by Spencer Warren

he comparisons of President Bush to a “cowboy” by critics of the Iraq war ironically demonstrated the enduring resonance of the Western hero as symbol and myth. But it was not the critics who first invoked the parallel between the War on Terrorism and the Western. When President Bush declared that he wanted Osama bin Laden “dead or alive,” he uttered time-honored words from that most American of creations. Consciously or not, the president was reaching deep into the American ethos, evoking the traditional Western’s bald demarcation between right and wrong, engraved in the image of the shoot-out between the knightly hero and the dastardly villain. More recently, however, the American movie Western has reflected the cultural transformation that occurred during the past half century: a movement from concerns such as duty, honor, valor, and celebrating our national heritage to open rebellion, cynicism, and ultimately nihilism toward moral truth and the very meaning of our national experience.

In classical Hollywood cinema, the cowboy was a fearless man of character, the rugged exemplar of manly virtue (but always courtly toward women), laconic and spare, reluctant to draw his gun but deadly once aroused, wielding force in a morally climactic act of (minimal) violence to do justice and save the community from the chaos and barbarism of the outside wilderness. The Western also depicted and mythologized the march of hardy pioneers, conquering mighty obstacles (rivers, mountains, storms, Indians) to plant free communities across a vast continent of majestic beauty that symbolized God’s providence for the young nation.

Riding High

This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the movie Western: The Great Train Robbery of 1903 was the first motion picture to dramatize a story. The movie Western traces its roots even further back that that, however, to James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales and to dime novels and adventure books of the late nineteenth century, which offered diversion and escape for the growing urban populations of the East. The most influential Western novel, which set down many of the archetypal themes, was Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902). The best of the many movie versions (made in 1929) features two classic scenes of moral rectitude that became staples of the genre: the hero upholding the West’s code of honor by reluctantly hanging his best friend for rustling and, later, rejecting the tearful entreaties of his betrothed and dueling the villain to the death. In the most famous of Western dialogue lines, the Virginian (Gary Cooper) tells the cursing, black-mustached villain, Trampas (Walter Huston), “If you’re gonna call me that . . . Smile.” Later, they confront one another in the saloon. Trampas barks at the Virginian,

TRAMPAS: I got ya corralled now and I’m callin’ your hand.

VIRGINIAN: Whatta ya got?

TRAMPAS: I got the belief you’re a lyin’, white–livered skunk. This country ain’t big enough to hold the two of us. I’m givin’ ya to sundown to get out of town. Get out by sundown or I’ll shoot ya on sight.

Accepting the call to manhood, the Virginian tells his pleading fiancée (in identical words to those Cooper would use twenty-three years later as Marshal Kane in speaking to his tear-filled bride, played by Grace Kelly, in High Noon): “I’ve got to stay.” Then follows the ritual of the townspeople fleeing the street as the nervous villain gulps his last whiskey before passing through the swinging saloon doors out into the arena, where his dirty fighting is of no avail—the hero drops him in the dust, dead. The street fills with grateful citizens, the hero’s girl embraces him, and the community is safe once more.

The Depression largely brought an end to major Hollywood Westerns (although the low-budget B-Westerns and serials remained popular) until John Ford revived the genre in 1939 with Stagecoach. Ford innovatively integrated an intelligent drama with the Western conventions and made expansive use of Utah’s Monument Valley as an imposing stage on which to elevate the tale. He masterfully conveys, through his physical placement of the characters within each shot, the conflicts among the motley group of stagecoach passengers as they struggle to survive the perils of their journey. In the best tradition of New Deal egalitarianism, the common folk, led by a cowboy on the run, the Ringo Kid (played by John Wayne, in the role that made him a star), are the worthy heroes. The film features two classic Western scenes: Ford’s ultimate version of the shoot-out like the one in The Virginian, and the Indian attack on the stagecoach. As the galloping braves overtake the onrushing coach and their arrows and gunshots fly ever closer, the defenders have run out of ammunition. With all hope lost, the gentleman gambler (Western stalwart John Carradine) has saved one bullet, to spare the prim Eastern lady, Mrs. Mallory, the ordeal of capture. He aims his pistol at her head as she kneels, hands clasped, desperately praying for deliverance. His arm falls, lifeless, but suddenly she exclaims: “Do you hear it? It’s a bugle. They’re blowing the charge!” Cut to bugler leading the cavalry, sabers drawn and galloping hell-bent to the rescue, the soundtrack proclaiming “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” A particularly inspiring scene viewed since September 11.

