Television Westerns Research Articles

Race in a “Civil” Frontier: The Chinese-Story Western of the Civil Rights Era

ABSTRACT Today, when we think of the Western, we think of a genre dominated by white heroes conquering the obstacles of the frontier from daunting terrain to indigenous peoples. What we tend to forget – most likely because the most famous westerns did not show – is how Chinese immigrants played an important role in that history. The civil rights era film ‘Walk like a Dragon’ (James Clavell, 1960) is the only high-profile western which focused on the experiences of Chinese immigrants in the west. While Hollywood films of the 1950s and 1960s all but omitted Chinese immigrants from their vision of the frontier west, almost every television western included at least one ‘Chinese-story’ episode centered on Chinese immigrants and featuring Asian American actors. The representation of Chinese immigrants was not heterogeneous nor always progressive with some television westerns recycling out-moded tropes from decades past. What made the civil rights era film ‘Walk like a Dragon’ significant and unusual, even in the midst of the Chinese-story heyday on television, was its presentation of a Chinese immigrant through the visual iconography of the white western hero as a gunslinger and romantic victor.

The Enigma of Room 622 by Joël Dicker

Reviewed by: The Enigma of Room 622 by Joël Dicker J. Madison Davis JOËL DICKER The Enigma of Room 622 Trans. Robert Bononno. New York. HarperVia. 2022. 592 pages. ALMOST EVERY DAY the news reminds us of the immediate horror and lifelong repercussions of crimes both individual and more general. Yet mystery stories of murder, robbery, and other serious crimes have been a huge source of amusement at least since the industrialization of printing. We care little about the real consequences of stumbling across a murdered vicar in the stately library, though certainly we are aware of real murders, with genuinely suffering families and ambiguous explanations. As in gunfights in old television westerns, the violence in most mysteries is so stylized that the psychological and emotional threats to the reader are muted to a childish level, one guaranteed not to raise deeper questions of life and death. A smattering of semi-lifelike characters work their [End Page 80] way through the entertaining investigation of a murder or two structuring a diverting puzzle for readers who don't want to be taxed too hard. Rich people misbehaving: we're all familiar with the pattern, familiar enough that it is immediately recognized and easily parodied. Even in its title, Swiss writer Joël Dicker's novel The Enigma of Room 622 raises the ghosts of Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, and all their cohort to parody the popular elements of the "Golden Age" mystery, including the "locked room" mystery, disguised identities, poisons hitherto unknown, and the upper crust in tuxedos and ball gowns plotting to control a family inheritance—in this case a Swiss bank. On top of this confection, Dicker tosses the metafictional bonbon of a lovelorn writer named Joël Dicker (naturellement!), who is persuaded by a libidinous woman named Scarlett (what else?) to investigate a scandalous murder that took place in his hotel. Though he initially resists, he apparently comes round to writing the story as we read it. Scarlett interrupts him now and then for more basic pleasures, but when Dicker commits to the book he is compelled to beg off from her ministrations. Besides which, he is still enamored of the woman he fled to the hotel to recover from. None of this is really relevant to the enigma of Room 622 itself, and it strikes one as a literary flourish in an attempt to elevate a Golden Age–style mystery above its humbler pulp lineage. Fortunately, however, the frame story maintains a safe distance, allowing the main story to flourish. A Swiss bank has remained under the control of the Ebezner family for several generations. The old man in charge is dying, and his son, Macaire, the heir presumptive, is another of those rich twits escaped from a Christie novel who has difficulty spelling the word "work" and seems particularly unsuited to becoming president of a distinguished bank. There are machinations in the board room, however, and Macaire is determined to avoid the humiliation of having someone else elected. Lev Levovitch worked his way from waiting on tables to the board through talent and intelligence. Sinior Tarnogol, a mysterious foreigner who has acquired a large part of the bank shares, seems to hold the most power in the decision, but there are also the Hansens: Horace and his son, Jean-Bénédict, Macaire's closest ally and a major candidate for upper-class twit of the year. All this is complicated by several other characters, such as a house servant who, unknown to Macaire, is in love with her master, and Anastasia, Macaire's wife, who has been in love with Lev Levovitch since before she married but has remained with Macaire because she loves him as well. Dicker is adept with his sleight of hand, concealing essential facts from the reader without being too annoying. We are deep in the novel, for instance, before we find out just who it is who has been murdered. He also exploits the common motion picture and fiction trick of time-shifting, which always risks disorienting the reader, but overall Dicker shows more adeptness in general with these literary tricks than most of the Golden Age...

