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I
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come
back again.
Thomas
Wolfe : Look Homeward, Angel
Perhaps the draw of a good Western is its
ability to point towards the unknown, and thus to plumb a truth of the human
condition. The use of supernatural elements in Western films can be deeply
haunting, and the truly great Westerns endeavour to place in question the
archetypal forces of Good and Evil, and to portray the effort to continue to
search for one’s place, often against apparently insurmountable odds.
One of the most striking sequences of all
Westerns is to be found in Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (1985). The title
is a reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, wherein the rider of a
pale horse represents Death. The main character, the Preacher, is an “out-and-out
ghost” as described by Eastwood (who also portrayed him). We first meet him as
he descends from on-high mountain country, accompanied by words from the 23rd
Psalm, called out by a young girl as she buries her slain dog in a forest. When
we next glimpse the Preacher, he is cast in the imagery of St. George, astride
a pale horse on the edge of town. He is the supernatural anti-hero, apparently
sent to help the small miners and farmers in their hour of need. The classic
western Shane (1953) was an inspiration to Eastwood’s telling of Pale
Rider, and he extends the earlier film’s use of subtle supernatural
elements in both setting and plot. Each film ends with the mysterious stranger,
the outsider, riding away alone, into the unknown.
The Western film genre portrays the range of
human emotions set within a society that is often without ‘man made’ law, yet
cast around codes of honour, justice and archetypes. With films such as The
Furies (1950) and High Noon (1952), psychological dramas evocative
of ancient Greek myths were established as part and parcel of the genre. High
Noon, perhaps the greatest Western ever made, was directed by Fred
Zinnemann, and starred the physically pained and ravaged Gary Cooper (who was
actually ill at the time) as the Marshall abandoned by all the townspeople to
face the outlaws. The film can be seen as a morality play about the issues confronting
America, particularly the persecution of the film industry by Senator McCarthy
and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
It is a wilderness West to which the searcher
gravitates, seeking a life that is freer to grow up straight and become
oneself, opportunities that are no longer found “back East”. The frontier also
attracts the criminal and the outlaw, and, as writers and directors used the
genre for exploration, the black and white, good and bad of earlier Westerns
gradually gave way to many shades of grey. One has only to watch how John Ford
directs John Wayne in three films-as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach (1939),
the paternal captain Nathan in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and
Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956)_-to witness this deepening of
characterization and plot. Wayne’s simple form of character in Stagecoach has
become in _The Searchers a wandering, moody, dark, obsessive misfit. He is
shown at the end of the film turning away from a home and family; he is alone
and in a way as cursed as the buried Comanche, into whose dead eyes he had
earlier fired bullets, so that the Indian would have to ‘wander forever between
the winds’-doomed to spiritual homelessness.
In Unforgiven (1992), the mingling of
right and wrong, in both the retired gunslinger William Munny (Clint Eastwood),
who tried to go straight, and the sheriff, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman),
is even more striking. They have similar backgrounds: both men are shaped from
the same mould (and as Alan Ladd states in Shane – ‘A man has to be what
he is; you cant break the mould. I tried it- it didn’t work for me’). It is a
movie where the seasonal chill of the mountainous landscape outlives the
characters, caught as they are by accident and by fate. Who are the good and
who are the bad? The Sheriff, in order to uphold the law, whips a man to death;
the Outlaw, outraged by such a brutal killing of his old friend, Ned Logan
(Morgan Freeman), turns to merciless vengeance. It is the badly wounded Little
Bill Daggett who, in the harsh, death-strewn, storm-shrouded denouement, says, ‘I
don’t deserve to die like this – I was building a house.’ William Munny
replies, ‘Deserve has nothing to do with it.’ Daggett counters, ‘I’ll see you
in hell William Munny.’ The tension of the night scene is stretched into the
scarred and unforgiving face of Munny who replies, ‘Yeah’. Evocative of the
apocalyptic, the outlaw departs the rain-mudded town on a pale horse and it
seems that, as Alexander Pope wrote, “…universal Darkness covers all.” In the
final scene, the storm has abated, and the music is guitar gentle. Even the sky
(is it dawn or sunset?) appears to offer redemptive peace. There is the humble
house; clothes hung out to dry; a lone tree stroked by wind; a man standing by
the grave of his wife. As we watch both the clothes and the man fade and,
ghostlike, disappear, the rest of the scene remains to stir us to question our
time-framed existence.
II
Films of the Western genre were set in the
western United States during the late 1850’s to the end of the “Indian Wars” in
the early 1890’s. However, both the setting and period have a certain
elasticity, for the Western also incorporates the American Civil War and
settings east of the Mississippi. It also crosses borders into Canada, Mexico,
Australia, and, in the case of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969),
Bolivia. The influence of the Western can be felt outside of its era in such
films as Easy Rider(1969) and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
(2005). In Easy Rider, motorbikes supplant horses; gun violence and
bigotry is meshed in circadian Southern heat, and New Orleans becomes the
visited Wild West town. Three Burials draws upon the imagery and music
of the Texas Mexican border, a film imbued with friendship, revenge, atonement
and forgiveness. Though set in the modern era, the carriage of the film is
almost entirely of the Western genre.
