This history of the western was written at speed and in desperation. I was editor of a website at the time and we literally had no material to put online that week. In the circumstances, I don't think I did too badly. But some of the facts are wrong and some of the conclusions broad at best, dubious at worst. The rather tenuous explanation for the article's appearance was the release of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (hence the title) and Brokeback Mountain - which is barely mentioned! But the overall drift of the piece still has something going for it.
It all started with a camel. Or, at least, the shot of a camel trotting past a saloon in the first few moments of Sam Peckinpah’s Ride The High Country (1961). For that shot decisively brought an end to the era of the classic Western – the world of John Ford, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann. After all, who’d ever heard of a camel in a cowboy picture? It just wasn’t part of the mythic iconography associated with the genre and so much a part of its identity – the horses, wagon trains, six-shooters, Winchester ‘73s, showdowns in main street, bar fights, black hats and white hats, undertakers, jittery piano players. But Peckinpah had done his research and discovered that they were just as much a part of that landscape as all those elements, if not more so. This was the crux of the matter – that Peckinpah had struck a blow for historical authenticity, made the first declaration that the genre
was not so much involved with the times in which it was set but the mythology surrounding them.
It wasn’t the first time the Western had died and been reinvented. In the 1930s, the genre was more of a light-hearted vehicle for ‘show’ cowboys like Tom Mix and Hopalong Cassidy. The accent was on comedy and quick-draw stunts, making one wonder how George Marshall’s spoof Destry Rides Again could actually end up being more sophisticated than the films it parodied. But it was that film and another released in 1939, Ford’s Stagecoach, that transformed the Western. They introduced psychological realism and thematic complexity to the ‘oater’. At first, directors arguably strained too hard in this direction, resulting in films like William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). But soon, the Western capitalised on these new elements and produced the kind of narrative that would make it the most essential genre in American film.
The models for this narrative were three films made by the great founding fathers of the Western tradition: My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946), Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948) and Winchester ’73 (Anthony Mann, 1950). In each instance, the central story revolving around a small group of people acts as a microcosm for the development of the West itself. Hence, Wyatt Earp’s introduction to town society stands for the gradual civilisation – or urbanisation – of the wilderness. And James Stewart’s hunt for a rifle and a dissolute brother leads him through the many strata of frontier society, allowing director Mann to show how they are all affected by the one governing factor of that time – violence, the law of the gun. This is the beauty of the Western – the way it can relate stories which work on a personal, intimate level but that attain a mythic status once looked at on the social level.
Peckinpah and the directors that trailed him still followed this model. But their approach altered. Many critics put this down to social causes – ie, the increasing tension within the US due to Civil Rights struggles, Vietnam, the growth of the youth counter-culture movement. But it may just have been that they were further away from the source of their inspiration. After all, the cowboys who appeared in early, silent Westerns were sometimes veterans of the events they acted out. They knew that world. Mix and William S Hart were a stone’s throw away from the acts in rodeo shows, popular in the West in the 1890s. For Peckinpah, though - and despite his self-romanticised background - Westerns were a purely cinematic phenomenon. Paradoxically, that led him to reassess the genre according to its historical basis and, in doing so, he called time on the very genre he loved. Now that the myth had been exposed, it lay open to being reinvented as a self-reflexive playground, where directors could make their authorial mark either by revisiting Western themes armed with ‘new’ historical information or self-consciously reworking genre elements they knew their audience were familiar with. The ‘revisionist’ Western was born.
Of course, this happens to all genres at some point. An original work of art becomes popular, is imitated, and then familiarity makes it into a ‘phenomenon’, which is when the rot sets in, as directors become more involved with its clichés than in the story they’re telling. This is arguably what’s happened with the post-Scream modern American horror film. But the strength of the Western lies in the fact that its own clichés are visually and metaphorically so potent that reworking them can actually make the narrative more resonant. Take Robert Aldrich’s much-underrated Ulzana’s Raid (1972). This film plays with the unconscious perception that the classic Western was a white man’s genre, in which the Indians were cast as nuisances. The opening of Red River, for example, features the most jaw-droppingly succinct account of colonialisation, in the way John Wayne simply casts his eye over a vast plain and declares it his. In Ulzana’s Raid, a Cavalryman sees ‘hostile’ Indians appear over a ridge and gallops back to his lady’s carriage. But what appears to be an act of apparent heroism – dashing to her aid – is revealed as a moment of true horror, when he shoots the woman through the head. For him, this is a matter of duty – saving her from the indignity of rape – but it’s also a matter of racism, believing her death to be preferable to being in the clutches of Indians. This co-mingling of white honour and outright prejudice was rare in the ‘50s Western and was certainly never represented as so destructive.