Justified: Transitioning the Old TV Western Lawman into a New Television Protagonist

The western has long been a staple genre of American television. Starting in the late 1960s, however, the genre began falling out of favour as its stock content—the relatively simple moral exploration of right and wrong—shifted to detective shows and police procedurals. The “new television” trend, however, brought about a revival of the western. Central to this revival is the TV series Justified, which demonstrates that old western tropes and storylines can be made popular again if the tropes receive socially aware updates and moral questions about right and wrong are not presented with easy or obvious answers. This article provides a rhetorical analysis of the first season of Justified and identifies the specific strategies used to modernize the American western genre: (1) shifting from episodic to serial narrative structure; (2) presenting male characters struggling with identity roles within the context of contemporary identity/masculinity politics; (3) presenting female characters with more narrative complexity and agency; and (4) updating the setting to better engage cultural themes. It concludes by arguing that these strategies allowed the series to successfully revive the best elements of the old western and return the television western to a culturally relevant position.

The Outcasts: Racial Anxiety in the Television Western

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume 52, Issue 4 p. 773-792 Original Article The Outcasts: Racial Anxiety in the Television Western Caryn Murphy, Caryn MurphySearch for more papers by this author Caryn Murphy, Caryn MurphySearch for more papers by this author First published: 08 August 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12821Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume52, Issue4Special Issue: Super Cool, Super Baad!: Considerations of Blaxploitation in Film, Media, and Popular CultureAugust 2019Pages 773-792 RelatedInformation

Outlaw Heroes as Liminal Figures of Film and Television by Rebecca A. Umland

Reviewed by: Outlaw Heroes as Liminal Figures of Film and Television by Rebecca A. Umland Alan Baragona rebecca a. umland, Outlaw Heroes as Liminal Figures of Film and Television. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2016. Pp. 296. isbn: 978–0–7864–7988–7. $39.95. It is an old-said saw that 'all comparisons are odious.' So Rebecca Umland has waded into somewhat dangerous waters as she seeks to compare Casablanca's Rick Blaine, Shane, Dirty Harry, and Batman, among others, to the medieval knight errant in general and to Malory's Lancelot in particular. In Outlaw Heroes as Liminal Figures of Film and Television, Umland traces the origin of the heroic loner in Hollywood films about cops, vigilantes, and action heroes back to cinematic and television westerns (including the 'disguised western' Casablanca), and ultimately to medieval romance and the figure of the knight, principally Malory's Lancelot. The book is organized into three sections. The Introduction and Part I begin by establishing the typology of the literary knight first in the Middle Ages and then as reinterpreted primarily in the Victorian Age. Umland then traces the lone knight errant as reincarnated on film in Casablanca and Shane and on television in The Lone Ranger and Have Gun—Will Travel. Part II treats two Hollywood franchises that begin in the 1970s, the maverick cop Dirty Harry series and the vigilante Death Wish series. Ulmand refers to these as 'urban westerns.' Part III explores two more franchises featuring action heroes that combine aspects of both the cop and the vigilante into the 'elite warrior': Rambo and Batman (in this case, appropriately, focusing on the Batman of the so-called Dark Knight series). The connection between these real, disguised, and urban westerns and chivalric romance is unquestionable. Nor is it accidental. Batman is a 'dark knight'; the gunslinger/mercenary of Have Gun—Will Travel is named 'Paladin' and uses a chess knight on his business card. Through extensive research, Umland reveals less obvious connections, as well. In one episode of the Lone Ranger radio show, the voiceover says, 'there is a light that must have burned in the eyes of knights in armor' (p. 63). Shane, the novel says, represents 'all that makes a man' (p. 43), a phrase from Tennyson's Idylls of the King. The final season of Have Gun—Will Travel opened with an 'origin story' in which viewers learn the hero was given the name 'Paladin' by a mentor who not only perceives the hero as a 'gentleman knight in shiny armor' (p. 74), but calls the villain of the story a dragon. [End Page 81] Once Umland enters the deeper woods of medieval romance itself, however, the parallels become more tenuous. She finds three traits of the knight reflected in the liminal outlaw hero, characteristics that become a unifying theme throughout the book. First, they are loners, either wandering or in some self-imposed exile or isolation. Second, they are free from permanent domestic entanglements and, in the end, always remain in their loner state. And they act according to a private moral code, often a 'higher law' at odds with 'official' societal authority. These are the characteristics of the 'true knight' as gleaned from Umland's main source, Beverly Kennedy's classic Knighthood in the 'Morte Darthur.' One can see how Lancelot might illustrate all three traits. He often wanders on errantry; he cannot marry; and, most importantly, when Guenevere is condemned to the stake for adultery, Lancelot, according to Umland, puts his personal code of honor and love above the law, rescues her, and precipitates a civil war with the official authority, King Arthur. Yet, upon closer examination of Lancelot's story in comparison to, say, Shane or Rick Blaine, cracks appear in the analogy. First, a knight errant is not a drifter. He is seeking whatever aventure God gives him to increase his worship at court, so errantry is socially sanctioned. Nor is he disillusioned or otherwise damaged, like Shane or Rick or even the Lone Ranger. The hero knight's moral code is not individualistic or at odds with official authority. The libertarian streak so prominent in the myth of the West is alien...

