(2 of 3)
Disillusionment over Vietnam helped cause the western virtually to disappear from the theaters and network TV for nearly two decades. Now it is being viewed through a fresh '90s prism. Richard Slotkin, an American-studies professor at Connecticut's Wesleyan University, points out that westerns have traditionally provided "a way of testing out different ways of looking at the past. The events of the past 20 or 30 years -- in such areas as race relations, the ecology movement, the relationship between Native Americans and the government -- are all being revisited through the western." Notes Burns: "History isn't really about the past -- settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are."
Consider the life of Wyatt Earp. The frontier lawman was romanticized in earlier films and a TV series as a paragon of moral virtue and gunfighting prowess. In Wyatt Earp, scheduled to be released next summer, Costner portrays the complete Earp, a gambler and businessman who lived nearly 50 years after the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
Tombstone, the competing Wyatt Earp saga (due in theaters next month), sticks to more familiar terrain, but with a contemporary spin. Tombstone, Arizona, is a boomtown beset by very recognizable urban problems. "Normal people are terrorized by gangs," says producer Jim Jacks. "The cowboy gang of the Clanton brothers wear red sashes around their waist. We use gang colors." Notes Kurt Russell, who stars as Earp: "In terms of violence, Tombstone made South Central look like the Garden of Eden."
Geronimo, another Christmas release, was held up for years, according to producer-director Walter Hill, by his insistence that a Native American be cast in the lead role. (Wes Studi, of The Last of the Mohicans, finally got the part.) The film presents a more sympathetic picture of the Apache warrior than in westerns past. "This film examines the social and cultural tragedy of the Apache nation in the latter part of the 19th century," says Hill. "It's about the end of a culture."
Women too are getting an aggressive re-examination. In Bad Girls, due next spring, four prostitutes quit their business and strike out on their own, a sort of Thelma & Louise on horseback. "It's what freedom felt like at a time when the only value placed on a woman was as a wife," says executive producer Lynda Obst. In Maverick, another spring release, Mel Gibson plays the wisecracking gambler, who this time is teamed with a card sharp played by Jodie Foster.
Blacks have become more visible as well, though with less self- consciousness. Morgan Freeman played Clint Eastwood's best friend in Unforgiven, and Return to Lonesome Dove features both a black villain (Dennis Haysbert) and a black hero (Louis Gossett Jr.). But race does not become an issue in either film. Hollywood's reinterpretation in this case follows historical fact. "By some estimates, 25% of the cowboys during the heyday of the range-cattle trade were African Americans," says Slotkin. "It's really a very neglected aspect of American history."