The Westerns – They Went Thataway

The Westerns – They Went Thataway.

The Western is the most typically American of all movie genres. Indeed, it could hardly have originated anywhere else, although it has been taken up since by other nations with a certain measure of success. The typical Western celebrates a specific era in the history of the United States, the ‘moving frontier’ of nineteenth-century pioneer life anywhere west of St Louis, and it does so via the formula of a set of familiar, though not necessarily immutable, rules and conventions and a series of events which may have had an historic foundation but which have moved a long way from reality.

Many of these con\eniions made their appearance in the first real Western: Edwin S. Porter’s sixminute- long The Great Train Robbery (1903). Unlike the numerous vignettes with a Western theme produced by early film-makers hoping to cash in on the success of the enormously popular dime novel, The Great Train Robbery had a form. It had a holdup by masked raiders, a fight on the roof of a train, and a gun battle showdown in which the villains received their just deserts, all cleverly edited together by Porter. ‘L’he film did not have an authentic background, however, having been made in New Jersey.

The first Western star. Broncho Billy Anderson, moved the Western from its early Eastern locations to California and the real West for most of his hundreds of films. Anderson – initials G. M.- became Broncho Billy when a film called Broncho Billy and the Baby (1908), which he made himself and in which he took the lead because no-one else was available, became a big success. He was the leading Western star until William S. Hart and Tom Mix and their more sophisticated movies superseded him. William S. Hart was given his first Western role by Thomas Ince, the producer and director who, with D. W.

Griffith, did more than anyone else to give the Western film a shape and style. By the time Hart came on the Western scene in 19 14, Griffith had left it and Thomas Ince was nearing the end of his best work. Hart’s style, which he created as actor, writer and director, was serious, dedicated and concerned with putting honest reality into the Western. Tom Mix, on the other hand, was much more flamboyant, with a style deriving from the old rodeo shows. His films for Fox, whom he joined in 191 7 after a long apprenticeship in minor parts, were full of action, fights and chases, and did not try to raise serious issues. After a time, they made Hart’s films seem rather slow and old-fashioned, and when Hart made his last film, the wonderfully epic Tumblezveeds, in 1925, the field was left largely to Tom Mix and his ‘B’ Westerns, and to the Western stars who followed him: KenMaynard, Hoot Gibson, George O’Brien, Buck Jones, Tim McCoy, William Boyd (Hopalong Cassidy), and later in the 1930s and 40s, singing cowboys like Gene Autrey and Roy Rogers.

Although at this time the Western was considered as little more than escapism by serious movie makers, not all Westerns were ‘B’ pictures. Apart from Hart’s work, many notable films were made after DeMille showed the way to Hollywood with The Squaw Alan in 1913. The Spoilers (1914), based on Rex Beach’s novel, had William Farnum playing his first big role. In the mid- 1920s came the first Western epics: James Cruze’s The Coi’cred Wagon (1923) and John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924).

The coming of sound was initially a set-back for the big location Western, and schoolboys in the 1930s made do – albeit very happily – with a diet of largely ‘B’ Westerns, varied with the occasional grand-scale Western such as Cimarron (193 1 ), Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail (1930) which gave John Wayne his first big role, and, in 1936, DeMille’s The Plainsman and King Vidor’s The Texas Rangers.

The Western Passes a Milestone

1939 was a great year for the Western. Two films made then were to be a watershed in the history of the genre. The first was John Ford’s Stagecoach, considered by many to be the best Western ever made. It re-established the Western as a suitable subject for main feature films, giving it back literacy, a sense of proportion between myth and reality, and real people instead of the cardboard-figure fistfighters and gunslingers who had peopled so many ‘B’ Westerns of the 1930s. It also brought John Wayne back from nine years’ obscurity to the leading position in American movies he still holds.

The film was John Ford’s first sound Western, and he was to follow it with a group of films which earned him recognition as the great romanticist and poet of the West. His other Western of 1939 was Drums Along the Mohawk, another exceptionally fine film.

George Marshall’s Destry Rides Again, a spoof Western starring James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich, was the other great Western milestone of 1939- This film brought sex into the Western – ‘adult’ sex, not the romantic embrace which ended most of Hart’s films or the pretty girls who played sisters or daughters to be rescued from bad situations in many ‘B’ features.