In fact, this change in attitude towards the question of race coincided with a geographical change in the location of the Western itself. Peckinpah took his cowboys south, to Mexico. All of his major Westerns are set across the border or in the hinterland around it. He saw in this country a more earthy, primitive attitude towards life and death, a country now more suited to mythical narrative than the increasingly urbanised landscape of the West Coast. But this is also a somewhat prejudiced perspective, and it plays into the hands of a new-found xenophobia in the Western – that towards the Mexican as opposed to the ‘Native American’. For, at the same time that concern spread about the misrepresentation of Indians, so the influx of illegal Mexican immigrants became a subject of national interest. The discussion of this in the Western arguably reaches its logical conclusion in Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2006), where a Texan pays a debt to his Mexican friend by taking his murderer over the border to face ‘justice’.
But this new ‘Latin’ flavour for the Western should not be seen as a negative characteristic. Indeed, it’s a demonstration of how flexible the genre is in that its elements can be transferred successfully from one culture to another. It also shows that in the era of the ‘revisionist’ Western, when there was an acceptance of the genre’s mythical rather than historical underpinnings, it could be disengaged from its specifically American identity. Cue Sergio Leone, the ringmaster of the revisionist circus. An Italian, he popularised the cycle of films known as ‘spaghetti Westerns’. These, too, were often set in border country, but more crucially, they were produced in Spain, the Iberian landscapes and hordes of Spanish/Italian extras giving the visual texture of the film an authentically Latin feel. Ennio Morricone brilliantly paired the epic sweep of American scores with the playful, ironic twists of European pop and the modernist influence in his own classical music. The result was A Fistful of Dollars (1964), a film that did not betray the Western – as some contemporary critics believed – but resurrected it. After all, Leone took the most basic of narratives – that of the lone gunman caught between two opposing groups – but, by making it in his own unique style, showed that these old stories could be repeated and reworked endlessly and still feel new to the audience.
Nevertheless, the new Latin Western did live up to Peckinpah’s conception of a more brutal landscape south of the Border. Violence had always been part of the Western, but now it took centre stage and seemed to be an end in itself. Thomas Sutcliffe, in his book Watching, argues that the punch, for example, became devalued over the course of the Western’s history and lost its impact as a moment of crisis. Each of John Wayne’s exercises in fisticuffs were motivated by strong moral reasons, and in other fights – like the one between two rival suitors in The Searchers (1956) – there were clear goals for the potential winner. Anthony Mann’s films are actually discussions of violence and its legacy; consequently, they feature some of the most powerful scenes in American film. One stands out – when James Stewart gets shot through the hand in The Man From Laramie (1955). The film cuts away from Stewart and the camera slowly pans across the faces of the men around him; they are sickened, embarrassed, disgusted. All the time, Stewart can be heard moaning softly, whimpering like a hurt child – in macho parlance, like a little girl. No other moment in film captures so eloquently the sheer pain of a gunshot, the awful degradation violence bestows both on its victim and its perpetrator.
By contrast, violence in Peckinpah and Leone often feels pointless, played for laughs or spectacle. Witness the incredibly bloody and extended shoot-out at the end of The Wild Bunch (1969) or the bizarre sequence that begins Leone’s For A Few Dollars More (1965), in which a man rides to the centre of a plateau in the extreme distance. A shot rings out and the man falls dead. Then the credits start. That’s it. It’s a sequence which almost seems to wink at the audience saying, “Anything can happen here – it doesn’t have to mean anything, just revel in the effect.” But to reject such sequences is to misunderstand how violence can be used as a symbolic tool. Take the sequence in Robert Altman’s brilliant McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971). A young gun challenges an unwilling soldier to a quick-draw contest – and promptly shoots him dead. Altman holds the shot of the corpse floating in a river in slow-motion. There is no reason for the killing, and no reason to linger on an unfortunate who has little to do with the plot. But that’s just the point – it’s that senseless, arbitrary waste of life that characterises Altman’s West. It’s the very triviality of the encounter that makes it so shocking.