Although some attempts at capturing Western
flavour had been made prior to 1900 (particularly with the short kinetoscopes
of the 1890’s) it is The Great Train Robbery (1903), starring Broncho
Billy Anderson, which can be said to be the first proper Western. The film,
directed by Edwin S. Porter, was a remarkable effort. It established Anderson
as the movie screen’s first cowboy star, and he went on to make several hundred
western movie shorts. Porter made over 100 films between 1901 and 1908. His
work is often seen as a precursor to W. B Griffith’s Birth of a Nation
(1915), having established the structure and codes of cinematic language
and classic film making.
The Western genre itself has sub-genres. ‘Revisionist
Westerns’ such as Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), The Long
Riders (1980), Little Big Man (1970), stripped away romanticism,
revealing the harsh, often brutal realities of life on the frontier. Its
B-movies were the ‘Singing Cowboy Westerns’, many of which were produced
throughout the 1930’s and 1940’s, making stars of Gene Autry, Tex Ritters, and
Roy Rodgers. ‘Epic Westerns’ included Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
and The Searchers. The ‘Spaghetti Western’ emerged in Italy during the
1960’s and 1970’s. Some of the best, made by Sergio Leone, were A Fistful of
Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the
Bad, and the Ugly (1966). In these movies, Clint Eastwood, the “Man-with-No-Name”
character, embodies some of the archetypical qualities of the movie cowboy:
toughness, self-reliance, quietness, skill with a gun; however, unlike the
original archetype often portrayed by actors such as John Wayne and Randolph
Scott, Eastwood’s characters portray moral ambiguity. The ‘Comedy Westerns’
included Way Out West (1937), starring Laurel and Hardy, Destry Rides
Again (1939) with Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart, The Paleface
(1948), with Bob Hope playing a cowardly dentist ‘Painless’ Peter Potter,
and Jane Russell as Calamity Jane. As the Western film genre began to disperse
and decline, comedy in films such as Support Your Local Sheriff (1969),
Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1974) and Alen Cox’s Straight to Hell
(1987) devolved into parody, and in a way were announcing the end of a once
dominant genre.
III
A strong influence upon Westerns in the 1960’s
was the Japanese samurai films of Akira Kurosawa. The Magnificent Seven
(1960) was a remake of Kurosawa’s Shichinin no Samurai (The Seven
Samurai 1954), and both a Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Last Man
Standing (1966) were remakes of Yojimbo (1961). Kurosawa was himself
deeply influenced by the work of John Ford, who in turn learned his trade as a
director of early Universal Studios silent Westerns. An offshoot of the genre
is the ‘Post-Apocalyptic’ Western, in which, following some form of major
catastrophe, what remains of society is trying to survive and rebuild in a
setting similar to the 19th century frontier. Good examples of these are The
Postman (1997), and the Mad Max Series (1979–1985) featuring Mel
Gibson.
It may be argued that Sam Peckinpah’s The
Wild Bunch (1969) marked something of an apotheosis and an end. The tale of
The Wild Bunch is set in 1913 and told from the point of view of nine
outlaws who are bound by friendship and honour but hounded by bounty hunters.
The film shows that the Old West is coming to an end, and so it was fitting
that the film included such old stalwarts as Robert Ryan, William Holding, and
Ernest Borgnine. Both Ryan and Borgnine acted with Lee Marvin and Spencer
Tracey in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), a drama that contained many
features of the classic Western. Tom Horn (1980) and The Shootist
(1976) play out the death of the gunfighter. Monte Walsh (1970) examines
what happened to redundant cowboys when their skills are superseded by
technology. Walsh, played by Lee Marvin, turns down a job as a circus
entertainer, adding that “I’m not gonna spit on my old life.” In The Ballad
Of Cable Hogue (1970), the hero Cable, played by Jason Robards, dies under
the wheels of a ‘new fangled automobile’. The death of the West, however, was
not simply figurative. The 1970’s and 1980’s saw the passing of many of the
directors and actors that were associated with the genre, including John Ford,
Howard Hawks, Jacques Tourneur, Raoul Walsh King Vidor, and John Wayne. After
the failure of Heaven’s Gate (1980) at the box office, Hollywood turned
away from the Western.
If today the Western has all but disappeared
from the screens, it is in part the result of both a shift in the genre itself
and also in American society. Just as Bob Dylan took up the songs of Arlo
Guthrie, science fiction films such as George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977–2002,
I–VI) and Sci-fi television series such as Star Trek (1996–2002)
borrowed extensively from the elements and conventions of the Western. Peter
Hyam’s Outland (1981) is an adaptation of High Noon to
interstellar space. Since the 1970’s the frontier for audiences has become
outer space and maybe it is symbolic that the year The Wild Bunch was
released coincided with American astronauts setting foot on the moon. Perhaps
it could be said that the Western has not after all vanished, but moved to the
new open spaces beyond the earth itself, or returned with a different view to
old territory, with examples of Dead Man (1995) with Johnny Depp as
accountant William Blake. encountering a strange Indian named “Nobody”, Ang Lee’s
Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Wim Wenders’ Don’t Come Knocking
(2005).