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Decline of the Western
In a shootout with the great westerns of the past, the current crop would be left bleeding in the dust.
When Lawrence Kasdan's Wyatt Earp opened at theaters across the country earlier this summer, it had become nearly commonplace again to see the faces of familiar actors slanting under Stetsons, their torsos cinched in by satin vests and six-guns, sporting an air of lazy and perfect discipline. During the past year or so, but especially this spring and summer, it's been impossible for moviegoers to overlook all the Hollywood notables rehearsing their reappraisals of the drawl and the dehydrated squint, the menacing glance and the fully-loaded draw. A partial list includes Kevin Costner, Jodie Foster, Mel Gibson, Gene Hackman, Madeleine Stowe, Val Kilmer, Kurt Russell and Dennis Quaid.
They appear in four major studio releases: George Costakis's Tombstone, Jonathon Kaplan's Bad Girls, Richard Donner's Maverick and Kasdan's Wyatt Earp. Two more comedies, The Cowboy Way and City Slickers II, basket weave Western myths and modem men, and a third, John Candy's Wagons East is about to be released. Add Walter Hill's Wild Bill (in production), and you have the makings of a real trend.
Problem is, so far they're rather uninspired, coming at you as they do all slender scripts blazing. Blame it on an age in which much of our culture seems defined by the secondhand, happy merely alluding to authenticity. But the very point of the Western is its scorn for anything not original, anything not bedrock America. One goes to a Western, after all, to experience something real; for that brief spell of watering horses and making camp and scouting territory.
In West of Everything (1991), Jane Tompkins records her longing, watching Westerns, to belong to the towns that cowboys ride into. The cool offices (telegraph, sheriffs, newspaper) that line Main Street, and all the townsmen in wool (not denim or leather) agog at the approaching rider. In town, a cowboy eases up, treats himself to a two-bit bath and shave. In the heat he smokes a cigar and keeps his head dry, his gun in easy reach. They are intoxicating moments, maybe moreso because they don't lead anywhere. One reason Wagon Master is so terrific is because of its breathing spaces, the moments in it with little or no dialogue and no obvious push of story development. It has long shots that just draw you into that wavy heat, letting you drink in the dryness and glide along the haywagon balance of the covered wagons.
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| Clint Eastwood squinted his way through a string of Sergio Leone movies as "The Man With No Name." |
It's a way of life that John Ford and William Wyler and Howard Hawks put into their films in the 1940s and 1950s. And characters were part of the landscape. In Stagecoach (1939) John Wayne's Ringo Kid seems to jump right out of the desert scene. He's unreal, but the rack focus makes him an immediate, ripe specimen in dusty work-pants. Ringo, Ford found a way to make clear, is defunct, and it is to the director's everlasting credit that he made filmgoers so aware of the perfect goneness of the way of life he was depicting. When Ringo rides off with Dallas (Claire Trevor) at the end, they might just as well be leaving the world as entering it to become newlyweds. That's a pretty heavy mythological burden; against it the new films homestead in a world all homage and allusion.
