The Western May 30, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films , trackbackI’ve been thinking about the Western genre quite a bit these last few days. Watching The Professionals last week in a beautiful widescreen print probably set my mind in motion. I had never seen the film before, a wonderful late era Western directed and written for the screen by Richard Brooks. The film literally looked like it had been made the day before the screening, with a brilliant and crisp picture quality that superbly showcased both the performances and the cinematography by Conrad Hall. Not that I needed reminding, but seeing The Professionals with a packed house in a breathtaking format affirmed my substantial love for movies. For two hours, it seemed like what I imagined 1966 felt like in a theater, when Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan were gracing screens and making films people could still get excited about forty years after the fact.
In The Professionals, it was a line delivered by Lancaster that hit me and made me think about the Western genre, as well as America itself, I suppose. “Maybe there’s been one revolution since the beginning - the good guys versus the bad guys. The question is - who are the good guys?” I’ve thought a lot about this simple statement since seeing the film. Immediately, I thought of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch in the theater, a film where the line between good and bad is deliberately blurred and we’re left with protagonists who’ve done unspeakable things in the past trying to do the right thing for once and maintain the honor of a fallen comrade. It’s nearly impossible for film lovers not to think about Peckinpah’s elegiac western when watching The Professionals, I’d think. Made only three years prior to The Wild Bunch, Brooks’ film plays like a less violent, less daring version of Peckinpah’s grimy epic.
Both films involve a team of men on a mission with Mexico as the primary setting and feature Robert Ryan, creator of roles frequently vicious and unredeeming, as the most tender, relateable character therein. If The Wild Bunch is going to be hailed as a landmark, upper echelon Western responsible for the shift from what we’d previously seen from John Ford into a more realistic, less romantic view of cowboys then surely The Professionals deserves an inkling of praise as well. It perfectly bridges the gap between the clear cut heroes the genre had often thrown at its audience into the questionably worthy lead characters we end up with in the 1970s and beyond.
Every character in The Professionals is essentially a criminal, and the pack of heroes chosen by Ralph Bellamy is a ragtag group of mercenaries eager to capture Bellamy’s “kidnapped” wife from a man they have reason to trust much more than their benefactor. So who are the ”good guys?” The cold hard truth, most likely, is that the Western genre had no business broaching such a question in the first place. If you kept a six-shooter strapped to your hip then there’s a good possibility that you’re not one of the “good guys” regardless of who you’re murdering or what town you’ve landed in under the auspices of maintaining law and order. Is there any doubt, then, that the Western’s demise was as inevitable as it was prolonged?
Eager to explore more of the evolution of the Western, I plunged into a couple of the Anthony Mann-James Stewart pictures from the 1950s - The Man from Laramie and Bend of the River. Never having seen either film (and I call myself a Jimmy Stewart fan!), I was struck by the building blocks laid forth by Mann in both movies, as well as the other three films he made starring Stewart, whereas the main character immediately possesses an air of mystery about his past, his intentions, and his future. The audience, familiar with the collaborations between these two seemingly opposite men, may have a good inclination of what the Stewart character is looking for, but the other characters are always unsure of his purpose. Stewart is an outsider, frequently after revenge and given the opportunity to seek it but emotionally torn between his primal desire to complete his cycle of vengeance and maintain the goodwill he’s gained in his time with those who’ve crossed his path.
Not only is this a completely different side of Stewart than we’ve ever seen, or ever would see in his film career, but it’s also a new kind of Western hero, a man on the edge of sanity whose innermost needs to avenge a wrong must battle with his ultimate decency in every film. We identify with the character because of the actor playing the role and his everyman quality, but we’re taken to an unexpected place where the good guy briefly drifts into the realm of the villain. There are no white hats and black hats to help us identify who’s in the right. It’s all moral ambiguity and psychological question marks. In Bend of the River, Stewart says, “You’ll be seeing me. Everytime you bed down for the night, you’ll look back to the darkness and wonder if I’m there. And some night, I will be. You’ll be seeing me.” It’s a haunting, frightening line, perhaps the best in the entire Mann-Stewart series, and it’s delivered by the good guy.
The great thing about these Mann Westerns is we never see exactly what happens to the Stewart character that makes him so determined to reap vengeance. We eventually find out, in Stewart’s words, but we never see for ourselves. The audience is forced to trust Stewart, with the belief that he’s not a raving lunatic, even if he inevitably becomes violently unwound at some point in every picture. This is not the John Ford-John Wayne traditional Westerns from the previous two decades. The separation between hero and villain is tenuous at best, greatly influenced by casting and the narrative. Perhaps in response, Ford countered with his own unorthodox protagonist, Ethan Edwards, a man arguably devoid of redeeming features and certainly far removed from the usual frontier heroes.
