the ways of elders, and to be honest in all dealings." 5 What a number of the programs shared was an American ideology best characterized by two of the most popular shows of the 1930s, Tom Mix and The Lone Ranger. With the cry, "The Tom Mix Ralston Straight Shooters are on the air! And here comes Tom Mix, America's favorite cowboy!", American youth were drawn into the romantic world of Tom Mix, which was at the same time realistic because it was placed in a twentieth-century milieu of trouble and technology. 6 The show was so popular it continued for a decade. Premiering in 1933, The Lone Ranger, on the other hand, although set in real time, derived its plot and action from the timeless American West of the nineteenth-century frontier. The much-discussed relationship between the Lone Ranger and Tonto in the series was certainly a distinguishing feature, giving it a deeper cultural and social significance than that enjoyed by a number of the competing Western series, since it attempted a resolution of the western conflict between races.

Although the Lone Ranger and Tonto never broke into song on America's airwaves during the 1930s and 1940s, many other weekly Western heroes did. The most famous were Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Despite their tendency to warble about the sagebrush, the cattle and the sky, these cowboys, like their non-singing counterparts, were inhabitants of a male world where women were tolerated because they were necessary for civilization. (They were rarely featured and, with the exception of Dale Evans on the Roy Rogers Show, never starred.) The Western heroes were also patriotic, helping to serve the war cause as well as any other citizen. The fictional Tom Mix delivered the following message to the American public on May 8, 1945:

"We've shown Hitler and his gang that we know how to lick bullies and racketeers, but we've still got a big job to do for our brothers, and our cousins, and our uncles, and our dads who are still fighting the Japs." 7

Buck Jones of Hoofbeats opened membership to his Buck Jones Club to any boy or girl "who's interested in clean living, outdoor exercise, and seeing that the underdog gets a chance." 8 Radio Westerns, like much of programming in popular media, upheld traditional American values of friendship, honesty, justice, perseverance, and concern for others.

The rise of the adult Western in radio in the decade after World War II was an attempt to tell the Western story more realistically. Radio, reacting to competition from television, attempted to create its niche in the marketplace. Gunsmoke is, of course, the best remembered of these hard-hitting, realistic Westerns which presented tough plots and very human characters. Matt Dillon worried about killing, about whether the fragile civilization represented by Dodge City would hold up against all the attacks, and about whether he could continue to serve as the man who stood between civilization and the savage wilderness day after lonesome day. William Conrad as Matt Dillon opened the program with this description of his job as U.S. Marshal "around Dodge City and in the territory on West": "First man they look for, and the last they want to meet. It's a chancy job. But it makes a man watchful–and a little lonely." On Gunsmoke Marshal Dillon got shot, farmers did not survive on their land, and criminals were not always easily or finally dealt with.

Other adult Western series of the period included The Six Shooter, Dr. Six-Gun, Fort Laramie, Luke Slaughter of Tombstone, and Have Gun Will Travel, all appearing and disappearing between 1953 and 1960. 9 According to J. Fred MacDonald, violence and even sexuality were dealt with in franker ways than had been the case when the juvenile Western dominated the airwaves. 10 Even the American Indian was handled more fairly. 11 Still, the radio Western never really achieved maturity; radio remained a proving ground for variations in the Western formula which were to be more completely developed on television and film.

THE TELEVISION WESTERN

Television in the early 1950s, as a new popular medium in need of programming, found itself going back to older, familiar entertainment forms in order to provide an easy transition for its audience. In the case of the popular Western, this meant adapting formats and series already established on the radio and in B Western movies. The first significant Western TV series in prime time was Hopalong Cassidy, which premiered on NBC in June 1949. Series star William Boyd had been playing Hoppy in B Westerns since 1936. During the 1940s he had gambled his own savings to acquire the TV rights to the Cassidy pictures. His quick leap into the new medium proved to be a financial bonanza, as Hoppy became a national craze worth millions in merchandising rights alone. Noting the huge success of the Hoppy series, other B film stars quickly began working the television goldmine. The two leading singing cowboys of Saturday matinee and radio, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, began their own TV series in 1950 and 1951, respectively.

Unlike the early episodes of Hopalong Cassidy, which were merely re-cuts of the old B features, The Lone Ranger was the first successful network Western to create original filmed episodes. The "masked rider of the plains and his faithful Indian companion" premiered on ABC in September 1949.

The early episodes look clumsy today, with wooden acting taking place on small sound stages where a bush and a couple of trees often represent the vistas of the American Southwest. Nonetheless, the show was a big success, enjoying an eight-year run and holding down seventh place in the Nielsen ratings in 1950–51. Other radio shows followed the Ranger to television, notably Sky King, a modern Western where criminals were chased down by a hero in a twin engine Cessna; Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, a Mountie adventure featuring the wonder dog, Yukon King; and The Cisco Kid, which partially made up for its Latin stereotypes by making its Mexican hero genuinely charming and attractive. Other television Westerns of the early 1950s, such as Wild Bill Hickock, Range Rider, and Walt Disney's fabulously successful 1954–55 miniseries, Davy Crockett, were series created originally for television. However, these also adapted the formats of B films or radio children's Westerns by featuring comic or youthful sidekicks, an emphasis on action, very clearly defined perspectives on good and evil and the heroic administering of righteous justice.

