The Wild West’s Long and Winding Road

Of all the strange genre conventions in movies — that the rich girl will fall in love with the poor boy, or that people will choose to express themselves by bursting into song — surely the goofiest is the one at the heart of the traditional Western: that the good guy will be the best shot. Does that make any sense? Surely the villain will have had more practice, and with more live targets. Surely he will not wait for a sporting opportunity to murder. Yet there he is, at the wrong end of Main Street, about to be perforated by the unerring trajectory and superior moral gumption of the man in the white hat.

Fans of the Western will say that trope simply proves the purity of the form: that it’s a fable, a parable, a chivalric test of manhood. Whatever its historic validity, the notion of the big shootout kept Westerns going strong for the first 70 years of Hollywood cinema. It began with the first smash hit at the nickelodeons, The Great Train Robbery, and continued with Cecil B. De Mille’s The Squaw Man and John Ford’s The Iron Horse in the silent era. Cimarron, a generational tale from Edna Ferber, was declared Best Picture at the fourth Academy Awards convocation.

In the 30s and 40s Westerns were mostly a staple of B-minus movies. Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Ken Maynard and others rode through hundreds of Saturday matinee sagebrush epics, and John Wayne made 50 or 60 of them before he became a star with the 1939 Stagecoach. That was Ford’s first Western of that decade, and he made no more until My Darling Clementine in 1946, finally devoting his full attention to the genre in the mid-50s. By then it had become his calling card. “I’m John Ford,” he’d announce. “I make Westerns.”

In the post-war era, virtually every Hollywood director, from George Stevens and Fred Zinnemann on the A list, to Preston Sturges on the way down and Ed Wood who was never up, directed a Western. It was the new film noir — you could call it the anti-noir, trading claustrophobic darkness for blinding light in the wide-open spaces. But it was also a continuation of noir’s fascination with the haunted man, the ordinary guy who’d been scarred by violent experiences. It spoke to returning veterans from World War II, young men from cities and farms who’d been handed weapons and asked to clean up the wildest parts of Europe and the Pacific. They needed to believe that the mission they’d been sent on, and which took the lives of some of their comrades, had a moral meaning. Because Americans came back winners, they could accept that the good guy could win a gunfight.

The Western was by far the most prolific genre in the Hollywood 50s. It put virtually every big star in the saddle: old Hollywood types like Gable and James Stewart, younger rebels like Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Brando and most of the Stanislavski crowd from Broadway. Top actresses — Stanwyck, Dietrich, Crawford, Monroe — they all went West.

And it’s wrong to think that Westerns were flights from Cold War reality or the political issues of the day. The form attracted serious young writers, like Gore Vidal, a graduate of TV’s Golden Age of live drama, who wrote The Left-Handed Gun, a Billy the Kid film that one critic called “Freud on the Range.” There were plenty of mature, psychologically complex Westerns. In the original 3:10 to Yuma, the career killer and decent farmer hole up in a hotel room and have an extended existentialist conversation — like Sartre or Beckett, but at gunpoint. In Anthony Mann’s Westerns with Stewart and Gary Cooper, a good man with a bad past would face his own demons. The final shootout was both a surge and a purge.

The form also dominated TV production, which had just shifted from New York to Hollywood, and from live to filmed entertainment. Out went the hour-long, Broadway-style dramas; in came the strutting gunman with a ornery streak of justice. In the 1958-59 season, six of the seven top-rated shows were Westerns. That’s where the B-movie oaters went to live again, and where Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds and dozens of others stars-in-the-making came from. Steve McQueen, fresh from the Actors Studio, became a bounty hunter in Wanted: Dead or Alive. He moved to the big screen in The Magnificent Seven, which introduced a new generation of Western stars, including Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson and James Coburn. A good thing, since the previous generation of cowboys, from Wayne, Stewart and Cooper to Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, were becoming so senior that, s Pauline Kael wrote, the only suspense in their Westerns was to see if they could still mount a horse.

UH-OH, SPAGHETTI OATERS

On TV and in the movies, the work of the Western was to reconcile the individual and civilization, the man with the gun and the pretty school teacher. For the hero to be the best shot was also to say that the little people in the community were safe as long as it had a strong, armed protector — a one-man army, a preternatural policeman, the Old Testament God — on their side.