Entertainment Weekly saw the men in Cowboy Way and City Slickers II inhabiting a "virtual reality frontier," on dude ranches and in Manhattan's gutted streets, but the same could be said for any of the recently released films. They wriggle out from under their load either to spoof it, as that long sigh Maverick does, or to riff along ably in its shadow, as Bad Girls does, or by attempting- to match it, epic pound for pound, as both Tombstone and Wyatt Earp do. But - was there a cross-studio storyboard meeting? - all seem to concede from the start that they lack the leverage and the ballast and the plain wrought iron of a John Wayne in The Searchers; his Ethan Edwards cants his weight off on one leg and suddenly you know a man's thirst and regret a solid century ago. The two recent Wyatt Earps offer pretty striking examples of what can happen when you endeavor to fix what isn't broken. In the radically uneven Tombstone, Kurt Russell plays a big clean stud who steps off the train in Tombstone with a hankering for money. But this is no Fistful cf Dollars; his Earp doesn't want filthy lucre, only a healthy financial portfolio and middle-class respectability. When he flirts with Dana Delany, their faces look so polished you can't help wondering if they both use Noxema. Kevin Costner's performance in the gleaming Wyatt Earp is an improvement. He manages a weightier but also heavier Earp that a lot of moviegoers, even Costner fans, will find too deliberate and solemn, especially in the second hour. Still, sometimes he lays down lines like he's flattening out bedrolls and in a way lends the film a nicely authentic savor. Of the many Earps who precede these two, including Burt Lancaster (Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 1957), the best is arguably Henry Fonda's in My Darling Clementine. One moment in the early going captures why: he's swiveling in the barbershop chair with a fresh haircut, and it's clear he hates all the oil and tonic, hates the civilizing mouth and looks at the sky and blows Russell and Costner off the back lot.
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| Can Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp hold a gun to the great Westerns of the past? |
At least some of what the new movies lack is the big drum roll a Wayne or a Fonda or a Jason Robards brings to a picture; yet there's hardly even the secondary smoke of a Claudia Cardinal or a Charles Bronson. There are stars thick as shag flies, but all of them, with the possible exception of Gene Hackman, fail ,to attain the aura that John Ford's or Howard Hawks's Westerns had for audiences, and none of them contend seriously for a place among the late (or "alternative," or "revisionist") Westerns that began to appear at the end of the 1960s.
The studio-era Westerns established the code of the hero. He was the taciturn loner who shunned soft beds, homes and words, spurned the company of women and all but the fringes of town life. The best of the later films - including The Wild Bunch (1969), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and Little Big Man (1970) - showed these codes to be at the root of some later failures in American life. In the controversial blur of bodies and bullets that commences Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, the historian Richard Slotkin finds references to Vietnam massacres. The story - a band of outlaws heading for the Mexican border to escape the railroad's hired gunmen - is rife with issues/08/images of the end of the West and of open territory and expansion. The bunch's leader Pike (William Holden) mutters to himself at one point, "We've got to start thinkin' beyond our guns. Those days are closin' fast." It is a moment that chimes with a dozen others in films of the period. In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, thought by many to have killed off the Western for good, Warren Beatty meets a shabby end in the muddy snow of the Pacific Northwest; it's 1901 and he's been killed by developers for business reasons.
Indeed, most of the Westerns released between 1969 and 1977 (more generously, from 1961 on, when both John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars came out) - including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Once Upon a Time in the West, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, True Grit and John Wayne's last film, The Shootist - seem to make a concerted effort to narrate both the end of the West and the Western. Jane Tompkins believes that the cowboy's established image (what she calls the "anesthetization of the hero," his denial of needs for family, companionship and love) was finally being called to account. By the late 1960s, this image couldn't square with social realities, and 1975 was probably the last year that young American males could go to cowboy movies every Saturday. By 1982, the only Western around, besides those in regular rotation on the late show, was Sam Shepard's True West, a play about a showdown between two brothers, some stolen toasters and the California desert. Its central characters are as disconnected from each other as they are visibly disenfranchised from the Western myths they have inherited and which they can never own. In that year, John Ford, the Western's great director, had been dead nearly a decade (he died in 1973) and John Wayne, the genre's great icon, had been famously dead for five, his last film, The Shootist, having included "memories" of the gunfighter that consisted of footage culled from Wayne's long career. Sam Peckinpah would die two years after that, his best Western a decade behind him.
