The Mammoth Book of the West (58 page)

The other vein to be tapped by the makers of early Western movies was the real West itself. While the first Westerns were shot at east coast studios, in 1907 the Selig-Polyscope Company of Chicago sent a film crew way out West to shoot
The Girl from Montana
, which made heavy use of the local scenery. A trend for authentic locations was set. It was confirmed forever in 1909 when the Bison Company arrived in California. More studios followed . . . and so was Hollywood born.

California had more than scenery: it had real Westerners. For bit parts in the first Hollywood Westerns, unemployed cowboys used to be rounded up from Los Angeles’ dirt-floor saloons for a dollar a day and lunch. Not just cowboys, either. A few authentic Old West heroes and villains had their moment in the movies. Robber Al Jennings and Sheriff Bill Tilghman reconstructed their past in 1908’s
The Bank Robbery
. Buffalo Bill Cody starred in
The Adventures of Buffalo Bill
(1917). Wyatt Earp was a near fixture around Hollywood lots declaiming on how the West had been won, and featured in 1919’s
The Half-Breed
. Reputedly, Earp gave director John Ford the just-so version of the gunfight at the OK Corral, as patented in Ford’s
My Darling Clementine
from 1946.

The West and the movies were made for each other. The camera loved the landscape west of the Mississippi better even than the brushes of Seth Eastman and Albert Bierstadt loved it. Motion pictures, by definition, need action. What could surpass the spectacles – the gunfights, the wagon trains across the Plains, the stampedes, the cavalry charges – of the real and pot-boiled West?

Nothing. It is perhaps small wonder that nearly one quarter of the movies made in America in 1909 were Westerns.

That same year also saw the emergence of the first Western star in the pugnacious shape of Gilbert M. Anderson (aka Max Aronson). Beginning with
Bronco Billy’s Redemption
, Anderson played the “good bad man” (a ne’er-do-well redeemed by the heroic saving of, usually, a woman or child) in a slew of nearly 200 films. Anderson did something more than shine celestially. He also made the cowboy the Western hero
sans pareil
. Before Anderson, the heroes of Western movies had tended to be those of old-style Western literary fiction, the trapper and scout. After Anderson, the cowpoke ruled, a happenstance not entirely unconnected to the phenomenal success of Owen Wister’s 1902 novel
The Virginian
and the growing popularity of rodeo. There was also the small fact that a cowboy looked stylish on film in a way that a man wearing furs never can.

The ascendancy of the cowboy on the silver screen was only proven when the next Western star, William S. Hart, adopted cowpuncher persona. And the next, Tom Mix. But whereas Hart, raised on the old frontier, brought authenticity and moralism to his films, Mix – whose career was at its zenith in the 1920s – opted for sheer escapist entertainment. Authenticity versus Fantasy. Always would the Western be pulled between them, to and fro, to and fro.

Even in the same moment. If Tom Mix’s glitzy dare-devilry was one flavour with the Jazz Age audience, another was the epic Western. Producers such as D. W. Griffith at Biograph had already shown what could be done with big production values and bigger vision in such spectaculars as
The Battle of Elderbush Gulch
(1913). But the first epic really to roll was Paramount’s
The Covered Wagon
of 1923, based on Emerson Hough’s novel, which followed
an emigrant train going westwards in the 1840s. The theme was mighty (the conquest of the West), the budget vast ($782,000 – about $10 million at contemporary prices), the panoramas sweeping (it was filmed on location in Utah) and the length almost unprecedented (it was a ten-reeler, twice as long as the average feature).

A small stampede of historical epics followed, among them John Ford’s railway-building extravaganza,
The Iron Horse
(1924, which used as extras the same “coolies” who had worked on the real transcontinental constructions), William S. Hart’s Oklahoma land-rush tale
Tumbleweeds
(1925), and
The Vanishing American
(1926), this last based on Zane Grey’s story about reservation Indians. There might have been more, but the epics required expenditure that unnerved studio heads. Down at the lot, meanwhile, “oaters” based around a particular Western star – Mix, Hart, Hoot Gibson, Tim McCoy, Ken Maynard, Buck Jones, Harry Carey – coined in the money nicely with little risk thank you. The oater got a further filip in the mid-1930s with the advent of the “double-bill”, which required a filler for the bottom half of the programme. Oaters fitted the wanted notice perfectly and they rolled off the conveyor-belt of Hollywood at bewildering pace. In 1934 Hollywood produced 76 Westerns; a year later its annual production had more than doubled to 145 Westerns. The Taj Mahals of Hollywood’s moguls were built on the back of the humble “B” (for Bottom of bill) Western, a star-based American morality play in which the guy in the white hat gunned down the villain in the black one. And was made on the cheap. The budget for the Westerns Marion Morrison (aka John Wayne) made for Monogram in the middle of the 1930s was $5,000 a pop. Wayne, at least, didn’t have to sing, for this was also the era of the singing cowboy, epitomized by Republic studio’s Gene Autry. A former “hillbilly”
recording artist, Autry was installed at Republic in place of the unpredictable Ken Maynard and almost instantly topped
Motion Picture Herald’s
annual poll of the major money-making Western stars, staying in the top slot from 1937 to 1943. Many tried to emulate Autry, but only Tex Ritter and Republic stablemate, Roy Rogers (
né
Leonard Slye) offered serious dollar-spinning competition.