Television also absorbed the adult Western formula from radio, and in doing so ushered in the modern era of the TV Western, bringing the popular Western its greatest mass popularity. In September 1955, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp premiered on ABC and Gunsmoke was introduced on CBS. Both of these new half-hour shows were dramatically different from all of the action-oriented Western series that had preceded them. On Wyatt Earp, the story was presented for the most part as historically accurate, although this was in fact rarely the case. Other changes from early TV Westerns were an increased sense of moral complexity; the presence of a larger number of regular characters, including villains; a hero who often solved problems with his head rather than with guns or fists; and secondary characters who had individualized personal qualities or problems, rather than merely broad virtues or vices. Here, in other words, was a Western with a degree of sophistication, a show that could appeal to adult sensibilities as well as to children.

Gunsmoke made no claims to historical accuracy, but its sense of realism far surpassed that of Wyatt Earp. The structure and characters of Gunsmoke had already been clearly established by its three-year success on the radio at the time the show reached the TV screen, the first three years of the TV series being mainly adaptations of old radio shows. Writer John Meston and producer Norman Macdonnell brought to the television version of Gunsmoke a nineteenth-century Dodge City, Kansas, peopled by half-wild buffalo hunters, homesteaders brought to the brink of insanity by the emptiness of the prairie, and men whose only handle on survival was the butt of a sixgun. It was a neurotic, compulsive world dominated by greed and cruelty, and made livable only by the vulnerable, tiny community of friends headed by U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon, the gimpy, rather stupid deputy Chester Goode, the booze-sipping Doc Adams and the saloon owner–madam, Kitty Russell. It was the ideal show for a 1950s mass audience, brooded over in their own world by the Cold War and by trendy social science and psychology jargon about deviance and the failure to adjust. By 1957, Gunsmoke was the top-rated program on television, a position it would hold for the rest of the decade. In 1961, the show expanded to an hour, gradually softening its outlook and evolving into an anthology format. It placed amongst the top twenty shows every year until it finally left the air at the end of the 1974–75 season, as the longest-running and most successful dramatic show in the history of television.

The success of Gunsmoke and Wyatt Earp quickly filled the TV screen with adult Westerns all hoping to capture some of the audience. Wagon Train began a successful eight-year run in 1957. Rawhide, an excellent series about a cattle drive north from Texas, premiered in 1959 and continued until 1966. Warner Brothers Television began a group of hit shows in the middle fifties about wandering heroes that included Cheyenne, Bronco, Sugarfoot and the comedy-oriented Maverick. The popularity of the television Western peaked in 1958–59, when twenty-four adult Westerns were on prime time television each week, including seven of the top ten shows in the Nielsen ratings. With over fifty million Americans watching Westerns every night of the week, Westerns had become the most popular mass-appeal story formula ever created. From that pinnacle, Westerns slowly lost their appeal for television audiences until 1975, the first year in the history of network television that not even one Western series was included in the prime time schedule.

By the time television Westerns were at their point of unparalleled popularity in the late 1950s, they had evolved past their roots in film and radio and developed formulaic qualities of their own. Simply put, most successful television Westerns featured ensemble casts who functioned as a collective hero in a family or quasi-family structure. This was a change from the mid-fifties, when shows with loner heroes were the norm. The Restless Gun with gunslinger Vint Bonner, The Texan with the Texas gunfighter Bill Longley, and Tales of Wells Fargo with special agent Jim Hardie, along with the Warner Brothers series, all made regular appearances on Nielsen's top twenty list. But the more spectacular success of ensemble shows such as Gunsmoke and Wagon Train focused series creators more and more in that direction. Most loner-hero shows came and went quickly. During the 1960s, The Loner and Branded lasted only a single season. And only two loner-hero shows, The Lone Ranger and Have Gun Will Travel, both begun in the 1950s, lasted six seasons or longer.

Ensemble hit shows, following Gunsmoke's lead, created tiny communities of love and cooperation that were able to withstand the ravages of frontier savagery. Many shows created family-like relationships. Lawman, Wagon Train and Rawhide, for example, all featured an older man guiding and teaching a younger, impulsive apprentice. Although in all three cases the two were not related, the parallels with an ideal father-son relationship were obvious. By the late 1950s, however, genuine families were beginning to take the reins of the television Western. The trend was inaugurated in 1958 when The Rifleman, featuring a widower raising his son on a western ranch, quickly became a ratings hit. The most important stimulus for Western series built around a family, however, was Bonanza, which premiered in 1959. The series was not successful until it was moved by NBC to a Sunday evening slot in 1961, where it quickly became a major hit, finishing as the top ratings winner of the entire decade. Featured on the series were Pa Cart-wright, owner of the biggest ranch in Nevada, and the three sons who helped him protect and run his western domain: Little Joe, the hotheaded youngster, Hoss the slowwitted but gentle and sensitive giant, and the oldest son, Adam, loyal and reliable, but somehow enigmatic. After Bonanza came a number of imitators, all featuring a diverse family of huge landowners. The Virginian, the first ninety-minute series, debuted in 1962; The Big Valley, featuring Barbara Stanwyck as a mother ruling over her unruly sons, began in 1965; and The High Chaparral, with the usual huge ranch but more than the usual share of Freudian family tensions, went on the air in 1967.

