Kitses Rides Again

Abstract

Kitses Rides Again David Boyd (bio) Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood, by Jim Kitses, BFI Publishing, 2004. The original version of Horizons West, published back in 1969 as part of the British Film Institute's Cinema One series, was a tightly packed little book focusing on three filmmakers whom Jim Kitses persuasively argued could "be said to have found their essence within the Western": Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, and Sam Peckinpah. At the time, Kitses' three directors of choice were probably more or less equally well-regarded by Western aficionados and more or less equally disregarded by everybody else, but over the subsequent decades their critical fortunes were to diverge radically; Mann has been largely (and unjustly) forgotten, while Boetticher has become a minor cult-figure and Peckinpah the subject of an academic growth-industry. Kitses' little book, however, has consistently, and rightly, continued to enjoy an esteem quite separate from that of its subjects. It was, and it remains, one of the most influential books ever written on the Western, and an exemplary piece of generic criticism. Thirty-five years later, Kitses has come riding back into town toting an altogether heftier tome in his saddle bag. The new version of Horizons West is more than twice as long as the original, and more than twice as expansive in its historical scope, extending from Stagecoach (John Ford, US) in 1939 (with brief glances back at John Ford's silent westerns) up to Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, US) in 1992. The original chapters on Mann and Boetticher reappear with only minor additions (Mann made his last western in 1960, and Boetticher his in 1969), but the Peckinpah chapter is considerably extended to include his later films, with a particularly persuasive and eloquent section on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (US, 1973), "a languorous dirge, a drifting death-poem, a post-modern lament for an earlier America," which Kitses regards as "Peckinpah's ultimate statement." (229) The enlargement of the book results primarily, however, from the addition of chapters on Ford—with a detailed study of his fourteen westerns from Stagecoach to Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford, US, [End Page 106] 1964) as long as the original book—Sergio Leone, and Clint Eastwood. Despite its extended historical range, however, and despite Kitses' unsettlingly Leavisite claim that "these six can be seen as constituting a great tradition of the western genre," the book makes no attempt to present itself as a comprehensive history of the genre. (1) Instead, Kitses confines his attention to directors whom he sees as western "specialists"; not just directors who made distinguished westerns, but whose directorial profile was defined by their westerns, unlike, most obviously, Howard Hawks, "whose films are equally accomplished and personal regardless of genre." (201). The inclusion of Eastwood in this company seems debatable at best, and becomes increasingly so with each new Eastwood film: only four of the twenty-five films he has directed are westerns, and it would surely be hard to argue that Mystic River (US, 2003) and Million Dollar Baby (US, 2004) are less central to his directorial output than High Plains Drifter (US, 1973) and Pale Rider (US, 1985). Kitses' "basic premise is that at its core the Western marries historical and archetypal elements in a fruitful mix that allows different filmmakers a wide latitude of creative play. Where Ford and Peckinpah generate an epic historical canvas, Mann, Boetticher and Eastwood explore archetypal and existential aspects of the frontier experience." (14) These relationships between authorship and genre, and between history and myth, although greatly elaborated here, were equally central to the original edition of the book. But the critical context in which the new edition appears is, of course, very different, and it is certainly no longer possible to claim, as the original did in its opening sentence, that "the western has yet received scant critical attention." On the contrary, the genre has been subject to a barrage of critical attention in recent years, most of it ideological in its concerns. Although Kitses insists that "such latter-day interpretations do not invalidate the auteurist and thematic analyses they build on," and although he unblushingly and...