In many respects our film industry represents what has happened in our culture. At its very finest it is capable of shining a vivid light on our beliefs and values, portraying them, dissecting them, and, like other art forms, it may become an instrument to affect or even shape our outlook and our politics.
In the United States the first significant commercial film ever produced and shown was a Western: The Great Train Robbery (1903), starring Bronco Billy Anderson. It was just twelve minutes long. American film culture began, thus, with a Western. It was from the classic Western that crime dramas and adventure films were spun off. One could well argue that major American crime movies up through, say, The Untouchables or even some more recent representations were “Westerns dressed up with cops and robbers.” And those magnificent adventure films about space exploration—the Star Wars and Star Trek series—are they not Westerns transported into the relative infinity of space and time, with our unquenchable desire to explore new frontiers “where no man has gone before”?
Indeed, it was famed Hollywood director Elia Kazan who once remarked that “the Western was the only film genre to have originated in America.”
It is the Western that represents so well and encapsulates so aptly the movement of American history, the aspirations and insatiable curiosity of our citizens, and just how we as a people overcame various challenges in building what became the United States of America. It is a story of conquering frontiers as a symbol for the growth and evolution of the American nation. It offers graphically and sometimes with violence the effects of right and wrong actions, and the absolute requirement for law and order in any civilized society. And it is, at its finest, a chronicle of great persons—some real, some idealized, others made up—by whose hands a nation was fashioned.
We hold those persons up as heroes and as models. Thus, a Davy Crocket, a Wild Bill Hickok, a Sam Houston, a Buffalo Bill, a Jesse James—all real flesh-and-blood people in our past—have vividly emerged from the pages of our history books and have entered our consciousness, into our everyday lives. Sometimes, as in the case of a Billy the Kid or maybe the Clantons of Old Tombstone, they become iconic representations of the “bad guys”—of the less savory symbols of our history. But in all cases, they have become reference points that make our history alive and tangible.
The better Westerns become vehicles for memory and memorialization of history and heroes that oftentimes can seem remote or forgotten. In this sense, the Western took over the role of the great historic legends and inherited myths—the Sagas from Scandinavia, the legend of the Holy Grail in England and Brittany, or King Arthur and the Round Table. And in more recent times, as the nation has seemed to sink into decay and moral uncertainty, the Western has—often graphically—represented that, too.
As much of Hollywood has moved strongly to the ideological Left over the past decades, the Hollywood Western also has also reflected that movement in the subjects and messages it seeks to portray. Indeed, the fact that since the late 1960s and early 1970s the Western has receded as a major film genre is, in itself, significant. For the Western, more than other cinematic manifestations, is autobiographical about the growth, trials, and, above all, successes of and pride in the American experience. Since certainly the late 1960s, Vietnam, and the great success of cultural Marxism in our society, the role of the Western as a reflection of the triumph of traditional “good” over “evil,” of the ever-advancing and intrepid frontiersman triumphing over natural hazards, over the elements and fierce aborigines, has receded. America no longer celebrates those heroes; if it celebrates “heroes” at all, it is the vaunted pioneers in civil rights, a Susan B. Anthony or a Martin Luther King, or hitherto unknown feminists (who, save for political correctness, should have remained unknown).
Right and wrong, black and white are muddied; we live in an age of the anti-hero, where inherited and tried-and-true standards of morality and moral conduct are not only shunted aside, but often ridiculed.
What does John Wayne in, for example, The Searchers or She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, have to tell us in our society now where even the concept of duty and obedience to moral right is largely downplayed and considered unsophisticated by the dominant culture?
In one of the last great classic Western epics, Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High from 1962, Joel McCrea is asked by his co-star, Randolph Scott, if he doesn’t really want more in life than just what appears to Scott to be his existence as a lonely, lowly paid deputy marshal. McCrea’s character, Steve Judd, responds laconically in one of those immortal lines that epitomizes both the representative and the didactic roles of the American Western: “All I want is to enter my house justified.” That is, I want to fulfill my duty and appointed role in society, to obey and keep the law, to receive the precious legacy of the culture I inherited, perhaps add to it a bit, and then pass it on, unsullied, to my children and my posterity.
Is this not the message that the classic Western offered us, and, as well, was inculcated into the imaginations of millions of young boys and girls, as well as older adults, during its heyday? Was this not the message of Matt Dillon on TV’s “Gunsmoke” or Ben Cartwright of the Ponderosa?
In that superb John Ford Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, also from 1962, after Jimmy Stewart has recounted to the assembled newsmen the long history of how he accidentally took the credit for John Wayne’s gun down of the infamous bandit Liberty Valance (played deliciously by Lee Marvin) and how it propelled him to fame and to the United States Senate—and how what has been believed for years was essentially built on a legend—a stunned news reporter replies: “This is the West, sir. When legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
America—the America we have loved and wish to preserve and restore—has been dying a slow death for years for lack not only of genuine heroes, but for lack of sometimes shadowy, often-times mythical, legends. For our society, our culture, is not just built on the quantifiable advances of science and materiality, or on the history of new “civil rights” laws, or on the growth of the sports and entertainment industry. Every culture has its legends, its quasi-mythical past that inspires it and adds a certain attractive richness and purpose to its existence. Without that, something integral, something very real and essential in the history of those entities would be lacking.
I remember going to see Ride the High Country with my dad at the old Ambassador Theater in downtown Raleigh. It was one of those indelible and intensely moving experiences that always remains with me. For my father, growing up in the Charlotte area, which had also been the home of Randolph Scott, the event was special for him. After the movie, he took the time to explain to me that the Scott character who, initially, had skipped out on McCrea but returned to help him fight one last battle with the bad guys (led by James Drury), had earned redemption and paid the price for his “sin,” by returning. McCrea, in one of the most memorable death scenes in all film, has a final conversation with Scott. Scott tells him: “Don’t worry, I will take care of everything.” (Including getting the stolen gold shipment back into rightful hands.) McCrea replies: “Hell, I always knew you would—you just forgot for a while.”
