The western, as a thriving movie genre, is deader than Billy the Kid, Jesse James, John Ford and Sam Peckinpah put together.
Whenever a Silverado, a Dances With Wolves or an Unforgiven gallops screenwards with Stetsons flying and six-guns ablaze, critics inevitably speculate on whether it is primed for a comeback. It isn’t — it’s always the last roundup — but occasionally there are brief and enjoyable spasms of cowboy nostalgia.
The western’s glory days are three decades and more in the past, as transient and impermanent as ghost towns and trail dust.
A political casualty of Vietnam, a cultural casualty of Star Wars, the western wasn’t shot in the back on Main Street at high noon, nor did it expire contentedly in the saddle, under the stars on the wide rugged range.
Instead, like the real-life Frank James (brother of Jesse, who lived until 1915), it lingered long enough to witness its own obsolescence and to wonder at the world that displaced it.
Of the 50 movies bearing his name, the best films about James — who fascinated some of the most interesting postwar American directors — shift our attitudes to the old west and its supposedly heroic criminal denizens.
James is a straightforward hero in Henry King’s Jesse James (1939, with Tyrone Power as James) and a fallen martyr in Fritz Lang’s 1940 sequel, The Return of Frank James. Sam Fuller viewed him as a psychopath in 1949’s I Shot Jesse James, while Nicholas Ray, in The True Story of Jesse James (1957, with Robert Wagner), portrays a troubled young man burdened by infamy and legend.
Andrew Dominik, in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, is working more in the vein of the demythologising westerns of the 1970s. His film is pitched half way between Philip Kaufman’s revisionist The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, in which James (Robert Duvall) is a fundamentalist Christian hillbilly who fulminates madly in tongues, and Walter Hill’s vaguely reactionary The Long Riders, in which Jesse (a smouldering James Keach) is again the hero of the Kansas backwoods, curse of the Pinkertons, saviour of the poor.
Add meandering camerawork, a fascination with mythmaking, digressions on fame, homosexuality and machismo, and much visual noodling, and you have in The Assassination of Jesse James a compendium of the great elegiac crepuscular westerns of three decades ago.
As it died, the western was a magnificent comet breaking up and scattering burning shards across the landscape. So important was it to America’s sense of self before 1970, and so often was it rhetorically invoked in the Vietnam war that the hippies and antiwar left seized on it as ripe for demolition or rehabilitation.
The overthrow of the western’s myths began in the respectable heart of the genre’s old guard, John Ford, who examined foolhardy honour and suicidal heroism in Fort Apache, racism in The Searchers, mythmaking in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and the Indian genocide in Cheyenne Autumn, laying the ground for many followers.
Sam Peckinpah’s debut, Ride the High Country, mourns the passing of the old ways and the sudden irrele-vance of two ageing practitioners, 60-something western stars Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea. This was Bloody Sam’s overarching theme through The Wild Bunch, Junior Bonner and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, along with a nihilistic violence.
Peckinpah once remarked, ‘The western is a universal frame within which it’s possible to comment on today.†His political polar opposites, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, in the same year — 1969 — as The Wild Bunch, clad themselves in boots, buckskins and cowboy hats for their cross-country search ‘for America†in Easy Rider.
It was these two generations — World War II vets and pot-smoking baby boomers — who were responsible for the extraordinary efflorescence of the western as it slouched towards its last hurrah.
On the one hand were old salts such as Peckinpah, his mentor Don Siegel (The Shootist) and professional provocateur Robert Aldrich (Ulzana’s Raid) working in a largely classical vein, no matter how subversive their themes, along with ageing enfant terrible and mischief-maker Robert Altman, who, in McCabe and Mrs Miller and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, ruthlessly dismantled the genre and reassembled it in pleasingly misshapen form.
They also embraced the enormously important innovations of operatic Marxist Sergio Leone, whose spaghetti westerns thrived on brutality, amorality, greed and self-conscious genre stereotyping that sanctioned almost all the experiments to come.
John Wayne, the western’s foremost icon and among the loudest cheerleaders for the Vietnam war, helped discredit the genre in many eyes.
Vietnam was the cauldron of the 1970s western. It was like every American institution in that molten era: full of disputable assumptions and ripe for destruction and creative rebuilding.
At one end of this spectrum was a bloodthirsty revisionist cavalry western such as Ralph Nelson’s Soldier Blue, or Arthur Penn’s picaresque satire Little Big Man, in which Wild Bill Hickok is a stumbling drunk and Custer a vainglorious madman.
In both, the white man was callous and murderous, the Indian a noble victim or sly hero.
At the other end were hippy westerns like Peter Fonda’s lovely The Hired Hand, Hopper’s shamanic, often incoherent The Last Movie and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s incantatory El Topo. These were ‘peyote westernsâ€, in which American history was reinterpreted to make room for hallucinogenic experience.
Their natural terminus is Jim Jarmusch’s masterpiece, Dead Man, which the critic J Hoberman has called ‘the western Tarkovsky always wanted to makeâ€.
When they had run their course, the 1970s westerns had left almost no myth or legend untouched.
Never was a genre so thoroughly broken down and reconstituted as the western in those times, and the job done, the genre was as good as dead.
The few westerns we see today are nostalgic throwbacks to the classic 1950s western (Kevin Costner’s Open Range, or Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado), or homages to the oddball, refusenik westerns of the 1970s iconoclasts (Dead Man, The Ballad of Little Jo). Guess which are more interesting.
Like the buffalo herds and the Indian nations, the western isn’t altogether extinct. But like them it is a relic of something formerly great, now as good as gone, but occasionally still surfacing to surprise us. —