Ford is the most renowned of the Western directors. His My Darling Clementine (1946) is the ultimate statement of the legend of Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda): the man who cleaned up Dodge City and wants simply to settle down in Tombstone, but who reluctantly puts the badge back on when his brother is murdered. With Doc Holliday, he finishes off the evil Clanton clan in the since-legendary Gunfight at the OK Corral. The Western hero knows that it is impossible to reason with evil, and that there comes a time when a man must stop talking and, however reluctantly, start shooting. Ford transforms the tale into a visual poem of the Western as moral fable. The most famous scene is the Sunday dance at the site of the church to be. A bell beckons the arriving families as they gather below the frame of the steeple to consecrate the future spiritual home of the community—two U.S. flags high atop flagpoles whipping in the wind. (The rite is held at the church site, not the town hall—community is more important than government.) The scene, which Ford envelops in the grand, cloud-filled skies and limitless open space of the surrounding Monument Valley, is a metaphor of American innocence—pioneers planting new life in virgin wilderness—as well as a supreme example of Ford’s screen poetry.

In Fort Apache (1947), Ford makes his most profound statement on the theme he treated most often in his movies: belonging and community. A rigid West Pointer, Colonel Thursday (Fonda), ignoring the practical experience of Lieutenant York (Wayne), leads the regiment into a Custer-like massacre. But afterward York promotes the mythic view of Thursday’s “heroic” last stand because the regiment, as a metaphor for America, is bigger than any particular shortcomings. To Ford, myths and heroes embody the spirit of the ordinary people whose everyday lives define the nation (their familial social bonds are portrayed here in loving detail); blunders at the top should not obscure their larger truth. Ford’s staging of the massacre also is noteworthy: the noble composition of the last troopers in their redoubt, resolutely awaiting the Indians’ final charge, the men then vanishing amidst the braves’ shouts and the dust clouds left by their galloping horses. This is shown in a long shot, which creates pathos, in contrast to the blood-soaked close-ups a contemporary director would use.

Strong and Straight

In the 1950s, perhaps influenced by the Cold War, the Western’s Manichean struggle of right and wrong rose to the level of epic moral drama, often magnified by the use of color and the new wide screen. The hero’s struggle becomes more complex, and the Indians often are portrayed much more sympathetically.

High Noon (1952) is the most formal presentation of the type of stark moral choice that lay at the heart of the genre: Why shouldn’t Marshal Kane (Gary Cooper, for three decades the embodiment of the quiet American hero) leave town as planned with his bride (Grace Kelly), and flee the Miller gang he has just learned is coming to kill him? None of the townspeople will stand with him (it’s the marshal’s job, not theirs, they insist). But Kane’s honor demands that he stay and fight. The movie represents a turning point in the Western, in that here the community is not worth saving. Also, Kane is seen openly struggling with his fears (much to the disgust of John Wayne, who hated the movie). A fable against McCarthyism by the subsequently blacklisted screenwriter Carl Foreman, the film nevertheless operates in a traditional moral framework (as all but a handful of Hollywood movies did until the 1960s).

The greatest of all Westerns in my view is George Stevens’s Shane (1953), from Jack Schaefer’s novel. Shane encompasses three central moral dilemmas. The first is whether the peaceful farmer Starrett (Van Heflin) should stand up to the cattlemen rather than take his wife and son to quieter parts, especially given that the other farmers are afraid to back him up in such an effort. The second is whether Shane (Alan Ladd), the professional who wants to give up gunfighting, should let Starrett take on the cattlemen’s hired killer, Wilson (Jack Palance)—particularly given that Shane has an unspoken love for Starrett’s wife, Marian (Jean Arthur), and she for him. The third is whether Starrett should allow his friend Shane to go in his stead. Starrett chooses, honorably, to fight Shane in an attempt to prevent him from going in his place.

All of this becomes, thanks to Stevens’s subtlety, control of tempo, and dramatic visual style (and the gorgeous setting among Wyoming’s Grand Tetons), a deeply moving drama. The climax is among the most powerful ever filmed: the worshipful little boy, Joey Starrett (Brandon de Wilde), running after his hero, Shane, as the latter purposefully rides alone into town to rid the community of the killer, Wilson. Shane confronts the evildoer in the saloon and ultimately shoots him dead. His work done, Shane places his hand on Joey’s head, tells him that he can’t go back to the family that had given him a new, domesticated life, and that he wants the boy to grow up “strong and straight” and take care of his mother and father. Then Shane rides off, back into the mountains whence he came, as Victor Young’s score reaches its impassioned climax and Joey’s call echoes out into the valley: “Shane! Come back!” Woody Allen—that most urban of filmmakers—has commented that these are “some of the best scenes I’ve ever seen in an American movie.”