Several reasons have been posited for the television Western's evolution from the single-hero structure to the ensemble hero formula. The most obvious reason is the simple need for variations. On a television series, single characters normally cannot initiate enough inventive interest to sustain a show that is viewed every week. In devising a format that could easily feature one of several regulars during a particular episode, the producers of TV Westerns solved the problem of overfamiliarity.

Horace Newcomb in his book TV: The Most Popular Art 12 argues that the family formula was established by the success of those situation comedies in the early 1950s that centered themselves around families. All television programming, Newcomb concludes, has taken the cue from TV situation comedies and invented family-like groups not only to sustain variety and interest, but to establish a connection with a vast audience, most of whom are watching television at home as a family unit.

A third theory for the evolution of the TV Western formula is offered by Ralph and Donna Brauer in the only book-length study of the television Western, The Horse, the Gun and the Piece of Property. 13 According to the Brauers, the changing formulaic pattern in the TV Western reflects a changing "fable of our identity" in which the national psyche moved from valuing individualism to valuing the team-play of corporate anonymity. The family on the giant ranch, the Brauers conclude, is a metaphor for corporate America in which characters become heroic by learning to control individualistic and eccentric behavior for the sake of the prosperity of the ranch. Ben Cartwright's advice to an old frontiersman on an episode of Bonanza, for example, is to join the local Cattleman's Association.

Whatever the reasons for the changing pattern of the TV Western and its resulting success, sheer overexposure caused a gradual but steady decline in the popularity of the form. Since 1970, no new Western series has lasted longer than two years, 14 and only one new series has managed to attract a large audience. How the West Was Won in 1977–78 finished eleventh in the ratings mainly because of the nostalgic appeal of star James Arness, who earlier had played Matt Dillon for the entire twenty years of Gunsmoke. Attempts to revive television Westerns in the 1980s have been spoofs of the Western formula. However, even parodies seem unable to revive audience interest. Neither Best of the West in 1981 nor Gun Shy in 1983 was renewed for a second season.

Beyond the fact of overexposure are perhaps more subtle reasons for the television audience's loss of interest in Westerns. It is no doubt coincidental that 1975, the first Westernless television season, was the first season planned by TV executives after the Watergate scandals and the resignation of President Richard Nixon. On the other hand, the relationship between these two events is at least symbolically suggestive. If Watergate and the Vietnam War that preceded it signaled, as many suggest, the end of American innocence and the beginnings of American self-doubt, it seems appropriate that at that very moment the Western story, which was traditionally a narrative confirming America's worthiness to venture onward, would disappear from television.

MODERN WESTERN FILMS

As Westerns proliferated on television, they began to decline in the movie theatres. In 1950, at least 135 American-made Westerns were released in the United States. By 1956, the number had declined to seventy-eight. And in the entire decade from 1965 to 1975, only about two hundred Westerns appeared on movie screens, an average of less than twenty per year.15 Part of the decline in Western film production is traceable to the fact that television began presenting the type of kiddie action Westerns that earlier had been produced as low budget B movies. 16 Mainly, however, it simply reflected less audience interest. From 1965 to 1970 only two Westerns made it to the top fifty of Variety's top grossing films of the period (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969, number 7; True Grit, 1969, number 37); during the entire 1970s, no new Western made the Variety top ten list of box office champs during the specific year it was released.

Despite the waning loyalty of the Western movie audience since 1950, the films themselves have been unusually rich in style and ideological diversity. The classic Western story described by Cawelti as that of the wilderness versus civilization, mediated by the Western hero, no longer serves as a constant formulaic model. Instead, the classic Western now provides a basic structure for experimentation within which the old formula is twisted, laughed at, and sometimes bitterly repudiated. Director Anthony Mann, for example, in a series of Westerns with star Jimmy Stewart, beginning with Winchester 73 in 1950 and including such fine films as The Naked Spur (1952) and The Man from Laramie (1955), presented stories of men motivated by revenge against a döppelganger figure, sometimes a member of their own family. 17 For Mann, Freudian psychology is as much a determining element in the settlement of the West as is the desire to build churches and schools. Similarly, John Ford, the best known of all Western movie directors, in his most critically praised film, The Searchers (1956), has the hero, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) driven by a pathological hatred of Indians. At the climax of the film, civilization is preserved only when whites attack a sleeping Comanche village and slaughter nearly everyone, including women and children. Ford's Cheyenne Autumn (1964) actually reverses his older stories of a heroic U.S. Cavalry during the Indian wars by having the Cavalry harass a tiny band of Cheyennes whose only desire is to return from Oklahoma to their Yellowstone country homeland. Some critics link these formulaic revisions to immediate historical events. Philip French in Westerns says that modern Westerns can be directly traced to the political philosophies of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, William Buckley and Barry Goldwater. 18 John Lenihan in Showdown relates changing patterns in the Western formula to specific attitudes about public issues such as the Cold War, racism and late-sixties attacks on the establishment. 19

Considering modern Westerns from a somewhat broader perspective, however, allows them to be grouped into four major categories: traditional Westerns, anti-Westerns, elegiac Westerns and experimental Westerns. Together, these four categories reveal not only common themes but also the extent of the diversity of Western movies, especially since 1960.