Hoo-doo cowboys and bronze buckaroos: conceptions of the African American West

Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos undertakes an interdisciplinary exploration of the African American West through close readings of texts from a variety of media. This approach allows for both an in-depth analysis of individual texts and a discussion of material often left out or underrepresented in studies focused only on traditional literary material. The book engages heretofore unexamined writing by Rose Gordon, who wrote for local Montana newspapers rather than for a national audience; memoirs and letters of musicians, performers, and singers (such as W. C. Handy and Taylor Gordon), who lived in or wrote about touring the American West; the novels and films of Oscar Micheaux; black-cast westerns starring Herb Jeffries; largely unappreciated and unexamined episodes from the golden age of western that feature African American actors; film and television westerns that use science fiction settings to imagine a postracial or postsoul frontier; Percival Everett's fiction addressing contemporary black western experience; and movies as recent as Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. Despite recent interest in the history of the African American West, we know very little about how the African American past in the West has been depicted in a full range of imaginative forms. Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos advances our discovery of how the African American West has been experienced, imagined, portrayed, and performed.

Television Westerns: Six Decades of Sagebrush Sheriffs, Scalawags, and Sidewinders (review)

Reviewed by: Television Westerns: Six Decades of Sagebrush Sheriffs, Scalawags, and Sidewinders Cynthia J. Miller Television Westerns: Six Decades of Sagebrush Sheriffs, Scalawags, and Sidewinders. By Alvin H. Marill. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2011. 190 pages, $49.95. Click for larger view View full resolution Jane Hilton. KENNY AND JOANNE GOODE, POWDERMONKEY (EXPLOSIVES EXPERT), CORTEZ, COLORADO. 2007. ©Jane Hilton. From the 1950s onward, tales of lawmen and outlaws, one-horse towns and wide open spaces, the coming of the railway and the vanishing of the frontier, have all been brought to life on American television, serving as mainstays of popular entertainment. Alvin H. Marill's Television Westerns offers an overview of these small-screen offerings that covers the last six decades—focusing on production and broadcast rather than cultural analysis—an ambitious task for this concise volume, the last of the author's career. Marill is well known for his numerous publications, among them Keeping Score: Film and Television Music, 1988-1997 (2005) and his two volumes dedicated to Movies Made for Television (2010). Marill's discussion of televised Westerns begins with late 1940s Western programming aimed at children's audiences. These early programs, often local, included puppet features such as Howdy Doody, The Adventures of Cyclone Malone, Rex Trailer's Oky Doky Ranch, and The Buffalo Billy Show. From these emerged the well-known series that have come to define early televised Westerns: Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, The Gene Autry Show, The Cisco Kid, and The Roy Rogers Show. The volume's examination of the genre's life on the small screen ends, essentially, with HBO's Deadwood—though very brief mention is given to Justified (unfortunately, referred to in the text as Justice). The final episode of Deadwood, for Marill, signals the genre's ride into the sunset of televised entertainment. The volume's twelve chapters treat the televised Western thematically, with extensive overviews covering powerhouse series such as Wagon Train, Bonanza, The Virginian, The Big Valley, and made-for-television Westerns, including The Over-the-Hill Gang and Purgatory, along with chapters on miniseries, pilots, cartoons, documentaries, and Western-themed episodes in non-Western series such as The Dick Van Dyke Show, Superman, I Dream of Jeannie, and Star Trek. The content of these chapters is bracketed by brief chapters of introduction and conclusion, in which the author offers commentary on the importance and impact of Westerns on TV. Of particular interest is an early chapter on "The Western, Disney Style," which discusses programming offered by Disney, Kraft, Philco, and others that provided American viewers with romanticized historical fiction in formats that were undoubtedly familiar from other Disney products. This was, as Marill notes, a pivotal time for the televised Western, as the unprecedented popularity of shows such as Davy Crockett assured [End Page 217] a place for frontier tales in the cultural economy of American entertainment. Marill presents readers with a comprehensive elaboration of televised Westerns, interrelating material typically covered in volumes focused on individual anthologies or production companies. However, the volume also offers Westerns scholars considerable frustration in its brief and sometimes superficial discussion of many of the topics covered. This uneven treatment works in the favor of well-known, long-running series and made-for-TV movies but shortchanges many less-central topics, such as cartoons and Western-themed episodes, with some chapters as brief as six or eight pages. As might be expected, the brevity of these treatments leads to numerous omissions and, in many cases, citation, rather than the discussion afforded entries in other areas. While these chapters suggest that much ground exists to be explored in their respective topics, those explorations are not carried out thoroughly here. The information presented is, nonetheless, valuable to media scholars who approach the book with a careful eye toward making the most of the volume's strengths. The series and televised films covered are not only significant in their role as American entertainment—many of these are, as Marill points out, the cornerstones of popular culture—they are part of an ongoing web of intertextuality that includes adaptations, appropriations, visual and textual references, borrowings, and inspirations in literature, music, film, and, of course, television. Cynthia...