Released in 1956, after all five Mann-Stewart films had already been produced, The Searchers came four years after Ford’s previous collaboration with Wayne, The Quiet Man. There’s little to prepare audiences for the intense questions of racism against Indians/Native Americans in the Ford-Wayne collaborations prior to The Searchers. Regardless of Ford’s personal contrition, the film still paints the Indians as the villains, with Wayne’s character coming across as the de facto hero to most viewers. Ethan Edwards is a racist, a criminal and a murderer but he’s still the protagonist and it’s hard to believe that the majority of 21st century viewers will recognize his shortcomings in relation to his ultimate triumph. If The Searchers is the greatest Western of all time (not my opinion, but a popular one), does that make Ethan Edwards a role model? I’d say of course not, but my opinion only accounts for one vote and John Wayne’s enduring popularity makes me question how others see the film. Is his bigotry justified by his final (seeming) redemption? Again, I can’t imagine how Wayne’s character serves as the epitome of anything but a solitary, pathetic racist, but the most popular Hollywood star in history surely deflects criticism from many admirers regardless of the role.
I like the underlying message we get from The Searchers, that racism and bigotry are wrong, but I can’t wholeheartedly agree with the method Ford uses to achieve his tenet. The Indians are still the bad guys, impossible to understand and savagely unrefined. It’s nice to see Ford with an open mind towards the frequent antagonists of his Westerns, but he still fails to portray them as human or anything but violent, homicidal animals. Should we be comforted that Ethan Edwards, a vile, murderous man seemingly without virtue is juxtaposed with Scar, the Comanche leader who’s scalped numerous whites, including Edwards’ love? There are no easy answers in The Searchers, another aspect I admire, and we’re forced to confront our own prejudices through Edwards’ bigotry.
Thus, we’re left with vengeful, murderous, bigoted criminals as protagonists in these Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s. After pushing the limits of the genre, both through this kind of main character and the various films set during the fading era of the West, where did it have to go to seem fresh and relevant? Apparently, there were few places left to be explored given the dearth of successful Westerns the past three decades. Kevin Costner had his epic Oscar winner Dances with Wolves and Clint Eastwood countered with his own awards magnet Unforgiven, which, for the record, is my favorite Western, but otherwise the genre has sputtered and faded. It’s not like other types of film have been banished into financial obscurity, so why the Western?
Looking at the progression from Ford and Hawks into Mann and Peckinpah, the answer sort of comes into focus. The early Westerns eschewed blood and guts for heroic daring and easily defined lines between good and evil. As the genre moved forward and filmmakers tired of a repetitive lack of realism, we began to see messy, blood-soaked battles and an uneasy distinction between right and wrong. The Western was destroyed only to be rebuilt into a new, less lasting product adhering closer to what really happened. With that drastic change in temperament, the older, romanticized version of the Old West seemed like a relic in comparison. Audiences no longer wished to see the clear-cut, bloodless depiction of good versus evil.
The problem therefore manifested itself with showing how the West was really won, an expensive proposition that few modern directors were interested in exploring. When classical Western heroes were given big screen treatments, such as Walter Hill’s Wild Bill or the dueling Wyatt Earp biopics Tombstone and Wyatt Earp, audiences were already too uninterested in the slow, drawn out pace necessary to depict these historical figures. Action heroes were now indestructible he-men in the form of Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Willis, not encumbered by pistols and horses. Audiences instead demanded assault weapons and cool cars, anomalies of the earlier decades where John Wayne, James Stewart and Gary Cooper reigned supreme at the box office.
So, it seems that we’ve outgrown the Western genre, pushed to its limits and unable to rebound. Television attempted to revive it through the ultra-profane Deadwood, and perhaps an envelope-pushing modernization complete with slick violence and hyperkinetic jumpcuts could manage to succeed in today’s depressingly youth-oriented culture. Then again, maybe all that’s lacking is a good enough story, exemplified in Eastwood’s Unforgiven a full fifteen years ago now, to revitalize the once-dominant Western genre. It just seems like every nook and cranny has been peered into and capitalized on at this point, leaving precious little left to draw upon. Do audiences want to watch films of a certain type so foreign and unidentifiable in regards to the current social climate? The answer remains unclear, waiting for the right movie with the right pedigree, but we’ve been given little reason to believe enough people still care about the Western genre to make it a viable route of exploration in the current, increasingly frustrating marketplace.