If parody and pastiche are the signs of a genre's death (and look at the treatment the deader-than-dead disaster pictures get in the Airplane films), the writing was on the wall when Mel Brooks released Blazing Saddles in 1974. On the other hand, it can be argued that the Western never passed away, it just dispersed into the culture which it had helped to form. And into world culture. In Jean Renoir's The Crime of M. Lange (1936), for example, the hero writes stories about "Arizona Jim" ("Ah-riz-on-a Jeem"), who undoes wrong and rides off in clouds of dust. Inspired by his own stories, Lange eventually shoots the exploitative owner of a crime magazine who has been publishing his writing. Liberated at the end, he flees the country. The likeliest source for the storybook hero is Arizona Ames by Zane Grey, the Ohio dentist who helped to invent the very code and idiom in which the Western exists.
The question of the appeal of cowboy stories in a country that sold the Louisiana Territory for four cents an acre has a simple answer: the stories take place in a purely imaginative place - "Arizona" is the place you go to be free. But you don't have to cross the Atlantic to see how the Western has seeped into the culture. Barbecue sauce commercials feature comic showdowns from spaghetti Westerns. We drive Mustangs and, unless we're Albert Brooks, talk slow when we're angry. And in every major American city there is an unfortunate tradition brought from Tombstone's main street: the decisive gunfight. My uncle Basil, forced into a wheelchair by the wasting effects of a muscular disorder, lined his bookshelves with paperback novels by Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour. Friends slightly older than me have committed to memory fight sequences and plot complications from an unbelievable number of old Westerns. I know a novelist whose husband joked that his inner child was Clint Eastwood; she briefly postponed the wedding. And so on. My favorite belt has a stamped tin buckle and, running around the outside, faded ink drawings of western archetypes: the wagon train, a rearing horse and rider, an Indian Chief with full headdress. Missing is Cookie, the half-mad mealmaker, the gussied up saloon girls, the hustlers and the vested grifters who work for the railroad and wear their affects flattened and their collars crisp. We have come to understand that all of them in their own way are expressions of the freedom we claim as our birthright.
Along the way the Western got grafted onto non-Westerns, too, as Star Wars (1977), The French Connection (1971) and Dirty Harry (1971) intimate. And then there's Ronald Reagan's loopy cowboy-style defense initiative for the last frontier, his "star wars" plan. (Dolly in closer: at the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan's "Morning in America" speech was preceded with film clips from John Wayne movies).
But neither the stories about the end of the West, nor its diffusion and disappearance into the culture ever really killed off the Western. Historian Slotkin counts three attempted revivals since the late 1970s, the most recent of which is the likeliest impetus for the avalanche we have on our hands now. It began early in the decade with Dances With Wolves (1991), Unforgiven (1992), Lonesome Dove (1990) and Last of the Mohicans (1992). These works attempted to replace the bilious taste of the "alternative" films of the 1960s with stories of a saving remnant. So in Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves, a soldier fresh from a disillusioning experience in the Civil War requests to be transferred to the farthest army outpost, where his independent ego breaks against the Dakota Sioux's wider and wilder feeling for family and tribe. And in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, a killer who had always worked with the laconic precision of a lathe-worker carving bedposts, turns against the spiral of his career in death. Eastwood's case is particularly compelling because his career cuts through four decades. With Ford and Hawks gone by the mid-1970s, and with Peckinpah and Leone in serious decline, Eastwood was essentially the only icon left to carry the torch (or the SmithWesson). Eastwood's TV career crossed over into film with Leone's first "spaghetti" Western, A Fistful of Dollars (1961), and by 1973 he was working his own sour variations on the theme of treacherous loners in High Plains Drifter, a Western so grins and weird that his anti-hero comes across, probably deliberately, as Charles Starkweather in a black duster.
Eastwood's ascent was not automatic. As fine as The Outlaw Josie Wales (1976) is, audiences avoided it. By the early 1980s, Eastwood was beloved most by frat row Greeks, the President of the United States and Barbara Walters. And Pauline Kael was not alone in deriding the actor for the rigor mortis in his line deliveries. (In one aside collected in When the Lights Go Down she writes, "he looks stricken - he hisses his lines angrily, his mouth pulled thin by righteousness"). But he raised his stock in the sagebrush genre with Pale Rider (1985), and last year the semiologist Paul Smith published a long, imposingly written analysis of the Eastwood Image entitled Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production, assuring his place as a Western film demigod.