Introduction: Television and the Depiction of the American West

Introduction:Television and the Depiction of the American West Michael K. Johnson, Guest Editor (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Blackfoot author James Welch watches They Died with Their Boots On (1941), a film depicting the life of George Armstrong Custer, starring Errol Flynn. In James Welch, dir. by Matteo Bellinelli, Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 1995. Two strangers walk into a bar. Outside, a wooden sign hanging over the entrance sways slightly in the wind. Inside, a thin layer of dust covers the bar, the scattered tables and chairs. An upright piano is against one wall. Three men are already inside. One of them has been drinking heavily. Another has the bearing—if not the uniform—of a lawman. His gun is holstered on his hip. The strangers are also armed. The five men share a drink. "To better days and new friends," toasts one of the strangers. As the talk continues, it becomes clear that the two strangers want something from the other men, who aren't willing to give them what they want. The conversation becomes tense. One of the strangers stands up and leaps over to the other side of the bar. The lawman's hand falls to his hip. The stranger smiles, puts his own gun on top of the bar, and reaches underneath to grab a bottle, which he opens and pours. [End Page 123] The other stranger moves slowly over to lean against a wall—and to shift his rifle from the strap on his back to his hands. The stranger behind the bar suddenly moves for his gun, but the lawman is faster, his first shot hitting the stranger in the head, his second shot taking out his partner—before either stranger can fire a shot. Any regular viewer of Westerns has seen this scenario—or variations thereof—played out dozens of times. What is surprising is that this scene takes place not in a Western but in AMC's contemporary zombie series The Walking Dead (2010-present), in an episode titled "Nebraska" (2.8). Perhaps even more surprisingly, given that the television Western has widely been considered a dead genre since the 1970s, The Walking Dead is filled with allusions to Westerns. In the scene described above, the barroom set would need only slight alterations to be made into a Western saloon. We also see prominently displayed on a wall a poster that reads: "Pawnee Bill Shows, WILD WEST, Touring America This Season." A drawing of a charging buffalo is in the center of the poster. What stands out about the poster is the capitalized phrase "WILD WEST," which is visible in the background of multiple camera shots during the scene. The show signals its participation in the genre of the Western through such visual signs and through other allusions to Western conventions. The Walking Dead may literally take place in Georgia, but, metaphorically, we are in the "Wild West," a state of being brought about by the collapse of civilization in the wake of a viral infection that makes the dead walk. As Neil Campbell observes in "Post-Western Cinema," various com-mentators have been declaring the death of the film Western for going onto a century now. However, Campbell argues, "far from being dead," Westerns have survived by "traveling across generic boundaries, poaching and borrowing from many different earlier traditions, whilst contributing to the innovation of the genre" (409, 409-10). What is particularly notable about the Western genre over the twentieth and into the twenty-first century is its adaptability: its movement from one medium to another (from books to radio to film to television), its ability to be combined with other genres (science fiction, musicals, melodrama, zombie films) to create new hybrid forms, and its potential for including voices and experiences in hybrid forms that the classic Western often excludes. The "reinvention and survivance (its 'living on' in new or altered forms)"of the Western in cinema is also taking place in the medium of television (Campbell 409). Although the golden age of the television Western has long since passed, we have seen in the twenty-first century a remarkable rebirth of the portrayal...