The traditional Westerns of the post-1960 era continued to glorify the white taking of the wilderness. A great many argued for the validity of such a vision more strongly than ever, especially the 1970s movies of John Wayne. By the time Wayne received a Best Actor Oscar for his role as the irascible lawman Rooster Cogburn in True Grit in 1969, he had been cast as a traditional Western screen hero for forty years and was the virtual mythic embodiment of the character. The box office success of True Grit may well have encouraged Wayne to continue his heroic westerner on screen. Whatever the reason, Wayne continued to glorify and defend the West until his last film, The Shootist in 1976, with but a slight revision of the traditional formula. In True Grit, the aging gunfighter Rooster teaches the adolescent Mattie Ross about a true westerner's personal code of values, including loyalty, courage and the defense of the weak. Most of Wayne's subsequent Westerns followed a similar pattern, eschewing standard young and vital heroes for near-old men who could teach the proven western values to the uninitiated. In Big Jake (1971) Wayne rescues his grandson from a kidnapping with the help of twenty-ish sons. In Cahill, U.S. Marshal (1973) Wayne is saddled with two delinquent sons who learn to love and respect him by the end of the movie. The Cowboys (1971) is the most obvious example of Wayne's role as Western patriarch of older values. In that film Wayne is forced to hire on a gang of twelve-year-old boys to help him drive cattle to market. On the trail, Wayne forces the boys to become like himself, so that when he is murdered, the boys revenge the murder, regain the stolen herd and deliver it to market. The film closes on the boys returning with the cattle money to Wayne's widow as the camera pans upward, a sign that Wayne is looking down from heaven approvingly.

The only real rival to John Wayne's personal popularity as a Western hero during the 1960s and '70s was Clint Eastwood, whose Westerns, like Wayne's, reaffirm the ideals of the traditional Western. Eastwood's American films are known for their violence, which stems from the macho power of his tight-lipped heroes. Within such a context, however, Eastwood's Westerns develop a pattern of values that defends proper civilization as strongly as the oldest Western movies. In Hang 'Em High (1968) Eastwood begins with a desire to gain revenge against a gang who had nearly lynched him. At the end of the film he changes his mind and delivers the surviving culprits to the Sheriff, thus confirming the values of law and civilization. In High Plains Drifter (1973), Eastwood is an avenging ghost who sees to it that an evil town is destroyed so that the few decent citizens can rebuild it. Eastwood's last Western of the 1970s, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), once again presents a hero motivated by revenge. But Josey eventually joins a small group of settlers and finally chooses to discard his hatreds in order to preserve the fledgling society that has accepted him.

The second general category of modern Westerns, the anti-Western, is nearly the opposite of the traditional Western of Wayne or Eastwood. AntiWesterns began to be seen on American screens in the mid-1960s. During this time revisionist history, critically examining the commonly accepted versions of historical events, began to be popular on college campuses. Similarly, anti-westerns consciously rejected the heroic components of western historical events or, like much activist rhetoric of the 1960s suggested that the idealist assumptions of the traditional Western formula were naive and masked the racism, violence and greed of the historical conquest of the West. The Wyatt Earp gunfight at the OK Corral, for example, had been presented in earlier movies as an heroic defense of family and community. Two anti-westerns pictured the event much differently. Hour of the Gun (1968) shows the famous gunfight as a consequence of a near-psychotic urge for revenge. Doc (1971) suggests that the killings were precipitated in part by Earp's political ambition and in part by his repressed homosexual lust for the gunfighter Doc Holiday. Another famous historical figure, Billy the Kid, who had invariably been seen sympathetically on screen as a victim of society, is depicted in Dirty Little Billy (1972) as a mentally deficient punk whose murderous impulses were brought to a full flowering by a depraved environment in the West. Anti-Westerns featuring historical struggles between whites and Native Americans were especially virulent in their condemnation of whites. The Sand Creek Massacre in Soldier Blue (1970) and Custer's Last Stand in Little Big Man (1971) are both presented as the result of the literally insane leadership of white troops. Often, the movies went to unfair extremes in their attempt to correct stereotypes. In Ulzana's Raid (1972), the savagery of the Indians is presented as consistent with their cultural beliefs, while equal savagery by the white cavalry results from racism and uncontrolled emotions.

Many anti-Westerns, instead of taking a new look at specific characters or events, sought a rethinking of traditional attitudes about the West by reversing earlier patterns of the Western formula itself. For example, in There Was a Crooked Man (1970) Henry Fonda, who for a generation was a symbol of the integrity of the Western hero, plays a hypocritical prison warden who grabs a bagful of stolen loot and happily runs off to Mexico. One of the best made of the anti-westerns, Martin Ritt's Hombre (1967), intentionally reverses the pattern of John Ford's 1939 classic Stagecoach. Whereas in Stagecoach most of the passengers are flawed but essentially good people who eventually find their better selves and a new life, in Hombre all but two of the passengers are rotten to the core. Stagecoach ends with John Wayne killing the evil Plummer boys and riding off with the woman he loves. Hombre ends with Paul Newman's senseless death and the woman's loneliness and grief.