While the Bs boomed, A Westerns hit hard times in the 1930s, a direct result of the flopping at the 1930 box-office of RKO’s
Cimarron
– ironically enough the only Western to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards until
Dances with Wolves
in 1990 – and Fox’s
The Big Trail
. Not until 1939 with John Ford’s
Stagecoach
, filmed in what would become Ford’s signature backdrop, Monument Valley in Arizona, and
Jesse James
did the A Western come out all guns blazing, for a decade and more of glory.

The return to Hollywood town of the A Western was no coincidence. There was a new breed of athletic star – Tyrone Power, James Stewart, Henry Fonda and, especially, Errol Flynn – needing action screen parts, and when Cecil B. de Mille, whose first Western had been
The Squaw Man
in 1914, decided to have another shot at the genre others were sure to follow suit. Especially when, as with
Union Pacific
(1939) and
Northwest Mounted Police
(1940), he made lucre at the box-office.

More than any of this, the Western had grown up and got meaningful, become a mirror into which Americans might look and see something of their past, but also their present. It was more than coincidence that many of the new crop of Westerns were either biopics of American outlaws (
Jesse James
) or pageants of frontier progress (
Union Pacific
). Their common evil was money-grubbing capitalist barons who did down poor folk, even driving them to become outlaws (such as the James boys). The parallel with the Depression of the 1930s was plain for audiences to see.

Something else audiences were getting a glimpse of in the A Western was psyche and sex. Up to Howard Hughes’s
The Outlaw
starring Jane Russell, released in 1943, women in Westerns were either absent or simpering symbols of civilization (the “gentle tamers”). Russell paraded a sexual desire unknown in Western movies (“What are the two reasons for Jane Russell’s rise to stardom?” quipped the film’s poster over a still of her décolletage), with the heat turned up further by
Duel in the Sun
(1946). What was acceptable taste in movieland West was changed forever.

But the film that truly blazed the trail for the A Western was not
Stagecoach
or
The Outlaw
or
Union Pacific
but
The Ox-Bow Incident
from 1942. Based on Walter van Tilburg Clark’s novel, the
Incident
pictured a less than pretty West where townsfolk were given to lynching hysteria. There was no easy White v Black morality, “civilization” was hardly worth the fighting for, and there was not even a galahad-with-a-six to do it. And the folks had all sorts of neuroses. The Western was turned on its head.

Thereafter the trend towards “adult” Westerns trotted, cantered and by the 1950s was galloping apace. Gregory Peck found a town full of malice in
The Gunfighter
(1950). Gary Cooper encountered much the same in
High Noon
(1952). James Stewart played an angst-ridden lawman in
The Naked Spur
(1953), directed by Anthony Mann, probably the Western director most influenced by “film-noir”. Nicholas Ray’s
Johnny Guitar
(1954) lit into mob rule. Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn came close to something like homosexuality in
Warlock
(1959).

Not, of course, that the “traditional” Western was driven out of town. The B Western continued untroubled and unchanged, until killed off by the emergence of Western series on TV in the mid-1950s. The mythic Old West (or was it the true Old West?) where a man had to do what he had to do to tame the wilderness and the wild-blooded was
evoked unforgettably in
Shane
(1952). And John Wayne would not have become the icon of cowboy movies if he hadn’t ridden uprightly through
Fort Apache
(1948) and
Rio Bravo
(1959).

Yet even the stalwart John Wayne had a share of 1950s angst, starring as the fractured hero of Howard Hawk’s
Red River
(1948) and John Ford’s
The Searchers
(1956). When the Duke had to play it tortured, it was a certain sign that the times were moving to a different drum beat.

