American as American gets

Although many American films are now filmed elsewhere (generally to save on production costs), the system, technology, formula, marketing--the whole package--is envied around the world. Stories aren't always brilliant or original, and most genres (crime films, romances, comedies) are staples of cinema from Russia to China and India to Australia. But there are two genres which are uniquely American. One of these, the Hollywood musical, was mentioned in Lecture 5. The second is the classic American western.

With some exceptions--3:10 to Yuma, the remake of True Grit, etc.--westerns are not nearly as popular as they once were. From the silent era well into the 1970's any week would likely see one or more new westerns in the movie theaters, and from the 1950's until near the end of the 20th century westerns like The Rifleman, Have Gun Will Travel, Bat Masterson, Rawhide, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Bonanza (and many others) were on television screens just about every day. And on weekends, older western films were played on syndecated channels regularly. Yes, some of the later entries were not American (1964 saw Italian filmmaker Sergeo Leoni's "spaghetti western" Fistful of Dollars, which propelled Clint Eastwood to fame), but the roots of the western are as American as American gets.

Although many westerns are simple formula pictures (often called "horse operas"), there are some iconic works which have range and depth. Bernard F. Dick, in our Anatomy of Film text explores George Stevens's Shane as a savior myth which can support at least three different interpretations. Some westerns (Shane, High Noon explore the psychology of the hero, a single man living by a code not unlike that of the Arthurian knight. There are films about taming a rugged country, empire building, the role of the professional fighter, even the seemingly-super-human existentialist outsider who spreads mystery along his path (Stephen King's Gunslinger series has elements of all of these). The of all classic westerns is something that S.E. Hinton would later capitalize on (not in a western)--the outsider.

The Searchers--the quintessential western

Our reading for this week is Stephen Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky." You will want to go through the story looking for examples that relate to this lecture. The story is short on gun play and heavy on nostalgia. The ending has loads of references that help make sense of this. Here, for example:

"'Well. I 'low it's off, Jack," said Wilson. He was looking at the ground. 'Married!' He was not a student of chivalry; it was merely that in the presence of this foreign condition he was a simple child of the earlier plains. He picked up his starboard revolver, and, placing both weapons in their holsters, he went away. His feet made funnel-shaped tracks in the heavy sand." The freewheeling, wild-and-wooly, primal days of womanizing and boozing and fighting are being replaced by "marriage"--civilizing influences. The American West is being tamed; towns and cities are filling up the wilderness, and the rugged cowboys (children "of the earlier plains") are on their way out. The dirge-like foot dragging of Wilson at the end is almost sad, certainly final.

The United States is a young nation, but it's a nation that has moved very far, very fast. The movement has not always been pretty (the American Civil War, for example, saw more than 623,000 casualties--the highest American casualty count of any war). As the country expanded westward in an attempt to unite two incredibly-distant coasts, indigenous people were relocated or wiped out altogether; the buffalo herds were made all but extinct; natural monuments were leveled. And it took a rough-hewn sort of individual to brave the forces of nature, hostile tribes, outlaws, fortune seekers to survive and make an unforgiving land suitable for citizen farmers, railroads, churches, schools and other institutions (for good or ill) of civilization.

What to call indigenous people. Yes, we live in an era of political correctness, and it can be challenging at times. Talking to one of my friends who is 1/16 Navajo prefers to be called "American Indian"; another friend, part Pawnee, prefers "Native American." A snippet from infoplease.com has this to say: "While these were once raging questions in the culture wars, they have now happily sorted themselves out. Over the years, the people whom these words are meant to represent have made their preference clear: the majority of American Indians/Native Americans believe it is acceptable to use either term, or both. Many have also suggested leaving such general terms behind in favor of specific tribal designations."

In the western film (not bound by contemporary political correctness), the indiginous people were generally called just Indians. Yes, I know; the Wyoming territory is not part of India, but there it is. Right or wrong, it's part of history, and so the term Indian is what we will read and hear most often with this genre.

The classic western shows this tension between outsider (the rough, often brutal individual needed to tame the wild West) and civilization (the people who come along only after the wild land has been tamed for them). Civilized people need the brute to do the dirty work, but once the job is done, they don't want the brute living in their neighborhood. The message is, "You get out there and beat up the Indians and the outlaws for us; then get out of here because you're too violent for us."

John Wayne (star of many major westerns) plays just such a brute in John Ford's The Searchers (1956). Jim Beaver, on imdb.com, summariezes the plot: "Ethan Edwards, returned from the Civil War to the Texas ranch of his brother, hopes to find a home with his family and to be near the woman he obviously but secretly loves. But a Comanche raid destroys these plans, and Ethan sets out, along with his 1/8 Indian nephew Martin, on a years-long journey to find the niece kidnapped by the Indians under Chief Scar. But as the quest goes on, Martin begins to realize that his uncle's hatred for the Indians is beginning to spill over onto his now-assimilated niece. Martin becomes uncertain whether Ethan plans to rescue Debbie...or kill her."

The search, showcased in the film's title, is really secondary to the film's gradual revelation of Ethan's character--he is a complex, contradictary individual, drawn broadly in the fashion of teh western hero, though clearly many of his traits are unheroic and anti-social. From the opening shot, where Martha (Dorothy Jordan) looks out from the cabin onto the Monument valley landscape as Ethan approaches, we see the chief conflict of many westerns--the safety of the community Vs. the wilderness of the untamed West.