The spaghetti western changed that. Sergio Leone filched the plot from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (Hollywood had already remade Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven) for his 1964 Fistful of Dollars. Clint ambles into a rotten town commandeered by rival miscreants and takes both gangs down. In Fistful and the Leone-Eastwood followups For a Few Dollars More (surely the most honest title every slapped on a sequel) and The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, society was run by outlaws. The moral choice was among various shades of black. Anarchy ran riot, and the only recourse was martial — not marshall — law.

But the audience needed a rooting interest, and because Clint was so damn cool, he established the new mode: hero by default. The good guy was the one with the fastest gun, the meanest scowl and top billing. And that perpetual three-day beard that Toshiro Mifune had worn in the same role in Yojimbo; in Hollywood Westerns, the hero’s visage was typically hairless, while villains sported a dastardly mustache. Eastwood’s scruff became a fashion statement that lives today on the carefully unshaven faces of pop stars and young actors. And his surliness, transposed to the Dirty Harry Callahan character he played in five films, lent the cop film an antiheroic attitude the genre still can’t shake.

Hollywood, when it brought Fistful to the States, still wanted moviegoers to think the Italian Westerns were American, though Eastwood was the only Yank on the set. So Clint’s costar, Gian Maria Volonte, is called Johnny Wels on the U.S. credits; composer Ennio Morricone is Dan Savio, cinematographer Massimo Dallamano is Jack Dalmas. In some versions, Leone was called Bob Robertson. The American edition bore no screenplay credit, and of course no reference to the original literary source.

But audiences didn’t care where it came from; they loved it. Produced for a thrifty $200,000, of which Clint got $15,000, Fistful made the careers of Eastwood, Leone and Morricone. It created a legend around the Man With No Name — a publicist’s canny invention, since the Eastwood character always had one (Joe, Mongo, Blondie). And it triggered literally hundreds of Westerns from an Italian movie industry that had already shown itself expert at imitating Hollywood and British genres: the Biblical epic turned into the sword-and-sandal muscleman movies, the sex-charged Hammer and Corman-Poe horror films made into even more erotic thrillers. For ordinary moviegoers of the 60s, the phrase “Italian films” did not conjure up Fellini, Antonioni and the glamour of alienation. It meant vigorous ripoffs of English-language genre films.

Among the prime directors of Italian Westerns (most of them shot in Spain, by the way) was Sergio Corbucci, who vaulted to prominence with the 1966 Django. It was The image of star Franco Nero coming into town not on horseback but on foot, dragging a coffin, was an instant sensation that cued more than 50 Django films, all unrelated to the original. Its theme song, by composer Luis Bacalov, remains one of those melodies that worms its way into a listener’s brain and, as I can testify, can’t be extracted for weeks. The Corbucci film also inspired later generations of video hounds, including Quentin Tarantino, who appropriated the Django scene of banditos cutting off a preacher’s ear for his film Reservoir Dogs. (The original went further: the poor man had to eat his ear.)

Corbucci went from hot to frigid with The Great Silence (1968), a snowbound Western in which a mute Jean-Louis Trintignant, the Man With No Voice, sets out to even the odds against the nasties who cut out his tongue. It’s a plot similar to the film Leone was making that year: Once Upon a Time in the West, another decades-old revenge story and one of the great, elegiac Westerns. It was horse opera rendered as grand opera, with Morricone’s fullest, most voluptuous score. Corbucci’s vision was much bleaker. For once the good guy doesn’t win. Hero and heroine are both killed, and the rival bad guys are left to shoot it out in a final saloon carnage.

For all its influence in Europe and Asia, Django got no Stateside release that I know about. In fact, few spaghetti Westerns beyond the Leones were released here. Americans stuck with the Duke through True Grit and patronized the anti-Westerns of Sam Peckinpah (notably The Wild Bunch) and Robert Altman (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, another snowy oater). And then, bang, the genre was dead. The setting, the pace, the moral stakes all seemed so very 19th century. When the Western is periodically revived, it’s not from popular demand but from the antique obsessions of powerful filmmakers.

And they’re often as remote from our shores as the Italians. The stars of the new 3:10 to Yuma are the Australian Russell Crow and the Brit Christian Bale. The writer-director of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is the New Zealand-born Andrew Dominick. Today, as in the 60s, the Western holds more fascination for outsiders than for Americans. But if the genre is to rise from the dead one more time, the grandsons of the pioneers — the descendants of those millions of viewers who made the Western a unique contribution to popular art and culture — will have to saddle up and see a few.

Archive: Richard Corliss on the films of Anthony Mann