The Western most prized by critical opinion, however, is Ford’s The Searchers (1956). John Wayne, in his greatest role, plays Ethan Edwards, an Achilles-like warrior embarked on a seven-year quest to rescue his niece, Debbie (Natalie Wood), who was kidnapped when Comanches massacred her family. Ethan, a driven loner who never could settle down, allows his violent nature and desire for revenge to engulf him, and he becomes a mirror image of the chief, Scar, whom he is maniacally pursuing. Ethan frighteningly displays the danger posed by the Western hero’s talent for violence, upon which the security of the frontier community depends.

After Ford, the other top Western directors of the 1950s were Anthony Mann (The Naked Spur [1953], Man of the West [1958]), Budd Boetticher (Seven Men from Now [1956], Comanche Station [1960]), Delmer Daves (3:10 to Yuma [1957], The Hanging Tree [1959]), and Howard Hawks (Rio Bravo [1959] and, earlier, Red River [1948]). Their films focused on dramas of moral character, or, with Hawks, the camaraderie and professionalism of the group, but without the epic and historical context that inspired Ford.

New Code

The classic Western rode elegaically into the sunset in 1962, with Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country. Ford returns to Fort Apache’s mythic theme, but although he still affectionately depicts the frontier community, the director has become disillusioned, seeing the Old West’s code of honor as falling victim to modern political hucksterism. The weak, Eastern dude lawyer (James Stewart) gets all the credit and fame (including a Senate seat) for supposedly killing Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin’s version of the Jack Palance villain in Shane), whereas the Western hero who in fact shot Valance, saving the dude’s life and rescuing the young community (John Wayne) is left to die in obscurity. The oft-quoted line, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” actually is meant as ironic and bitter.

In Ride the High Country, aging, down-and-out, ex-lawman Steven Judd (Joel McCrea), whose religious faith makes him a rather unusual Western hero—he speaks of “entering my house justified”—undertakes to regain his self-respect by taking a job transporting gold from a miners’ camp to the bank. He signs up his equally aging ex-partner, Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott), who has turned cynical and has other ideas for the gold. Poignantly played by these leathery Western icons, and tenderly written by N. B. Stone Jr., this is a powerfully affecting, memorable drama: Judd gives his life defending the girl (Mariette Hartley) they earlier rescued from a sleazy miner (James Drury), and Westrum redeems himself by going to his old friend’s rescue in the climactic shoot-out with the white-trash miner and his two remaining brothers.

Ride the High Country makes for a fascinating comparison with Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), which is a much better-known film. In the seven years between the two releases, American culture and the Western had been turned upside-down. Peckinpah had risen from a young man working within the rules of the studio tradition and the self-censorship Production Code to an auteur with creative freedom and no code to rein him in. The result was an explosion of unrestrained self-expression, a movie extremely well directed but with a theme—of a worthless world in which a band of virile men find meaning in the camaraderie of apocalyptic violence—right out of Nazi entertainment movies.

The understated, allusive treatment of violence in Ride the High Country is far superior aesthetically and morally to The Wild Bunch’s explicit mayhem, especially the famous slow-motion bloodbath opera at the end. (Unprecedented and shocking at the time, today it is rather obvious and dated, even laughable.) The main violence in the former is the gunfight at the end, when the two old-timers take on the three Hammond brothers out in the open, face-to-face, in the timeless ritual dating back to the The Virginian. Judd is hit repeatedly, but each time, Peckinpah cuts away so that we see him only for a fraction of a second, reaching for his side or bending over in pain. At the end, with all the Hammonds dead, Westrum, the only one still standing, leans over his fallen pal, who says that this time being shot is different from all the other times, because “they’re all in the same place.” Judd dies, rolling over, his body filling the movie’s final, haunting composition.

The stark difference between these two movies—one made strictly according to traditional aesthetic rules, which today are widely considered repressive and antithetical to artistic expression, the other made with complete freedom, turning the silver screen red—is a metaphor for the cultural gulf between pre-1960s and post-1960s America.

Mirthless Myths

Of course, it was inevitable that the Western would change, as any art form evolves. A few 1950s Westerns had already prefigured the future: The Gunfighter (made in 1950) was a tragic tale of a gunman (Gregory Peck) who cannot escape his past; Devil’s Doorway (1950), Broken Arrow (1950), and Apache (1954) each showed whites exploiting Indians, with unhappy endings. Vera Cruz (1954) was the first Western without a hero; the rival protagonists (Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster) are cynical opportunists. The Left-Handed Gun (1957) had Paul Newman playing Billy the Kid as a misunderstood juvenile, and the renowned Johnny Guitar (1954), with Joan Crawford as the man-dominating heroine, had more than enough psychological themes to fill a treatise.