As all manner of film commentators noted in learned journals of the 1950s, that age’s paranoias (the Cold War, McCarthyism, youth rebellion) had found their place in the Western.
High Noon
and
Johnny Guitar
were implicit attacks on the witch-hunts of Joe McCarthy.
The Man Behind the Gun
(1953) took the opposite side of the street, and gave dire warnings to root out the red from under the bed. Nicholas Ray’s
The True Story of Jesse James
(1957) put inter-generational conflict plot centre – as had the director’s
Rebel Without a Cause
(1955) – which was just the right place for the new phenomenon of “teenagers”. There were obvious Cold War parables to be found in the cavalry movies
Arrowhead
(1953) and
Drum Beat
(1954). After
Broken Arrow
(1950), however, any film that portrayed Injuns as bad was fighting the wind.

American Indians had not had a good time out in the cinematic West. Aside from some sympathetic treatment in early silent movies which tended to romance, such as
Ramona
(1910) and
A Squaw’s Love
(1911), the lot of the Indian had been faceless savagery for 40 years. Delmer Daves’s
Broken Arrow
made a stand against anti-Indian racism, and made a difference. A true historian of the West, Daves presented authentic Indian culture. Influenced by the contemporary civil rights movement he also gave out a message of co-existence between the races. That the studio insisted on Whites playing Indian roles
and on the killing-off of the Indian princess (played by Debra Paget) before miscegenation could occur hardly lessened the movie’s impact. A whole flurry of pro-Indian movies was knocked out by Hollywood, among them
Apache
(1954, starring Burt Lancaster) and
Taza, Son of Cochise
(1954, starring Rock Hudson) and John Ford’s
Cheyenne Autumn
(1964), his last Western and something of apology for the cinematic crimes he’d committed against the Indians as far back as
Stagecoach
. Six years later the Western finally faced up to the real historical massacre of the Indian, with the release of
Soldier Blue
, which reconstructed the slaughters at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, and
Little Big Man
, which focused on the mayhem at Washita. When, in 1973, Marlon Brando refused to accept an Academy Award in protest at Hollywood’s treatment of Native Peoples, the pro-Indian uprising reached a kind of culmination.

It was too little, too late. By 1973 Hollywood was barely making any Westerns, let alone pro-Indian ones. Whereas 130 Westerns had been produced in 1950, just 16 Westerns came out of Tinseltown in 1973. The reasons weren’t hard to guess. Over the 1950s and 1960s audiences had become sated with oaters on the silver and small screens. Demographics, too, took a hand. As studios had long known, the major audience for Westerns were rural folk. In an increasingly urban America, the Western found fewer takers. Moreover, even as late as the 1950s men and women who had actually fought on the frontier were still to be found on rocking-chairs on porches, yarning about chasing the ’Pache and building sod houses. By the next decade the last of the Old West survivors had gone, and with them went the living links to the frontier era. Their passing was acknowledged by a passel of End-of-the-West-Westerns in the 1960s, beginning with Sam Peckinpah’s almost perfect
Ride the High Country
(aka
Guns in the Afternoon
) of 1962,
which found Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott as aged gunfighters escorting a payroll at the very moment the motor car arrived out West. There were similar laments to the gone West in
Lonely Are the Brave, The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance, The Good Guys and Bad Guys
and
Monte Walsh
.

Arguably, though, the real truth behind the fall of the Western was none of the above. For 50 years the Western had got along by adapting to the mood of the people who bought the tickets. In the 1960s the people were cynical. You can do pretty much anything with a Western, save make it cynical.

Of course, some tried. Notably the Italian director Sergio Leone. After importing a minor Western TV star, Clint Eastwood, in 1964 Leone embarked on a cycle of Cinecitta-made Westerns featuring a “Man With No Name”, an amoral and guileful mercenary who was almost superhumanly useful with a revolver. Leone’s “dollars trilogy” (
A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More
and
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
, all released in the USA in 1967) made an aesthetic of violence, which was lovingly choreographed and played out to the almost operatic soundtracks of Ennio Morricone. You didn’t need the eyes of an eagle to see that everybody involved had their tongues in their cheek. The limitations of the “Spaghetti Western” were nicely pointed up by the career of Leone himself. As soon as Hollywood came knockin’ on Signor Leone’s door with a wagonload of bucks, he made an almost entirely traditional-type Western, the epic
Once Upon a Time in the West
. Clint Eastwood followed the same path. Once back in Hollywood, he made oaters that retained Leone’s stylistics but used the old, tried and tested Western formula: the man with the gun commits violence for personal or societal redemption. The more Westerns Eastwood made after
Hang ’Em High
(1968), the more “normal” his oaters became, especially when he
warmed the director’s chair too, such as on
The Outlaw Josey Wales
(1976) and
Pale Rider
(1985).