Where John Ford’s film led the way to the Western with a serious theme, such as The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Broken Arrow (1950), High Noon (1952) and Shane (1953), Destry Rides Again helped bring sexuality into the Western. There was Jane Russell in The Outlaw (1943), for instance, and Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun (1946).

One should not over-emphasize this new ‘adultness’ however. Earlier Westerns had looked at important themes seriously. Although Broken Arrozv and Run of the Arrow (1957) were the first films for many years to consider the plight of the Indian, other direction before Delmer Davis and Samuel Fuller had shown an interest in the subject,  natably Thomas ince in such films as The indian Masscare (1912) and heart of an Indians (1913) . Lillian Gish had given a powerful performance in victor Siostrom’s . The wind in 1928 a film looked at the psychological stress created by the harsh environment of the West.

Familiar Names and Places

The ingenuity and variety of treatment which Western films have shown in their use of a few basic themes, employing the same characters and events over and over again, have been the main reasons for the popularity of the genre. Audiences know they are in familiar territory when they watch a Western. Well-known names, scenes and historical events provide a pleasurable sense of anticipation and expectation: one knows what is going to happen when a roughneck or two try to crowd the quiet man at the bar, just as one knows the inevitable outcome of the meeting between the lonely figure walking up Main Street and the man reaching for his gun who suddenly appears ahead of him, or as one knows that the wagon moving West will at some stage be menaced by Indians appearing from nowhere.

These scenes appear so often because they are basic to many of the comparatively few themes used in the Western: the wicked town, be it Dodge City, Tombstone or Deadwood, which the lawman must clean up; the great trek West of wagons, cattle or the railroad; a man’s search for the killer of his father or brother, or the kidnapper of a friend’s sister or daughter, and the revenge he takes; feuds between families, within the same family, or between groups with opposed ambitions such as sheepmen and cattlemen ; a fight between heroes and villains for valuable property, be it a waterhole, a mine or a railroad; wicked whites, speaking with forked tongues, and stirring up the Indians. Such basic themes have been used to accommodate any number of story lines.

Many of the characters who play out these themes are famiHar, too. Given that one actor or one director will interpret a part differently from another, it is also true that as Westerns have come to be used by directors and writers as a vehicle for their thoughts and ideas about the American way of life as a whole, or as a mirror for current American politics, both national and international, so their treatment of characters and events has altered.

The ageing blond General Custer, making his last stand with a megalomaniac gleam in his eye in Little Big Man (1970) is a far cry from the dashing soldier played by Errol Flynn in They Died With Their Boots On (1941). Handsome, if wooden, Cesar Romero in Frontier Marshall (1939) is a different Doc Holliday from Victor Mature’s tubercular character in Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), or Kirk Douglas in Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), or the unattractive, rather sordid figure in Frank Perry’s Doc (1971).

The characters of the Wyatt Earp/ Doc Holliday story have been used in other films, from the Gordon Elliott vehicle. In Old Arizona (1929), and Edward Cahn’s Law and Order (1932) to Wichita (1955) and Hour of the Gun (1967), and by John Ford again in a scene in Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

Two other characters whose story (in which Doc Holliday also turns up) has been repeated many times are Sheriff Pat Garrett and William Bonney – ‘Billy the Kid’. King Vidor used the real location of the Lincoln County wars for his version of Billy the Kid in 1930. Robert Taylor was a rather too smooth Billy the Kid in 1941, and Jack Buetel made him an unpleasant character in The Outlaw ( 1 943). (‘Billy ! Let me go !’ cried the voluptuous Jane Russell on a poster for this notorious film.) Audie Murphy played Billy in The Kid from Texas (1950) and Paul Newman in The Left-Handed Gun (1958). There was even a Billy the Kid versus Dracula in 1965. John Wayne was the Kid’s friend in Chisum (1970), and Sam Peckinpah made Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid in 1973.

The James brothers have been the subject of several films, including Jesse James (1939). Other characters forming part of the familiar world of the Western include Bat Masterson, Wild Bill Hickok, Judge Roy Bean (and Lily Langtry), Buffalo Bill, Kit Carson and Daniel Boon.