Nonetheless it is extraordinary how abrupt was the change in the 1960s. To some degree the transition is attributable to economic factors, such as the pursuit of a younger audience in the wake of television, suburbanization, and the decline of the urban movie palaces; the collapse of the conservative studio system and subsequent greater artistic freedom of more independent, tradition-hating filmmakers like Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, and Robert Altman; and the abolition in 1966 of Hollywood’s Production Code in favor of the present ratings system, which permits explicit bloodshed and sexual activity with virtually no limits.

The rapidity of the change, however, ris remarkable. A typical statement of moral absolutes like Joel McCrea’s in Wichita (1955)—“It’s not a question of who’s right. It’s a question of what’s right”—and a movie like Ride the High Country were inconceivable by 1970. By then, ’50s-style Westerns were as extinct as the dinosaurs, with the exception of John Wayne’s movies, which had become a shadow of earlier glory, except for the memorable El Dorado (1967), True Grit (1969), and Rooster Cogburn (1975).

Westerns (and other genres such as war movies and spy thrillers) became not only more complex and realistic but often turned the old moral universe completely upside-down. Villains now were embraced as antiheroes; characters were not just more rounded with normal failings but were consumed by perverted flaws; buckets of crude, explicit bloodshed replaced the limited, often artfully allusive treatment of violence; and the proverbial decent frontier community was often portrayed as a symbol of corruption, hypocrisy, and even depravity. From a genre that had long distilled the noble essence of the American experience through myth, the Western was frequently transformed into a vehicle for traducing the nation’s ideals.

We can see these developments vividly in the hip, antiheroic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Here the Western has utterly lost its moral center. The criminals (Paul Newman—one of the new breed of antiheroes pioneered by Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift in the ’50s—and Robert Redford) are the protagonists, and the lawmen are a remote, alien force, far removed from the action. The old code of honor, in fighting and in love, as well as the traditional moral struggle for something bigger than the protagonists’ immediate desires, are replaced by the immoral exploits of an appealing duo just out for a self-absorbed lark, summed up in the theme song, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” How removed that insipid jingle is from the manly ballad for High Noon and the stirring, romantic musical scores of the classic period, such as Elmer Bernstein’s for The Magnificent Seven (1960).

The subversion of conventional morality was not yet complete in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—they are both apparently shot in the end, after all. But the assault on the very values that had been reinforced by older movie Westerns was about to become explicit. Movies such as Arthur Penn’s hugely popular Little Big Man (1971) openly deconstructed the Old West, depicting a horde of greedy whites seizing the continent from the noble Indians.

Repugnant “Realism”

Unlike the earlier movies, however, the revisionist Westerns are not commonly seen as employing myth: their greater realism—that is, the employment of more blood and sex—insinuates that they are truer to fact. But the truthfulness of the depiction of the Old West in these films is more apparent than real. As shown in Little Big Man, for example, it is true that the destruction of the Seventh Cavalry was a result of Custer’s recklessness and a broken promise to the Sioux that they would be guaranteed a home in the Black Hills of South Dakota. What is decidedly not true, however, is the depiction of Custer’s 1868 raid on the Indian encampment on the Washita River in the Oklahoma Territory as a massacre of innocent squaws and their children. The camp was in fact a base from which the braves attacked innocent white settlers; to allow them sanctuary there would have been to condemn many innocent pioneers to more murder, rape, and pillage—like that depicted in Ford’s The Searchers.

Another highly emblematic Western of the period is Robert Altman’s nihilistic McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), a movie of studied ugliness in which the noble cowboy is replaced with Warren Beatty’s repugnant bordello entrepreneur, who is killed while stumbling helplessly in a blizzard. Altman followed this with the exceedingly mediocre would-be burlesque of Buffalo Bill, in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976).

Like the earlier movies, these vehicles employ myth to distill an essence about America—only now the story is of an evil, hypocritical, imperialist people guilty of genocide against its innocent, pure, native inhabitants, or of a land of poor, failing farmers whose dream of a better life is spoiled by a gang of amoral, corrupt men of violence who thrive in a Darwinistic, anarchic wilderness.