An early foil for Ethan is Clayton (Ward Bond) who was a rebel (Confederate) captain who had surrendered with his men when the Civil War ended. He is a brusque man, but he now represents pro-social values in his new roles as lawman and preacher; once a warrior, he has now assimilated into society. by contrast Ethan never surrendered his sabre; he still believes his rebel oath is binding. He says, "And I didn't turn it [his sabre] into no plowshares neither"--a biblical reference that means he cannot settle down to farming as did his brother Aaron. That's why the only person Ethan really seems to care about, Martha (he kisses her, calls out to her when he sees the burning shack) could never be matched with him; Ethan refuses to settle down like his brother.

Ethan's only law is his own, fashioned from his long-standing relationship with the wilderness. He is ignorant and unsympathetic to civilization an dits ways, but his understanding of the desert, Indian culture, the ways of nature surpasses that of any other white man in the film. He is more comfortable with his surrounding than he is with people, and he clearly likes it that way.

Ironically, there are similarities between Ethan and Chief Scar--both are renegades; both are driven by violent passions (Scar's two sons were murdered by the white man); both have similar temperaments (they even parody each other's lines when they meet); they are even visually switched when, in a rare over-the-shoulder shot, their confrontation is shown from Scar's point of view.

Ethan's uncompromising (stubborn) charater is continually juxtaposed with that of the young initiate-hero, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter). Martin embodies the transition from the Old West to an assimilated West (Martin is part Indian), the opposites Ethan just can't tolerate. He, like Debbie (a very young Natalie Wood), is both family and Indian, civilized and savage, vengeful but forgiving. When Ethan tries to stir up Martin's blood lust by saying one of the scalps ini Scar's lodge is Martin's mom's, Martin says, "It don't make no difference." His committment is to saving Debbie, not destroying Scar (though, ironically, he does kill Scar in an act of self defense).

At the end of this Martin is able to return to Texas, commit to his girlfriend Laurie Jorgenson (Vera Miles), and settle down. Males and females, marriages (romantic, practical, humorous) punctuate the film (just as marriage is at the heart of the short story "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky"). Marriage, community, civilization are inseparable here. Mrs. Jorgenson, an immigrant settler (one of the cornerstones of America's history) has lost a son in the search, but his daughter will marry Martin, and she defends the country: "It may be that our bones'll have to be in the ground a hundred years before, but this will be a good country some day." There's the goal for these Texican settlers, to make this a "good" land. But, for now, the Ethan's of the West still have their use.

The film closes with a shot of everyone coming into the shack from the landscape, everyone except Ethan. He looks in over the doorstep, then turns back and heads toward Monument Valley. He is fated never to be brought into the very community he helps make possible.

The Wild Bunch--what happens after the West is won?

The psychological western (Shane, High Noon) poses this question: how can the morally upright, socially autonomous hero (drifter, sherrif) continue to defend a repressive, institutionalized, cowardly, thankless community without going crazy? The professional western answers this question in one of two ways: the westerner either works for pay and sells his special talents to the community (Invitation to a Gunfighter, The Magnificent Seven), or else he becomes an outlaw. This latter shift is at the heart of movies such as Sam Pekinpah's The Wild Bunch and George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It's the natural result of law and order squeezing out the rugged individualist who made the order possible in the first place; at this point "honor among thieves" is preferable to buckling under to the community's emasculating demands (Steve McQueen being offered a job sweeping out a store in The Magnificent Seven).

The professional western--Rio Bravo, The Magnificent Seven, El Dorado, El Dorado, True Grit, The Cowboys, The Missouri Breaks, etc.--often incorporates a group led by an aging but still charismatic hero whose demand for payment undercuts the classic code of the western hero like Shane. These films don't have the isolated heroic cowboy with no visible means of support and whose personal values set him above the wimpy community he protects. These films are more cynical, more realistic. The West is nearly tamed; there's less need for the cowboy; his role is vanishing. He still has some the ability to strike a romantic pose (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid die in a blaze of glory facing down impossible odds; The Magnificent Seven demand payment to save a poor village, but some sacrifice themselves in the process).

In Sam Pekinpah's The Wild Bunch, perhaps more than most others of this type western, the villain is clearly progress. Big business, typified by the banks and the railroad, force the Bunch out of the United states and into a confrontation with a corrupt bandit army. When one of the Bunch is captured and tortured by the bandits (whose leader had given up his horse for a car and is doing business with German warmongers), the aging gunfighters undertake a final suicidal act of heroism. So the outlaw collective is heroic in their stance against corruption, threats to national interests, as underdogs trying to survive against big business.

The following lines are characteristic of this sort of western:

"We gotta start thinkin' beyond our guns; those days is closin' fast."
After a big score Pike says he'd like to back off, to rest, for a bit. Dutch asks, "Back off to what?"
The bandit army is waiting for them; essentially, they are doomed, and Pike says, "I wouldn't have it any other way."

These films show the end of the western hero. He is an anachronism, part of American history but on his way out.

Or is he? The western hero doesn't really leave forever. He reappears as the single-minded private detective in film noir movies, as the renegade action hero who refuses to follow orders in Rambo and Die Hard, as the good-guy-as-bad-guy-as-good-guy in movies such as the Fast and Furious franchise. The American hero is the underdog, the outcast, the independent person with the revolutionary idea who creates the order and opportunity enjoyed by the average citizen. This individualism is one of the cornerstones of the U.S., and it's what makes the western a uniquely-American invention.