The most striking of the anti-Westerns were the Italian "spaghetti" Westerns. 20 The highly successful release in 1967 of Sergio Leone's 1964 film A Fistful of Dollars, with Clint Eastwood, set off a craze for Italian-made Westerns starring American actors. Leone's "man with no name" trilogy of films released in America the same year, Fistful, For a Few Dollars More and the three-hour The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, are both typical of and the best of the sub-genre. All three partially parody the Western formula with an overstated style featuring an almost endless number of killings, lush musical background, huge closeups of faces and the melodramatic lengthening of climactic scenes. Against this operatic background, Leone presents protagonists who are stirred into action by personal vendettas or greed for money, thus trivializing Western violence by showing the seedy intentions that lie behind majestic events. Ironically, Leone himself apparently got caught up in the epic qualities of his style. His most critically praised film, Once upon a Time in the West (1969), retains the baroque colorations of the trilogy but applies them to genuinely epic events, such as the founding of towns in the western wilderness and the building of the transcontinental railroad.

The vogue for anti-westerns rose and fell with the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s. None of any consequence has appeared since 1973. Because Westerns since the late '60s have presented a much less idealized picture of the frontier West, it appears that anti-Westerns were an important influence on the entire genre.

A third general type of Western, the elegiac, was to some degree influenced by the negativism of anti-westerns, even though the elegiac Western has its roots in earlier themes. As far back as The Gunfighter (1950) and Shane (1953), there were suggestions that the individualistic frontier hero had outlived his time. It was in 1962, however, that this theme came to a full flowering in three memorable movies. David Miller's Lonely Are the Brave is a modern-day story of the flight of a cowboy (Kirk Douglas) who breaks jail because he can no longer abide civilizaton. His escape ends when his horse is run down by a truck hauling a load of toilets. Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country featured fine performances by veteran Western stars Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, who played aging westerners testing the integrity of their lives one more time by taking on a job delivering gold from a mountain mine, and rescuing a young bride from a family of maniacal in-laws. John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance showed the old-time western man of action, John Wayne, eclipsed in the changing West by Jimmy Stewart, who begins as a lawyer insisting that the law must replace brute force on the frontier, and ends as a prominent U.S. Senator. All three pictures set their time frames a decade or more after the usual era of traditional Westerns, which is 1866–1886. All three films also featured heroes no longer at ease in a West moving past its frontier origins. And, most importantly, all three films presented their aging protagonists as majestically noble in their gritty individualism, and juxtaposed their virtue against a new West only slightly less corrupt than the decadent frontier of the anti-Westerns. In these elegiac Westerns, as well as in later ones such as Death of a Gunfighter (1968), Will Penney (1968), Monte Walsh (1970) and Tom Horn (1980), we mourn the loss of the hero. The film message is all too clear– there are no longer men capable of replacing him; there is no longer a West that appreciates him; there is no longer a frontier worth fighting for.

The most noted director of elegiac Western movies, as well as the most critically praised creator of modern Westerns, is Sam Peckinpah. 21 Besides Ride the High Country, Peckinpah developed a vision of radically individual characters in an increasingly conformist West in The Wild Bunch (1969), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), Junior Banner (1972) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). The Wild Bunchinfluential and controversial mainly because of two extraordinarily bloody shootouts given a gory beauty by being filmed in slow motion, is the only elegiac Western most critics agree is a definite classic of the genre. In the film, the Bunch is a gang of outlaws led by two veteran gunmen (William Holden and Ernest Borgnine) who maintain that above all else, a man must be loyal to the men he rides with, even though it is 1912 and railroads and corporations have made frontier outlawry obsolete. This code is threatened when the youngest member of the Bunch is taken prisoner by a Mexican renegade officer who has hundreds of troops and is in total control of a weak and immoral town. At the famous climax of the film when the prisoner is murdered right in front of them, the Bunch retains its honor by suicidally shooting it out with the renegade troops. The beauty of the slow-motion carnage becomes Peckinpah's poem of praise for violent men who have the nerve to choose to die with the same bloody code of honor with which they had chosen to live.

The most notable elegiac Western of the 1970s was Don Siegel's The Shootist, a film which not only dramatizes the story of J. B. Books, a dying gunfighter, but also successfully sums up the career of the film's star John Wayne, who, like Books, was soon to die of cancer and who was playing in his last movie. The Shootist begins with a montage of clips from Wayne's old Westerns, suggesting that Books and Wayne are identical. This relationship is strengthened when Books says his code of life is, "I will not be wronged. I won't be insulted. I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people and I require the same from them"–thus echoing Wayne's own private views. When the admirable Books dies in The Shootist's final shootout it is 1901, the beginning of modern America. It is easy to see in that ending, and in the death of John Wayne which followed not long after, a symbolic death of the Western film itself and a future in which the form no longer has an important place.

