Westerns

Abstract

Westerns Ed Minus (bio) Here is Graham Greene reviewing movies for the Spectator (London) on an infamous date, 1 September 1939: Dodge City is a good example of the Western formula; pioneers build their city, racketeers build gambling halls; pioneers though outnumbering gunmen a hundred to one, are all old men with Bibles, old ladies sewing shirts for the little ones, the little ones themselves, poor widows, and a few mortality types: straight-shooting cowboy is asked to become sheriff, refuses, sees child killed, accepts, cleans up. There is always one moment of excellent drama when cowboy advances slowly toward gunmen along sidewalk or across square (see The Virginian and Stagecoach). Personally, I never tire of those pictures. In that last sentence Greene is speaking for many generations of moviegoers and, indirectly, many generations of readers all around the globe. For no genre, classical or modern, has been more formulaic, yet more protean, more American than the Western. Gangster movies have at times, as in recent decades in this country, been more popular, and they do indeed offer some—but only some—of the same pleasures. But they have never totally eclipsed [End Page 82] the Western, which has been mythologized, demythologized, romanticized, deromanticized, spoofed, mongrelized, inflated, deflated, politicized, allegorized—transmogrified in every conceivable way. But they’re still here (to adapt a lyric by Stephen Sondheim, who, unlike Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Lowe, has not yet written a Western). On the other hand it can be cogently argued that the true Western classics are works of nonfiction—from the Lewis and Clark journals right on up to the memoirs of Ivan Doig and the histories of Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher. But that’s an essay for another time. I was a year old when Greene reviewed Dodge City, but I grew up on double-feature B Westerns at the Grand Theatre on East Poinsett Street in Greer, South Carolina: movies in which one or another of the same half dozen or so cowboys, along with their codependent sidekicks and on codependent horses, galloped down the same draws and passes or confronted the same bad guys on that same dusty street, straight as a plumb line, that runs east to west through the American mind. What was surprising was that Tim McCoy and Bob Steele never bumped into each other, given the frequency with which they rounded headlong the self-evidently same boulders week after week. It is significant that, as I will suggest later on, women and children were in short supply in those movies: maybe an occasional schoolmarm or, in the relatively rare barroom scenes (youngsters were the ostensible target audience), a buxom floozie, who would generally, sooner rather than later, trudge upstairs to an entirely different movie. What the B Westerns offered, on the most basic and invariable level, was what the more sophisticated Westerns offered: intensely satisfying unsurprise. I graduated of course to those more prestigious Westerns and became, like everybody else, a habitué of the form. I especially liked John Ford’s black-and-white Westerns, but I was never a typical all-American fan because I had from the start a hard-wired resistance to the well-nigh universal appeal of both John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. It was not just that they were wooden actors, for neither was unique in that respect; it was more that I detected, as an unmistakable component of their vaunted machismo, a strong whiff of pomposity. In the summer 2009 issue of the Threepenny Review Javier Marías informs us that “nowadays, everyone—apart from the occasional conceited Spanish director—considers The Searchers (1956) to be not only one of John Ford’s greatest masterpieces, but one of the best movies in the history of the cinema”—an absurdly and patently insupportable opinion. Numerous critics better qualified than Marías consider The Searchers a moralistic and awkwardly constructed melodrama with more than its full share of Ford’s heavy-handed comic relief (largely in the person of Hank Worden as Mose Allison, a character who is retarded). Wayne plays a rabid Indian-hater in search of his nieces who have been abducted by...