Western Films: A Complete Guide by Brian Garfield

Abstract

Reviews 73 it, all three units of time going together to make up the imagination out of which he writes the book. And the imagination takes its material, the remem­ bered emotion, to create fiction. In Solo Wright Morris calls into question several myths of college-aged men, that one can take a cattle boat to the continent for one. And he also questions the myth among writers that one writes the better for experiencing Paris, and if possible a war. He also seems to be giving an example of what is true for the writer: that fiction is an attempt to get as close as possible to the description of an emotion. He is writing about the mind thinking about experience as the source of fiction. MARY WASHINGTON, Logan, Utah Western Films: A Complete Guide. By Brian Garfield. (New York: Rawson Associates, 1982. 386 pages, $24.95.) In the last two decades an increasing number of literary specialists have begun using films in their courses and have also become interested in writing about film. Among westerners the Western has especially gained a good deal of attention. For these scholars and for most students of the Western, the two best historical overviews have been George Fenin and William Everson’s The Western (1962, 1973) and Jon Tuska’s The Filming of the West (1976). Equally provocative are monographic studies by John Lenihan, Showdown (1980), John Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (1972) and Adventure, Mys­ tery, and Romance (1976), and Will Wright, Sixguns and Society (1975). The two most useful collections of essayson the Western are Jack Nachbar, ed. Focus on the Western (1974) and William T. Pilkington and Don Graham, eds. Western Movies (1979). While the volume under review differs in form and content from these previous studies, it too is a notable reference guide on the Western. Brian Garfield, a well-known author of Westerns and adventure novels, divides his useful volume into three parts. The first section (pp. 1-94) provides brief, overview discussions of several facets of the Western, including sections on the silents, the B-Westerns, the “talkies,” directors, writers, crews, and actors. The second section (pp. 95-358) is an extensive, film-by-film discussion of 1,500 “A” sound Westerns. The third section (pp. 359-86) contains three appendices briefly listing documentaries, juveniles, and TV and Spaghetti Westerns. Also in this section is an abbreviated, three-page discussion of the major book-length studies of the Western. Throughout this volume Garfield’scommentaries are discursive, opinion­ ated, and provocative. Generally, he prefers such classic Westerns as The Virginian (1929), Red River (1948), High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), the John Ford/John Wayne cavalry Westerns, and The Searchers (1956) to most films made after 1960 — for example, Little Big Man (1970), which he calls a “farcical satire veering from plausible comedy to simple-minded slapstick idiocy” (p. 219) and “sloppy, limp and inconclusive” (p. 220), and Butch 74 Western American Literature Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), which he evaluates as “merely a modern colorful reshaping with a pair of bemused and essentially pathetic characters” and “not nearly as sincere or important an effort as the contempor­ aneous The Wild Bunch” (p. 130). The one film Garfield singles out for first-rate status is The Wild Bunch, “the last great Western to have been filmed to date, and indeed one of the few great films of any kind” (p. 60). The long section on individual films varies a great deal in length and usefulness. While nearly all discussions contain listings of title, date, director, writer, cast, and length, evaluations sometimes are limited to a sentence or two and on a rare occasion extend to a full page. These analyses usually include brief plot summaries, commentary on major characters, and evaluations that are personal, often controversial, but still nearly always clear and straight­ forward. While Garfield’s interpretations do not follow a specific theme or train of thought, he does avoid too much plot summary and extraneous materials on directors and actors. In addition to castigating the auteur approach, he also eschews formalist and structuralist commentary. Instead, his lines of thinking are best described as personal and...