The essential characteristic of experimental Westerns, the fourth broad category, is not the attitude toward the traditional Manifest Destiny ideology of the Western nor the violent individualism of its heroes, but a fascination with the Western form itself. Makers of experimental Westerns take a playful attitude toward the genre and manipulate the form to achieve highly personal visions, as well as to extend some of the implications of the earlier films upon which their experiments are based. Philip Kaufman's exhilarating The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) is perhaps the most obvious example. Kaufman playfully debunks the older, formulaic movie heroics of the James-Younger gang. 22 Jesse's idea for the raid, for example, is actually "conceived" while sitting in an outhouse where he reads notes scribbled by Cole Younger, though he claims the idea has come to him in a religious vision. At the same time, however, Kaufman affirms Western heroism by picturing Cole Younger as genuinely admirable. In yet another reversal of the Western formula, Cole becomes heroic because he foresees and embraces a mechanized twentieth century, an attitude directly opposite those of the outlaw heroes of elegiac Westerns. Kaufman films all of these goings-on in an energetic, self-conscious style suggestive of the French "new wave" directors.

Other experimental Westerns of the 1970s, taken together, have explored broad new vistas in the popular frontier landscape. Robert Altman's lyrical McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1972) equated the Western hero with the small town entrepreneur. Sidney Pollack's Jeremiah Johnson (1973), stunningly photographed amidst the Rocky Mountains in wide-screen 70mm, gave unprecedented importance to the frontier environment. The title character does not obtain his heroic credentials by conquering the wilder-ness. Instead his full status as a legendary mountain man is earned only after he has allowed himself to be fully absorbed into the mountains and all their wildness. John Houston's The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) comically debunks frontier heroism in the first half of the film, but in the second half demonstrates the need for western heroic individualism in the modern era. Another Robert Altman film, Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976), is a crazy quilt of juxtaposed attitudes toward Manifest Destiny and white-Indian conflicts. Altman seems to conclude that legend, history and fiction are all ultimately determined by "the show business," and that illusion and reality are inseparable.

Other experimental Westerns were less exhilarating. Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks (1976), for example, presented a highly eccentric performance by Marlon Brando as a trickster–bounty hunter. It proved to be an expensive failure with critics and at the box office. William Fraker's The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981) suffered a similar fate when a hackneyed script and wooden acting ruined an attempt to modernize the old radio and television hero. For the most part, however, experimental Westerns added a fresh vitality to the familiar, giving the story itself new life even as it seemed to be expiring at the box office.

The box office popularity of Westerns was momentarily revived in late 1979 by the success of Sidney Pollack's The Electric Horseman, a modern elegiac Western contrasting the real virtues of cowboys with the phoney glitter of Las Vegas. By 1980, newspapers all over the United States were running stories predicting the popular revival of Western movies. But the promised boom quickly became a bust when two new Westerns, Broncho Billy and The Long Riders, after receiving enthusiastic reviews, both did mediocre business. The near-permanent doom of movie Westerns occurred in 1981 when Michael Cimino's spectacular dramatization of the Johnson County War, Heaven's Gate, was such a dismal flop that United Artists, the studio that produced the film, wrote it off as a forty-million-dollar loss, the largest loss on any picture in the entire history of American movies.

It is not hard to relate this decline of the mass appeal of movie Westerns to the erosion of popularity of the television Western. 23 During the socially tumultuous 1960s and 1970s audiences of both media apparently lost a hold on the simplistically optimistic version of American history provided by the formula Western, and were no longer thrilled by Indian wars, home-steading, or the building of railroads. Although big screen Westerns hung on into the 1980s by adjusting their formulas and attracting talented young filmmakers, modern movie Westerns like TV Westerns became dramatically less popular than their pre-1960 antecedents.

POPULAR WESTERN LITERATURE

Unlike the Western radio or television series whose popularity waxed and waned according to various media-specific developments, the popular Western novel has enjoyed a consistent and notable following from the nineteenth century to the present. With its foundation firmly in the dime novels, the Wild West shows, the pulps, and the popular Western formula, Western fiction has simply been more fully developed than its counterparts in the other mass media. From its earliest manifestations through the writings of Owen Wister, Zane Grey and Max Brand, the popular Western novel appealed to eastern sensibilities rather than western. 24 Other Western writers, such as Ernest Haycox, Luke Short and Louis L'Amour, weaned the form away from its eastern mindset and planted it more firmly in western soil.

The Western of post–World War II years is marked by two major tendencies. First, because novels, like radio, had to compete against the ever more popular television, like radio they fought back with realistic, toughminded content. However, despite changes in content, the tone has continued to be romantic and idealized. The contemporary Western novel thus strikes a precarious balance between the audience's need for realism and romanticism; however gritty the plot becomes, the results remain hopeful and optimistic.