Comments»
“It’s nice to see Ford with an open mind towards the frequent antagonists of his Westerns, but he still fails to portray them as human or anything but violent, homicidal animals”
Is ‘Look’, and her people, not portrayed as human? As sympathetic? She is, after all, an innocent victim, butchered in a massacre perpetrated by the cavalry? Martin is part Cherokee; dresses in the manner, rides his horse when we’re first introduced to him in the casual manner of ‘the finest light cavalry in the world’, he’s the character who crosses both worlds.
Scar is a victim of the Indian wars, his hatred of the whites stoked just as high as Ethan’s loathing of the indian, both of them having lost family to mindless acts of violence perpetrated by both sides, both equally capable of brutality and, yes, racism; we shouldn’t be comforted by that surely?
Wayne’s portrayal of a man consumed by hate, of a man condemend to ‘walk between the winds’ is possibly the finest of his career, probably matched only by the astonishingly courageous decision to play John Bernard Books in ‘The Shootist’.
As for racism in Ford’s westerns prior to ‘The Searchers’, I can think of few post-war westerns that treat the Indian with as much respect and reverence as ‘Fort Apache’. Yes, we can both no doubt cite instances where the Indian is treated with disrespect, as child-like, as villain pure and simple. But these are dramas of their day. Not documentaries.
This seems a little pointless John, since we obviously have quite different opinions on the matter. The portrayal of Indians in Westerns is a particular sore spot for me. Most everything seems like propaganda to further the whole Manifest Destiny justification of their slaughter and subsequent mistreatment. They’re portrayed as the terrorists of the Old West, with little voice of their own for dissent.
Nevertheless, as for The Searchers, Ford, Look, Martin, etc., sure there are examples of progress in how Indians were shown in film, but there’s still that separational divide where they’re not completely treated as equals to the white man. The character of Look is undoubtedly a sympathetic innocent, but I’m not convinced about the human element. I’m sure my opinion is contentious, but I see her trading for a frivolous hat and then tagging along to claim Martin as her husband as, indeed, child-like and almost demeaning. Martin’s 1/8th makes him questionable, but eventually okay even in Ethan’s eyes so it’s difficult for me to believe that the audience is meant to take away anything positive about Indians from that. He’s 7/8th Welsh/Irish so he’s not really tainted or some such nonsense? We’re certainly told to think that Martin is supposed to marry the white woman and he’s not happy with his impromptu marriage to Look.
I’m much too long-winded and stubborn, but, briefly, I’m not really comforted by Ethan’s parallel to Scar. The entire two hours focuses on Ethan, building him up as the hero but only on the surface, while Scar gets a few minutes of unsympathetic villainry adorned in ketchup and mustard war paint. Almost every viewer will try to identify with Ethan, because he’s the protagonist, because he’s white, because he’s played by John Wayne, and dismiss Scar as the “bad guy.” I’m not talking about people who’ve seen the film multiple times, but the average person will take away white man good, Indian bad, without connecting the similarities. Scar is one-dimensional while Ethan is one of the more complex characters in the Western genre. The stereotype is again perpetuated that the Indian is bad and not worthy of having his side of the story explored.
Lastly, before anyone has an apoplectic fit, I understand what Ford was doing with The Searchers and think it’s a great, landmark film. I’m just disappointed that he wasn’t even bolder, showing the perspective of the Indian instead of using John Wayne, cinema’s All-American movie star, to restore order by saving the little white girl from the big bad Indian. I was thinking how interesting it would have been if Ford had somehow thought of Clint Eastwood’s idea fifty-plus years ago and made a film from both perspectives. Instead we’re left with one perspective, the same one in every Western, this time with a twinge more curiosity and understanding.
We see so many aspects of ‘The Searchers’ so very differently, I guess we’ll have to simply agree to disagree.
And I’m just too old for retrospective political correctness, or the benefits of enlightenment by hindsight. But I will keep batting for evolution and not revolution as far as the western is concerned. If it hadn’t been for Ford, it’s likely that we’d never have got Sergio. No Sergio, it can be argued, no Eastwood (at least, not as we know him). And I’ve never seen ‘Dances With Kevin’, and I intend to not watch it again soon.
