From the Cheap Seats

Oh goodie! The western is back! As Peter Wild notes in his interesting article in this month’s Moviemail catalogue, there’s something of a revival in cowboys. 3.10 to Yuma, Seraphim Falls, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford are all set in the old west; The Proposition might be Australian but is indebted to the American tradition. Throw in neo-westerns like Brokeback Mountain, The Three Burials of Melquades Estrada and No Country For Old Men and some folks reckon there’s a full-blown renewal.

If only it were true. But Western fans – and I count myself amongst them – will only believe our favourite genre is back in the saddle when we start seeing more films flowing out. We’ve been burnt too many times by Western revivals that turned out to be anything but.

We were told that Dances With Wolves would inaugurate a new golden age. Then it was Unforgiven. Then Maverick. Yet the Western remains stubbornly moribund. It gets taken out once in a while, trotted around the paddock like some old horse and everyone says how good it looks. But it gets taken back to the stable and everyone forgets about it. Again.

The trouble is what the Western has become. In its heyday, it was the most wonderfully fluid genre. You could do musicals (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Paint Your Wagon), comedies (Cat Ballou), detective films (Rancho Notorious. Well, sort of.) and demented melodrama (Johnny Guitar) As long as the cast were in Stetsons, it was considered a western.

By the seventies, all that had changed. After Sergio Leone had anatomised the mythic dimension of the Western, many American directors chose to look at the reality of American history. They narrowed the range of the Western down to history. An iconoclastic era had no truck for the simple minded heroics of John Wayne and set about spelling out the reality of frontier life – murder, larceny and attempted genocide of the indigenous peoples.

They call this ‘Revisionism’ and since about 1979 (the year John Wayne died and, to my mind, a more sensible full-stop for the classic Western than Heaven’s Gate, the bloated mess that’s usually blamed for killing the genre), most of the infrequent forays into the old west have concluded that, actually, it wasn’t like the movies. Not at all!

Well, to quote the Bard, no shit Sherlock. Fictional stories aren’t history. What’s more, most of the people who made classic Westerns knew this too. Anthony Mann’s west, as Peter Wild notes, was a brutal place. So too was John Ford’s, by the end of his career. Two Rode Together is more vicious than anything the young pretenders could come up with. The Revisionists can’t see the irony in the famous line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.” It’s not a manifesto; it’s a criticism.

And after all this time, what are they actually revising? They’re kicking against a myth that hasn’t been celebrated for decades. Is it any wonder that the Western declined in popularity when it lost it’s reason for being? The whole point of myths is that they speak of broader truths: to insist that the Western anchor itself in pedantic historical accuracy debases the genre.

Things reached their nadir with Clint Eastwood’s awful Unforgiven. Clint is a hero to Western fans: The Outlaw Josey Wales is the last great Western. But Unforgiven is nonsense, spelling out its concerns with painful literalism. Typical of the film’s sixth-form debating style is the name of Clint’s bounty-hunting character: Bill Munny. Bill as in Dollar Bill; Munny as in Money. He’s trying to be clever. He fails. (I wish he’d continued this scheme. Gene Hackman’s character could have been called Little Bill Totalbastard; Morgan Freeman could have played Ned Tokenblackman.)

For the kids who’ve grown up on this sort of rubbish, the West must seem an unwelcoming and pompous place. Too many of these new Westerns are made for Western fans. We might like ‘em (I do, mostly) but we forget that the Westerns that made us love the genre were made for mass audiences, not film buffs. Purists hate movies like The Quick and the Dead (out of print at the moment) and Shanghai Noon but they’re the sort of movies that will spawn a real Western renaissance.