The second major distinguishing characteristic of the postwar Western is its emphasis on reality of setting. What Western writers and Western readers are interested in is a good story which not only entertains but also informs them about the American West. In his fine study The Dime Novel Western, 26 FONT SIZE=3 FACE="Garamond"> Daryl Jones notes that the late nineteenth-century public grew less and less tolerant of the increasing sexual and violent content of many of the dime novels, whose sales fell off notably. The Western story, in fact, seems to have gone through several cycles of birth, sordid adulthood, and rebirth during its one hundred and fifty-plus years of existence. Jones quite accurately pinpoints the popular appeal of the "cleansed" Western story:

That we are still reluctant today to abandon our vision of an ideal world, a moment's glance at a newsstand, a theater marquee, or a television program guide will instantly confirm. The medium has changed, but the popular Western lives on. To be sure, the message is neither so simple nor so reassuring as it once was. With the advance of the twentieth century have come cultural and worldwide dilemmas which have brought about significant alterations on the familiar formula. . . . Altered, inverted, even parodied, the popular Western formula nonetheless survives. And it will continue to survive as long as it extends to humanity some glimmer of hope that a golden age still lies ahead. 27

The modern popular Western, like its early predecessors, views the American West as a "golden age" which did not allow spiritual or physical weaknesses among the survivors. The heroes of the modern Western, however, can be philosophers on the range, men used to wrestling with ideas as well as cows, like those found in the novels of Ernest Haycox. Haycox, like a number of his contemporaries in the post-1930 period, added a historical dimension to some of his Westerns which, while heightening the realism, did not diminish the idealism. The author of twenty-four novels from the late '30s to early '50s, Haycox penned several classic Westerns, including Trouble Shooter, The Border Trumpet, Alder Gulch, Bugles in the Afternoon, and The Earthbreakers. Henry Wilson Allen in his "Will Henry" Westerns followed in the same tradition. In his Maheo's Children, the Sand Creek massacre plays a prominent role in the plot, and his From Where the Sun Now Stands depicts the annual trek of the Nez Perce Indians to follow the buffalo. 30 Luke Short also wrestled with the realities of the West in his works of romance. In Paper Sheriff, which is considered one of his best Westerns, the focus is on the importance of "group needs over individualistic interests," 31 a theme which marks a certain maturity of the Western formula. The emphasis on the historical West in each of their works allowed these writers to meet effectively the changing needs of the audience by providing them with hard information about the West, while at the same time engaging them in a romance. This compromise is not without its price, however. Paperback Westerns, which had been a staple of the publishing industry for more than three decades, have begun to decline in popularity. In 1975, for example, only sixty-five new paperback Westerns were published out of a total of 177 which were distributed; the other 112 were reissues. 32

The most dominant type of Western on the newsstands at present is the adult Western series, which does not exclude sex and violence. George G. Gilman's "Edge" series, Jake Logan's "Slocum" series, and Tabor Evans's "Longarm" series are only three of the many adult Western series now commanding an impressive part of the popular Western marketplace, leaving the casual peruser of the paperback racks with the impression that in the Western market the only competition adult Westerns have are reissues, or Louis L'Amour's novels. While adult Westerns do not seem to be consistent with the mainstream popular Western tradition, at least one critic, Gary Hoppenstand, has suggested that rather than a "bizarre outgrowth of the genre," adult Westerns might be an evolution of the approach of the Western romance towards sex and violence. He argues that the sex and violence of the adult Western series have been there all along–they have simply been more fully developed in this stage of the Western romance's evolution. 33

While other writers like Jack Schaefer, whose Shane helped to elevate the Western paperback to new levels of respectability, deserve serious analy sis as well, perhaps the most representative author of the mainstream popular Western tradition is the bestselling and prolific Louis L'Amour, who has been ranked by Saturday Review as the third top-selling writer in the world. 34 L'Amour clearly believes in a responsible and responsive West populated by the restrained and civilized. He has a considerable talent for perceiving the needs and interests of his audience and, after three decades of writing Western novels, has been able to establish his own genre against which the works of other popular Western writers are judged. L'Amour has developed a strong, personal relationship with many of his readers. He writes:

As for myself, whatever else I may be I am a storyteller. I see myself as carrying on the story of my people just as the shanachies in Ireland and the Druids before them, and as Homer did in Greece. . . . 35

Telling stories is my way of life. . . . My intention has always been to tell stories of the frontier, the sort of stories I heard when growing up. 36

L'Amour's fiction can be used as a touchstone for the modern popular literary Western because of its universal appeal and continuing success in the marketplace. In addition to providing his audience with enjoyable stories, he also provides them with a popular history of the settlement of America by focusing on family dynasties, vernacular architecture, the cultural history of the American Indian, women's roles on the American frontier, cowboy customs, and myriad other details of nineteenth-century American life.

From the 1950s Hondo to his most recent Sackett novel, Louis L'Amour's works remain convincing examples of the viability of the mainstream popular Western story, presenting the historical West in something like an oral tradition. But the successes of the adult Western series also serve as convincing examples of what many perceive to be the evolution of the Western story form into a distinctly different type of story. Still others perceive the two forms, the mainstream popular Western story and the adult Western series, as linked in an evolutionary process where the latter is developing elements already present in the former. Whatever the specific form or forms the popular Western story takes, it seems reasonable to suggest that it will continue to remain a strong force in the popular literary marketplace. One possible explanation for the longevity of the popular Western story in its many forms is that writers like Ernest Haycox, Luke Short, and Louis L'Amour are really telling versions of one, long epic tale unfolded over an extended period of time through the efforts of a number of skilled storytellers.