It would make sense, in this case, that the Eastwood line of Westerns, culminating in the Oscar-winning Unforgiven, would be the standard for new kinds of stories. But the recent films owe practically nothing to Eastwood's slower-paced, moody style. So where do they come from?
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| Earnet Borgnine and William Holden in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. |
The clearest forebear is Kasdan's 1986 Western, Silverado, whose fresh laundry the new ones seem most attracted to. The script was written as a tribute to Westerns and its ersatz feel affirms that. But most anachronistic is the gentleness of the cowboys, most evident in Kevin Kline's and Scott Glenn's performances. Their speech is tinged by none of their cinematic elders' remoteness; it belongs more to clipped lawns than desert campfires. They are suspiciously at ease inside homes and prone to giving their nephews a good squeeze when they visit. They've never been on the range. Watch Ethan Edwards at dinner in The Searchers; he eats like a convict, his eyes hawking around, his mouth cut into his face with a knife, his words all serrated. A typical speech in Silverado occurs when the barmaid Stella (Linda Hunt) councils Paden (Kevin Kline): "Some people think because they're stronger or meaner they can push you around. I've seen a lot of that. But it's only true if you let it be. The world is what you make of it."
By Western standards that's a soliloquy; in an earlier time Paden would have wheeled his horse around and galloped off, or hushed her with a strong word or a slap (Wayne's characters shut up talkers - that is, anyone who goes on for more than a sentence). Or her speech would have been pared down to something like: "He's mean, he'll hurt ya, Jake!" Stella's talk is borrowed from drugstore relationship manuals. In post-Civil War Silverado, men in chaps wouldn't know about the pliant whispers of the unconscious. Cowboys are not, by definition, complex, neurotic and urban. Like horses and buffalo and Arizona horizons; like duststorms and Utah buttes, they inspire awe and a little pain. But there are no Hamlets, except of course for the dying 'Doc' Holliday, who (in My Darling Clementine) likes Hamlet's speech on "the undiscovered country," ever looking forward.
A pretty big proportion of the angry reactions to these films - none of them terribly bad - probably has to do with how far short they seem to fall. The talent sometimes looks a little outdone by their period costumes; everyone is Winona Ryder in The Age of Innocence. In Maverick, Jodie Foster's hair is so sprayed and done that her eyes and mouth shrink down into the shape of drains, the effect finally something too porcelain and crisp for a woman with a past. Kiss her, you half think, and chip a tooth. Foster has arches too flat for comedy's light step, it's true, but the real problem is that she's no Mrs. Miller, the townbuilding, opium-addicted manager of high class whores that Julie Christie played twenty some years ago. Bad Girls isn't such an embarrassment either, but beside another female oater like Johnny Guitar it's badly outclassed. In one scene, Drew Barrymore and Andie MacDowell smoke and giggle on a shopkeeper's porch, looking like a pair of doped-up mall kids. And the plot begs the question: did this project get kick-started when someone on the committee asked, "What if Thelma and Louise drove over the cliff and landed in the Southwest of the 1870s?"
George Costakis's Tombstone fares slightly better in some respects, but in others, slightly worse. It delivers one brilliant performance that will make any moviegoer's day: Val Kilmer's portrayal of 'Doc' Holliday is so hypnotic ("Ahm your huckleberry," is his weird tag line) that you'll wonder how many times he watched Tonmmy Lee Jones in The Fugitive to perfect the supporting role routine. But the rest of the long film sits in a light of revery as thick and gluey as varnish.