Ladies of the Western: Interviews with 25 Actresses from the Silent Era to the Television Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s (review)

Ladies of the Western: Interviews with 25 Actresses from the Silent Era to the Television Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s (review)

Deadwood, Generic Transformation, and Televisual History

This article explores how Deadwood (HBO, 2004–2006) revises the relationship between televisual history and the television Western. It argues that Deadwood, in reinventing the Western as a “quality television” series, self-consciously undermines the generic conventions of the television Western and reconceptualizes the epistemological status of the Western genre.

Television Westerns, Termination, and Public Relations: An Analysis of the ABC Series Broken Arrow , 1956-1958

Television Westerns, Termination, and Public Relations:An Analysis of the ABC Series Broken Arrow, 1956-1958 Michael Ray Fitzgerald In hindsight we can easily say that the native people of North America were oppressed by three major forces: These were the government, religion and Hollywood....1 Chief Leonard George Depictions of Native Americans in American literature, film, and television often veer from denigration to veneration, rarely landing between these two extremes (Scotch 1960: 58-62; Berkhofer 1978: 71; Stedman 1982: 248-50; Wilson 1998: 41). As Peter Farb once explained, "Two images of the Indian—as Noble Red Man and as Blood Thirsty Savage—have prevailed in the minds of whites in the past 500 years, and feelings have tended to shift back and forth between the two" (1968: 245).2 It has been a simple—and serviceable—formula. The Native American was either an innocent child of nature or a murderous enemy of society. In the mid-1950s, however, although still trading at times on the Noble Savage trope (as did the 1950 movie on which it was based), ABC-TV's Broken Arrow (1956-1958) tried to break this mold, presenting Native American characters—the Chiracahua Apaches—in a realistic and reasonable manner. Apache characters appeared, it seemed, as individuals rather than as an undifferentiated mass. Their attitudes, ranging from pragmatic to rebellious, were not monolithic; they behaved as might any group of men (there were few women here) when threatened by encroachment. Many of them were undecided. They were not implacably hostile, nor were they submissive. They were willing and able to engage in rational discourse and to negotiate honorably. Sometimes they were confused. Cochise, their leader, was rarely hot-headed or emotional. He would take time to mull over his decisions and [End Page 48] operate according to the Apaches' unwritten laws and what he saw as their best interests.3 Click for larger view View full resolution In September 1956, when Broken Arrow debuted, The Lone Ranger was entering its seventh and final season, also on ABC. Comparisons between these two series illustrate how the western genre had changed in only a few years. Broken Arrow was more ambivalent than The Lone Ranger, a melodrama that tamed the Native American for its younger viewership.4 Moreover, while [End Page 49] The Lone Ranger purported to be only loosely based on history, Broken Arrow insisted that it was an accurate depiction of actual events, thus raising the political stakes of its depictions. This paper investigates that claim as it examines Broken Arrow's influence on the still-developing myth of the American West during the mid-1950s and the series' influence on the nation's domestic politics. Although conceptualized as a radical text, Broken Arrow eventually served as a public-relations vehicle for the U.S. government; it provided Euro-Americans with an honorific simulacrum of history; and it obscured the actual treatment of Native Americans during the Cold War years. The Myth of Multicultural America The western genre had long served as a flattering self-portrait of the Euro-American march across the continent. Although Hollywood had undergone intermittent cycles of "pro-Indian" films (Aleiss 2005: 15-38), Native Americans usually were depicted as homicidal maniacs with white settlers as their innocent victims, a classic example being John Ford's Stagecoach (Ford 1939). During World War II, however, this approach was suddenly moderated (Aleiss 2005: 70; Buscombe 2006: x). Fascism, with its racist overtones, had made depictions of the killing and displacement of minorities unpalatable, especially to many Jews in the film industry. The Roosevelt administration thus enlisted Hollywood executives and film producers in a program of creating "a mythic multicultural America in order to persuade a somewhat reluctant populace to unite in the war against the Axis" (Hoffman 1997: 45). The federal government was interested in promoting national unity as well as in recruiting minorities for military service. In tune with the shocks of the Depression, "[s]cheming businessmen and crooked bankers began to replace Indians as the frontier's villains" (Aleiss 2005: 70). After the war, stock depictions of "Injuns" as homicidal maniacs became an outright embarrassment for the U.S. Department of...