The extraordinary, operatic levels of violence that one finds in Leone and Peckinpah are not meant to be naturalistic – on the contrary, they’re ultra-stylised. But that allows them to explore themes that a director hidebound by realism could not. That, after all, is the gift of fiction – it allows us to transpose our fantasies into realistic form to investigate questions and states of mind that do not arise in our everyday life. Thus, Peckinpah’s final blow-out in The Wild Bunch is not just a shooting spree, but a last gasp of rage from a dying breed of men, who see their way of life, their code of honour, their freedom thoroughly compromised. It needs to be ferocious, vicious and unrelenting in order to make the audience feel the full force of their desperation, but at the same time face the uncomfortable truth that it makes them into surrogate heroes. In other words, we need to recognise that the style in which the violence is depicted is more crucial to the effect than the form the violence takes.
Peckinpah didn’t just make the Western tougher and move its location – he brought it forward in time. After all, the period when the pioneers settled the West was relatively quick and ended long before the onset of industrialisation. He set his films in the late 1800s/early 1900s, an era almost completely ignored by the classic Western, in which the old-timers were facing the abrupt changes brought about the automobile and the machine-gun. These devilish devices make cameos in nearly all his pictures and their appearances are a peculiarly poignant symbol of the death of the West – contrast their reception with that of the railroad in classic Westerns, which was almost always seen as a positive thing. But these films also allow the Western to come up-to-date and start commenting on the complex beginnings of the 20th century. Furthermore, they usher in a new sub-genre – the modern-day Western. Examples include Peckinpah’s own, undervalued Junior Bonner (1972), Lonely Are The Brave (1962) and, of course, Brokeback Mountain (2005).
They update the Western in another sense, however. The pattern of 20th Century art, from Modernism onwards, has been to locate themes and ideas in the personal or psychological. But the Western grew from the 19th century model of the dime novel, and its concern with the Grand Narratives of settlement and civilisation seemed at odds with the artistic movements around it. Though we talk of directors like Ford and Mann, in many ways, the genre seemed stronger than its individual auteurs. Peckinpah changed all this. He made his own personal demons apparent and threaded them through his films like dark undercurrents. Often accused of being a misogynist, he was actually more concerned with his ambiguous feelings towards men, railing against the declining freedoms and respect for masculinity in a Post-Feminist age but also the self-destructiveness of that masculinity, its propensity for violence. His often compromised characters also started to bear an uncomfortable resemblance to Peckinpah himself, fighting a losing rearguard battle against the studios who wanted to cut his work. This personal soul-searching reached a peak in Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), in which Warren Oates’ magnificent performance was closely modelled – or so Robert Culp claims – on the director himself.
In this sense, it was Anthony Mann, not the more celebrated Ford, who acted as a precursor to the modern Western, because he foregrounded psychological conflict over themes of nationhood. And while Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is often nominated as the film that kick-started the second Golden Age of American film because of its counter-culture stance, wouldn’t a better choice be Monte Hellman’s The Shooting (1966), that not only broached these ideas a year earlier but in the most traditional and iconic of American genres? In this film, again starring Warren Oates, a prospector is dragged into a quest for revenge only to discover that the quarry is his own doppelganger – in other words, he’s been hunting himself. There can be no better example of the interiorisation of the Western and the growing paranoia that would soon infect American film.
Leone, in his turn, also modernised the Western in that he brought it closer to the experimental cinema of the European New Waves. His long takes and extreme close-ups didn’t just extend the sensations of time and space, as in the films of Antonioni, but forced the audience to contemplate the nature of the clichés on show and enjoy the fact that that’s exactly what they’re doing. Hence the ridiculously extended shoot-outs, the all-black outfit of Fonda’s all-black villain in Once Upon A Time In the West (1968), and so on. Dialogue, too, is important. All Western directors have left their signature in the way their characters talk, from Budd Boetticher’s pithy, blunt one-liners of homespun wisdom – “There are some things a man can’t ride around” – to Peckinpah’s wonderfully florid insults – “You can kiss my sister’s black cat’s ass!” Leone plays with this hard-man argot, both to further story and characterisation but also to tip his audience off that the dialogue is to be enjoyed on its own terms, as an object in itself.
“- Looks like we’re shy of one horse.
- No, you brought two horses too many.”
So Leone brings the Western closer to the realm of Contemporary Art in the endless ransacking and reappropriation of found symbols. Other directors have followed suit, Clint Eastwood actually referencing in his own films those he made with Leone in the 1960s.
This year has seen the release of three very well-received Westerns in Melquiades Estrada, Brokeback Mountain, and The Proposition. The genre is still going strong, curiously kept alive by a stream of actor-directors – Eastwood, Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones. It still has new things to offer – the introduction of gay themes, the exploration of new horizons in Australia, the portrait of the Tex-Mex country that gave birth to George W. It’s far from facing its third burial…