Even so, there are exceptions. Before the women in Bad Girls can be free, not only from the law but from their pasts, they have to face down the story's bad guy, Kid Jarrett (James Russo). Cody (Stowe) had once been his bad girl and it will take a gunfight to clear him from her memory. It happens - she wins - and three of the women light out on horses, passing over misted plains toward the hills and an egg-yolk sun. The credits roll. It's the 1890s and they're going to the Klondike in search of gold. Hardly the end to the peek-a-boo male fantasy that many critics have described it to be. It's really a suffragette story that closes with a search for more than literal gold. Jonathan Kaplan's film is about getting clear of fate, about shedding men and their laws and their yokes. In a way, it's a Western like any other - it's about freedom.
There are moments in any Western that lead confirms that. But most anachonistic is the gentleness of the cowboys, most evident in Kevin Kline's and Scott Glenn's performances. Their speech is tinged by none of their cinematic elders' remoteness; it belongs more to clipped lawns than desert campfires. They are suspiciously at ease inside homes and they give their nephews a good squeeze when they visit. They've never been on the range. Watch Ethan Edwards at dinner in The Searchers; he eats like a convict, his eyes hawking around, his mouth cut into his face with a knife, his words all serrated. A typical speech in Silverado occurs when the barmaid Stella (Linda Hunt) councils Paden (Kevin Kline): "Some people think because they're stronger or meaner they can push you around. I've seen a lot of that. But it's only true if you let it be. The world is what you make of it."
By Western standards that's a soliloquy; in an earlier time Paden would have wheeled his horse around, or hushed her with a strong word or a slap (Wayne's characters shut up any talkers -- that is, anyone who goes on for more than a sentence). Or her speech would have been pared down to something like: "He's mean, he'll hurt ya, Jake!" Stella's talk is borrowed from drugstore relationship manuals. In postCivil War Silverado, men in chaps wouldn't know about the pliant whispers of the unconscious. Cowboys aren't, by definition, complex, neurotic and urban. Like horses and buffalo and Arizona horizons, like duststorms and Utah buttes, they inspire awe and a little pain. But there are no Hamlets, except of course for the dying 'Doc' Holliday who (in My Darling Clementine) likes Hamlet's speech on "the undiscovered country," ever looking forward.
A pretty big proportion of the angry reactions to these films - none of them terribly bad - probably has to do with how far short they seem to fall. The talent sometimes looks a little outdone by their period costumes; everyone is Winona Ryder in The Age of Innocence. In Maverick, Jodie Foster's hair is so sprayed and done that her eyes and mouth shrink down into the shape of drains, the effect finally something too porcelain and crisp for a woman with a past. Kiss her, you half think, and chip a tooth. Foster has too- flat arches for comedy's light step, it's true, but the real problem is that she's no Mrs. Miller, the townbuilding, opium-addicted manager of high class whores that Julie Christie played twenty some years ago. Bad Girls isn't such an embarrassment either, but beside another female oater like Johnny Guitar it's badly outclassed. In one scene, Drew Barrymore and Andie MacDowell smoke and giggle on a shopkeeper's porch, looking like a pair of doped-up mall kids. And the plot begs the question: did this project get kick-started when someone on the committee asked, "What if Thelma and Louise drove over the cliff and landed in the Southwest of the 1870s?"
George Costakis's Tombstone fares slightly
better but also slightly worse. It delivers one brilliant performance
that will make any moviegoers day: Val Kilmer's portrayal of 'Doc'
Holliday is so hypnotic ("ah'11 be your huckleberry,"
is his weird tag line) that you'll wonder how many times he watched
Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive to perfect the supporting
role routine. But the rest of the long film sits in a light of revery
that is a thick, gluey varnish. [CONCLUSION OF ARTICLE MISSING]
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Erik Chase on 10/15/08 at 12:19 pm
My favorite wester will always be Tombstone, some of my most favorite actors in there. Val Kilmer and Kurt Russell were great!
This story was published in the August 1994 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
The Decline of the Western / In a shootout with the great westerns of the past, the current crop would be left bleeding in the dust.
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