As their number declined during the 1970s, Westerns had little to offer but more demythologizing realism. Among the best of these was Ulzana’s Raid (1972), a subtle and rare account of Indian barbarity, and The Long Riders (1980), about the end of the James-Dalton gangs. A chief theme of Westerns in this era was the passing of the West, as in Monte Walsh—a quiet story about two aging cowboys (Lee Marvin and Jack Palance)—and Peckinpah’s astonishingly lyrical The Ballad of Cable Hogue (both from 1970).

The movie Western was virtually killed off by the fiasco of the mega-budget, four-hour Heaven’s Gate (1980), which, in a fit of historical revisionism, turned the farmers-versus-cattlemen theme into a neo-Marxist attack on the immigrant experience. The debacle of Heaven’s Gate says much about the common sense of the moviegoing public, and about the mentality of Hollywood’s young guns.

Dances with Wolves (1990), the first Western to win the best-picture Oscar since Cimarron in 1931, is a paean to the Indians’ supposed moral and cultural superiority over the white settlers. The “hero,” a Union Army officer (played by Kevin Costner, who also directed and won the best-director Oscar), prefers going native to saving his country. U.S. soldiers are depicted as moronic brutes.

The success of that film was followed by a modest revival of realistic Westerns, the three best being Tombstone (one of the best Wyatt Earp movies), Geronim An American Legend, and the feminist Western The Ballad of Little Jo, all released in 1993. Geronimo gives an unusually balanced account of the complex Indian problem in the southwest—until the ending. It shows the Army deceiving the great warrior into surrendering, and then packing him and his band to Florida as prisoners, where, the film clearly implies, Geronimo was held until his death twenty-three years later, in 1909. In truth there were broken promises on both sides, Geronimo agreed to the exile to Florida, and the Apaches were eventually relocated to a reservation in Oklahoma.

East of Eden

One of the most influential figures in the history of the postclassical Hollywood Western is, of course, Clint Eastwood. As an actor, he attained stardom in three Italian “spaghetti” Westerns: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1966), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), each imaginatively directed in a novel, aggressive style by Sergio Leone. All are still enormously popular today, and the antiheroism, amorality, and cynicism of these European imports certainly revolutionized the Western.

In place of the verdant, majestic landscapes of Westerns past, we have scrub and desert, both physically and morally, climaxing, in the last film of the trio, in a three-way duel in a cemetery over which scoundrel will get some gold. Even more than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Little Big Man, these Eastwood movies are perfect expressions of an amoral, nihilistic cultural desert.

Eventually taking over behind the camera himself, Eastwood directed four Westerns of his own. These are characterized by respectable if uninspired direction and boring use of landscape. High Plains Drifter (1972) is warmed-over Leone, a derivative of High Noon fashioned for the Vietnam era. Eastwood plays a nameless pseudo-mystical figure who rides into a town that had cowardly watched the brutal murder of its marshal; the drifter designs an elaborate scheme of revenge that ends in the worthless community’s destruction. (How the settlers built the West while perpetually destroying all traces of civilization is an interesting question these postmodern Westerns refuse to answer.)

In The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Eastwood’s best Western film, a farmer’s family is murdered by Union irregulars. He then fights as a Confederate guerrilla, only to see his comrades massacred when they surrender. This atrocity ignites an odyssey of revenge that ends when he finds understanding with a group of social outcasts in a remote refuge. Pale Rider (1984) is a pale imitation of Shane, but it seems to reflect a new, more positive spirit that arose during the Reagan era.

The latter movie’s positive theme was later contradicted, however, by Eastwood’s much-lauded Unforgiven (1992). Peopled with thugs, misfits, and failures, the film is a bleak, sometimes hackneyed rehash of the old theme of the gunfighter who cannot outrun his past. (Denouncing violence was apparently the least Eastwood thought he could do after his Dirty Harry movies.) Eastwood does nothing original with it—he is devoid of the creativity of Ford or Stevens, and lacks the dramatic power of Mann, Boetticher, or Daves. Also, whereas in the antiviolence film Shane the gun rescues the settlers, who are shown to be good people, in Unforgiven, guns are condemned as instruments of senseless violence and greed, and are used to save no one. Despite this nihilistic theme—or, perhaps, more likely, because of it—Unforgiven became the second Western in two years to capture the Academy Award for best picture.

Admirers of the postclassical Westerns argue that they are “truer” to the American experience than their idealized forebears. As we have seen, this is questionable on the facts. Further, the postclassical Westerns fail to recognize that people’s frequent inability to live up to their ideals does not in itself tarnish those ideals as untrue and meani

Spencer Warren is a writer living in Virginia. He formerly served in the Reagan Administration’s State Department and on congressional staff.

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