Small Screen, Smaller Pictures: Television Broadcasting And B-Movies In The Early 1950s

The exhibition of B-movies on television in the early 1950s is an area that has largely gone unnoticed in most literature surrounding the origins of television. Perhaps the most thorough account of...

Cowboy Capitalist

Page 28 American Book Review Cowboy Capitalist Michael Schumacher Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry Holly George-Warren Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com 480 pages; cloth, $28.00 Like most Baby Boomers, I spent countless hours of my childhood watching such television Westerns as Wagon Train, Have Gun, Will Travel, Rawhide, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Maverick, The Rifleman, and, of course, the most popular of them all, Bonanza. The Western seemed to hang on to the last traces of an adventuresome spirit and moral order, cast in a bygone era, yet teeming with timeless elements of universal human drama. It could be as politically incorrect as all hell, but what did we know? We were kids. We wore Davy Crockett (fake) coonskin caps and Gene Autry cap guns in genuine imitation leather holsters, and we made certain that the sounds of little brothers and sisters didn’t interfere with the sights and sounds of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the Lone Ranger, or the Cisco Kid, all transmitted on decisively low-def, rabbit-eared, black-and-white television. Then, we got older and forgot. Cynics might contend that it’s the mind’s way of protecting us from the dismay we’d suffer if we were reminded of a time when we, as Americans and individuals, had faith, when hearts were less easily broken by reality. Better to hurtle into the future with as little recall clutter as possible. Fortunately, we have writers like Holly GeorgeWarren to remind us of how wrong-headed this line of thinking really is. George-Warren is a masterful researcher and storyteller, and in Public Cowboy No. 1, her biography of “singing cowboy” Gene Autry, she has given us an account of a fascinating life lived at wide-open throttle (or gallop); of the American Dream fully imagined, pursued, and realized ; and, ultimately, of the evolution of the entertainment industry itself. And somehow, by the time you’ve reached the final pages of the book, you feel as if someone’s dropped a little loose change back in your pocket. That might not be faith, but it’s a decent feeling, in any event. It would be easy to suggest that Autry’s good fortune was the product of fortuitous timing, a fierce work ethic, the right connections, and a healthy spicing of fate, all judiciously blended to cater to a country grasping for hope, first in the wake of the devastating effects of the Depression, and, later, the hardships of World War II.All of this is true enough, but it was true of any number of other entertainers in the first half of the twentieth century. What made Autry different? What made him an entertainment pioneer rather than someone simply latching on to the latest trend? The answer, George-Warren suggests in her biography, might be found inAutry’s humble Oklahoma roots. From the beginning, Orvon Grover Autry (who would change his name to Gene when he started his professional career) had to find a way to make things work. His father, in a strange way, acted as a reverse role model, as an example of what not to do. DelbertAutry drifted from job to job, jail to jail, and marriage to marriage , leaving his sickly wife and children to fend for themselves. Orvon had no choice but to earn money to help with the bills, and self-discovery came along the way. He worked on the railroad, learned to play guitar, and, by initially imitating the popular recording and performing artists of the day, and making the most out of marginal talent, he began a career that would eventually place him near the top of the entertainment world. The key, George-Warren suggests, wasAutry’s ability to take a time-testedAmerican obsession—the West—and plug its nineteenth-century mythology and allure into the different elements of the following century’s popular culture. “Gene Autry embraced the tools of the twentieth century,” George-Warren writes in her introduction , “to make his way in the world—cutting phonograph records, broadcasting over the radio, appearing in motion pictures and, later, television— yet he found stardom by reinventing...