The death of John Wayne, the movies' greatest Western star, symbolically suggests a place to mark the demise of the modern popular Western. By that date, hoofbeats on the radio had been silent for a generation. Both the film and television media had become incapable of producing a Western hit. Even the long-lived Western novel showed signs of aging. However, though the popularity of the Western theme has declined, its struggle to maintain a place in American life has brought about a thematic maturity and dignity to the popular Western formula. Where early or "classic" Westerns had affirmed the European-American taking and taming of the West, modern Westerns often did not. Radio and television Westerns such as Gunsmoke sometimes suggested that pioneering could mean no more than a slow death on a barren prairie. Movies often explored the negative side of the settlement of the West, such as the pathology behind much outlaw violence and the racism at the heart of the Indian wars. Even Western novels, the form that most strongly retained the values of "classic" Westerns, moved in the direction of stronger characterization and a closer fidelity to historical accuracy.

During the 1980s the formula Western refuses to pass completely from the scene. Western novels stubbornly maintain their slots in paperback book racks. Just as significant, perhaps, is the persistence of images from popular Westerns in the media. Popular music stars such as Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings still sell millions of records featuring songs about cowboys. During the early '80s, Western-style bars and cowboy clothes were a billion-dollar fad. On television, ads for chewing tobacco, gum, beer, aftershave lotion and numerous other products all ride into American homes on the shoulders of popular Western heroes. The continuing presence of these images suggests the remaining, latent attraction of the popular Western. When the national mood changes and is again receptive to frontier stories, it is not unlikely that a third significant period of popular Western storytelling will engage America's national imagination.

MICHAEL T. MARSDEN AND JACK NACHBAR
Bowling Green State University

Notes

1. Michael T. Marsden, "The Modern Western," Journal of the West 19 (January 1980): 54–61.

2. (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1971). 3. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976). 4. J. Fred MacDonald, Don't Touch That Dial! (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979), pp. 195–229.

5. MacDonald, p. 211.

6. Jim Harmon, The Great Radio Heroes (New York: Ace Books, 1967), p. 108.

7. MacDonald, p. 203.

8. MacDonald, pp. 209–210.

9. MacDonald, p. 220.

10. MacDonald, p. 225.

11. MacDonald, p. 226.

12. (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1974).

13. (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1975).

14. A possible exception to this argument is Little House on the Prairie, which premiered on NBC in 1974 and lasted until 1983. Although its locale is frontier Minnesota during the 1880s, it has not been included in this survey because its stories were primarily domestic-rural in emphasis. The themes of settlement, justice and violence which are normally associated with Westerns were only dealt with occasionally on episodes of Little House on the Prairie.

15. Figures were compiled from Les Adams and Buck Rainey, Shoot-Em-Ups (New York: Arlington House, 1978).

16. For a more detailed discussion of the relationship between the B Western and television see George N. Fenin and William K. Everson, The Western: From Slents to the Seventies (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973), pp. 301–317.

17. Jim Kitses, Horizons West (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), pp. 29–87.

18. Philip French, Western, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 12–47.

19. John H. Lenihan, Showdown (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980).

20. For a full-length treatment of this sub-genre, see Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).

21. For a full-length analysis of Sam Peckinpah's Westerns see Paul Seydor, Peckinpah: The Western Films (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980).

22. Don Graham, "The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid and the Cinematic Legend of Jesse James," Journal of Popularar Film 6 (1977): 77–85.

23. For an analysis of film Westerns that closely parallels the description of the evolution of the television Western described by Ralph and Donna Brauer in The Horse, the Gun and the Piece of Property (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1975), see Will Wright, Sixguns and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 29–185.

24. In his Exploration and Empire (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1966), William Goetzmann argues that the wilderness has traditionally been a screen upon which generations of easterners have projected images of what they thought the West ought to be. The explorers and settlers simply made the West over according to their memories of the East. And why, we might ask, should popular Westerns be any different, especially given the expectations of their largely eastern readership in the early decades of their development?

25. Marsden, p. 56.

26. (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1978).

27. Jones, pp. 167–8.

28. Richard W. Etulain, The Literary Career of a Western Writer: Ernest Haycox, 1899–1950 (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oregon, 1966), pp. 195–6.

29. Robert L. Gale, "Ernest Haycox," in Fifty Western Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, Fred Erisman and Richard W. Etulain, eds. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 183.

30. Anne Falke, "Clay Fisher or Will Henry? An Author's Choice of Pen Name," in The Popular Western: Essays Toward a Definition, Richard W. Etulain and Michael T. Marsden, eds. (Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular Press, 1974), p. 51.

31. Richard W. Etulain, "Luke Short," in Fifty Western Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, p. 439.

32. Clarence Petersen, "How the West (North, East, South and Midwest) Was Won," Chicago Tribune Book World, July 4, 1976, Section 7, p. 3.

33. Gary Hoppenstand, "Foraging in the Virginless Land: Development and Definition of the Weird Western" (unpublished essay, 1982), p. 17.

34. Tad Bartimus, "Romances Make Her Rich," Toledo Blade (August 17, 1981).

35. Letter to Michael Marsden, March 1, 1979.

36. Letter to Michael Marsden, January 3, 1979.

[Contents]    [Index]

© Texas Christian University Press, 1998. All rights reserved.