Incidentally, my feeling is that resistance to literate scripting in favour of whizz bang special effects has been another nail in the western’s coffin. But the western’s been dying for more than half a century; t’ain’t dead yet, pilgrim.
Excellent piece of writing clydefro, while I don’t agree with all your observations it was certainly an entertaining read.
“Not only is this a completely different side of Stewart than we’ve ever seen, or ever would see in his film career, but it’s also a new kind of Western hero, a man on the edge of sanity whose innermost needs to avenge a wrong must battle with his ultimate decency”
A new kind of western hero? Not that new, that description also fits Tom Dunson in Howard Hawks Red River (released in 1948 but filmed in 1946). The quote ““You’ll be seeing me. Everytime you bed down for the night, you’ll look back to the darkness and wonder if I’m there. And some night, I will be. You’ll be seeing me.” Could have been said by Dunson too. It’s a part that prefigures Ethan Edwards in The Searchers and is a key one in the evolution of the western “hero”.
As for viewers being led to believe that Wayne is the hero in The Searchers, well as a boy I watched the film (as I did all of Wayne’s films that appeared on TV, my Dad was a huge fan) and it troubled me more than any of Wayne’s other roles. To suggest that the fact he’s played by Wayne and therefore must be seen as the good guy is a little insulting to both Wayne and the films audience.
And the western is not dead, it’s just been in hibernation. This year we’ll see a remake of 3.10 to Yuma and Brad Pitt’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It’s a genre ripe for rediscovery and reinterpretation by modern film makers and if these two films are successful more will surely follow.
Thanks for the comment. I think I like Red River better than any of the Ford-Wayne westerns so no argument that Dunson lead up to Ethan Edwards or that the character is key in the evolution of the genre. I believe the difference between Dunson and Stewart in the Mann westerns is that Dunson isn’t the hero while Stewart always is. Clift’s Matt Garth is the character for the audience to latch onto as a moral compass and Dunson is turned into the bad guy before their (arguably uncharacteristic) reconciliation. Jimmy Stewart has no Montgomery Clift or Jeffrey Hunter in the Mann pictures and he’s largely all we have in those films to root for, identify with, or find sympathetic. I’m not implying that Stewart is as morally corrupt as either Wayne character, but he’s certainly complex, flawed and compulsively determined in his quest for revenge in these films.
Regarding Wayne and his position as the audience’s “hero” in The Searchers, I absolutely think many, many casual viewers will attach that status on him mostly because of his persona. I grew up with John Wayne films on television and his face on collector’s plates, consumed by the Wal-Mart shopping, animal hunting, fearfully prejudiced communities of small town rural America. To these people, and sadly there are lots of them out there, John Wayne represents the male standard and Ethan Edwards’ prejudice against Indians will not give them reason to pause. The Searchers still positions Edwards as the film’s hero and that’s what the average Wayne fan will take from it.
And I didn’t mean to imply that I thought the Western was dead, honestly. It’s the popularity of the Western that has sharply declined among targeted moviegoers, possibly caused by the genre’s limitations and the lack of any new territory to explore. I look forward to both of those films you mentioned, but I’m not sure either will reinvigorate the genre. One is a remake (with an undeniably good pedigree all around) and the other, which has faced numerous release delays and behind-the-scenes acrimony, is about a character we’ve seen in numerous film incarnations already. The Proposition was one of my favorite films last year though, and I’d like to see similar pictures arise from that film’s success.
When watching The Searchers it helps to be aware (as I was even at the age of seven when the picture came out) of the special relationship between the Comanches and Texans. The Comanches were a warlike and predatory people who preyed on the Texans for 40 years. Of the states west of the Mississippi Texas had the most difficulty with Indians. Unlike other western states the settlers came to Texas before the Indians had been subjugated by The United States. In this Texas had more in common with the bloody settlement of eastern states like Kentucky and Ohio than with other western states.
Add to the mix the violent and predatory nature of the Texans and you had a recipe for hatred and blood fued approached only by that of the Shawnees and Kentuckians of the previous century, worse even as the Shawnees often treated captives well and even adopted many (though they also burned captives). Knowledge of the personal and especially bitter nature of this fued gives the movie a depth not seen in most pictures that deal with the conflict between the Indians and the Americans.
I’m not trying to argue against your views but simply adding a little something to consider.
And even as a kid when I first saw the picture I knew the Edwards character was no “good guy”. And I never watched Roy Rogers again.