Family, Gender, and Society in 1950s American Fiction of Nuclear Apocalypse: Shadow on the Hearth, Tomorrow!, The Last Day, and Alas, Babylon

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 terminated World War II, by far the most costly war in human history in terms of lives lost and destruction of facilities and resources. For a very brief period, the bombings inaugurated a period of peace and triumph over the fascist empires that terrorized the world from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s. However, within just two years the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union began, and it quickly became apparent that the bombings had also introduced a new, even more dangerous period in human history. In this new era ordinary citizens as well as military planners and politicians could, for the first time, contemplate the destruction of the entire human race as a plausible, short-term scenario for humanity. Apart from visions of divinely inflicted apocalypse found in the Bible and other mystical writings, or from fears that a comet or some other celestial body might crash into the Earth, the annihilation of the entire species had never before presented itself as a real and present danger. The introduction of vastly more potent hydrogen bombs (so-called H-bombs), first by the United States in 1952 and then by the Soviet Union in 1953, made the prospect of worldwide nuclear annihilation even more likely, and the successful firings of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) by the Soviets in August 1957about a month before they launched the first space satellite, Sputnik I -meant that by the end of the decade essentially every location on Earth could potentially be struck by thermonuclear weapons capable of inflicting unimaginable destruction. The United States successfully launched its first ICBM four months later, in December. Although the threat of nuclear apocalypse certainly shaped 1950s military and foreign policies and promulgated angst throughout the world, it received surprisingly little direct treatment in American arts and letters and the popular culture of the decade. It is likely that the prospect of impending apocalypse added intensity and urgency to the teenage rebellions of the 1950s and 1960s, but it rarely appears in the foreground of entertainment directed to either adults or teens. Moreover, apart from news coverage and occasional documentaries, 1950s television programming included few direct references to the Bomb or even to the Cold War itself. Television Westerns routinely played out a subtext in which American heroes like Gttnsmoke's Matt Dillon, Wyatt Earp, Roy Rogers, Jim Bowie, or the Cartwright family on Bonanza all interposed themselves against those who would violate the law, greedily grab power and wealth for themselves, terrorize the weak and unprotected, and upset all norms of established social order, just as the United States was perceived to be standing tall against the expansion of a communist empire that advocated worldwide revolution and used its Red Army to seize territory for itself and oppress the powerless. But television sitcoms and dramas rarely even alluded to the Cold War as a presence in the lives of ordinary Americans; nor did they imagine the outcomes that might ensue from nuclear war. Family-centered sitcoms like The Honeymooners, Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and The Donna Reed Show rarely acknowledged politics or world events, and even venues for more innovative television drama, such as General Electric Theater, rarely addressed the Cold War or other political issues, although General Electric Theater did provide national exposure to its host and sometimes star, Ronald Reagan, thereby advancing his political career. The general absence of Cold War politics from 1950s television programming may have been a response to the horrifying nature of the subject, which would not appeal to viewers interested in escaping the stress of their daily work day, especially when there was so little they could do to eliminate the nuclear threat even if they thought about it. …

Western Attractions

North America,and in particular the United States, has fascinated Europeans as the place of the "exotic other " for at least the last two centuries. This article surveys American and European art, novels,radio programs, Western films, and television Westerns from the 1820s to the present. It posits that the presence of Indians, fictional Western heroes,gunmen,and a perceived general level of violence made frontier and Western America more colorful and exciting than similar circumstances and native people in other parts of the world. This resulted in a continuing interest in the fictional aspect of the American frontier and Western historical experiences.

Television Westerns:

Television Westerns:

Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western

Vanishing Americans - racial and ethnic issues in the interpretation and context of post-war pro-Indian westerns, Steve Neale photographing the Indian, Edward Buscombe the professional western - south of the border, Noel Carroll wider horizons, Doug Fairbanks and nostalgic primitivism, Gaylyn Studlar Our country whose country? the Americanization project of early westerns, Eichard Abel Dixie cowboys and blue yodels - the strange history of the singing cowboy, Peter Standield sixty million viewers can't be wrong - the rise and fall of the television western, William Boddy finding a new heimat in the Wild West - Karl May and the German western of the 1960s, Tassilo Schneider John Ford and Monument Valley, Jean-Louis Leutrat and Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues western motifs in magazine advertising, Colin McArthur the fantasy of authenticity in western costume, Jane Marie Gaines and Charlotte Cornelia Herzog the new western American historiography and the emergence of the new American westerns, Rik Worland and Edward Countryman the twelve Custers or, video history, Roberta Pearson.

Television Western players of the fifties: a biographical encyclopedia of all regular cast members in Western series, 1949-1959

Television Western players of the fifties: a biographical encyclopedia of all regular cast members in Western series, 1949-1959

Television Westerns episode guide: all United States series, 1949-1996

Television Westerns episode guide: all United States series, 1949-1996

Television Westerns Episode Guide:

Television Westerns Episode Guide: