Westerns
From the early days of the Hollywood studio system, genres propelled filmmaking decisions from a business standpoint; while the public’s relationship to individual stars could be fickle, their interest in specific genres proved more stable, at least broadly speaking. Genres tend to have life cycles: they are created in the example of successful individual films, go on to produce imitations and copies, proliferate, and then begin a slow process of decline. Hollywood film production has always relied on the familiarity of genres to bring audiences back to the theatre, even as individual genres have waxed and waned.
Westerns were not overly common in the 1930s, but its success (and that of other films in the genre in the late 1930s and early 1940s) demonstrated that the genre could be a rich venue for storytelling. More importantly, however, Westerns were successful with audiences, who went to see them in droves. Genres succeed and sustain themselves when two things happen: filmmakers see value in using the genre to tell stories, and audiences see value in the stories they are told within that genre. When the genre ceases to carry meaning for audiences, they die. Critic Leo Braudy offers a useful framework for considering the life cycle of genres and the various stages of their development: “Genre films essentially ask the audience, ‘Do you still want to believe this?’ Popularity is the audience answering ‘Yes.’ Change in genres occurs when the audience says, ‘That’s too infantile a form of what we believe. Show us something more complicated.’” At a certain point, audiences believed very strongly in Westerns and the ideas they represented. However, they eventually decided that Westerns no longer spoke to them in meaningful ways, and the number of Westerns declined sharply. Between the year 1939 (a big year for Westerns!) and the rough end of the Classic Hollywood studio era in the late 1960s, many hundreds of Westerns were made. In the years since, very few have been—they are now vanishingly rare, with one or two high profile entries in the genre appearing every few years.
John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) is undoubtedly one of the most important entries in the Western genre because it established the genre as a serious art form; this is mostly due to Ford’s artistry behind the camera. While the film is often (wrongly) credited with reigniting Hollywood’s interest in Westerns (a number of other big-ticket Westerns were in production at the same time), Barry Keith Grant argues that “Stagecoach was the first ‘adult western,’ for the film achieves a fine balance of the genre’s specific visual pleasures." Ford biographer Scott Eyman makes a similar judgment of Stagecoach’s generic viability he speaks of its singularity: “But B Westerns didn’t look like Stagecoach, B Westerns didn’t have casts like Stagecoach, and B Westerns didn’t have the distinctly egalitarian message of Stagecoach—that it is society’s outcasts who do the hard work of American civilization.”
Stagecoach is replete with generic signifiers; when you watch the film, you know from the types of costumes you see, the characters who appear, the settings, and the camera shots that you are watching a Western. Grant says that “Stagecoach relies heavily on genre conventions. Scenes such as the one in the saloon before the climactic showdown, with the piano player who stops playing with dramatic suddenness while the barkeep takes the mirror off the wall and stores it temporarily under the bar, are common to the Western. The characters, too, are types familiar to the genre: the comic sidekick, the prostitute with the heart of gold, and so on.” However, from a visual perspective, the images Ford crafts also communicate the Western genre: “In Stagecoach, the long shots of the coach at the bottom of the frame moving through Monument Valley visually attests to civilization’s fragile toe-hold in the wilderness.” Everything you see within the frame is part of building the framework for genre films.
Watch the video commentary at right which examines a clip from Stagecoach, which demonstrates Ford’s artistry in both adhering to and crafting genre conventions specific to his individual vision. As a filmmaker working often in the Western genre, he used its iconography to his advantage, but also helped to shape the genre’s conventions, which other, subsequent filmmakers would draw upon when making Westerns.
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Westerns have been among the most influential of genres, and Ford among the most influential of directors. Though Westerns proper are no longer made with such frequency, their influence is obvious in the works of many subsequent directors working in numerous film genres. George Lucas openly referenced Ford’s The Searchers (1956) in Star Wars, and director James Mangold’s movie Copland (1997, pictured below) is an urban Western, set in a New Jersey town infested with corrupt police officers; only the town’s sad sack sheriff, played by Sylvester Stallone, is brave enough to stand against them. Mangold’s reliance on Western conventions, despite the film’s contemporary setting, shows the lasting influence of the genre on later filmmakers. Many of Mangold’s other films, including the comic book film Logan (2017), share affinity with Westerns; in that movie, he models the aging Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) on several characters played by Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976, Dir. Clint Eastwood) and Unforgiven (1992, Dir. Clint Eastwood), and borrows narrative elements from George Stevens’s 1954 Western Shane, even including the film itself on a television set.
Throughout much of his career, Ford was concerned with the creation of American myth, an obsession represented most obviously by the oft-quoted maxim from his 1962 Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance that “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” But Ford’s interest in myth was underway well before that. Thomas Schatz calls Stagecoach “a singular prewar Western with one foot planted in U.S. history and the other in American mythology. The symbiosis of fact and legend is the very essence of the film’s enduring appeal and its tremendous influence on the regenerate A-Western form." In other words, Ford's films do not simply seek to create history, but to create a kind of American origin mythology that explores its founding principles. Barry Keith Grant suggests that “Ford used the Western and American history as a means of expressing his evolving regret for the nation’s past.” Essentially, his films did not take history literally, but instead attempted to enter into conversation with the narratives of American history that we have built over time; Ford knew that history as written was not accurate, and was the product of collective mythologizing. Ford’s work in the Western genre was designed to both build myths (which he mostly did at the start of his career) and then interrogate them (which generally came later).
A number of Ford's films are preoccupied with this idea, but one of the most poignant illustrations of it comes during Fort Apache (1948), one of the director's "Cavalry Trilogy." It tells the story of an arrogant commander, based on General George Custer and played by frequent Ford collaborator Henry Fonda, who struggles after taking charge of a remote outpost deep in Apache territory. The clip at right takes place at a community dance, wherein the staging of the dance acts as a metaphor for the populating of the West.
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Of course, this scene is taken from the vantage point of the white characters who make up the outpost. Ford's depiction of Native American characters has earned him a fair share of criticism. Fort Apache is sympathetic to the Apaches, and it portrays its Custer stand-in quite critically, but several other Ford films would not fare so well. By the end of his career, he came to regret the way a number of his movies depicted Native Americans and sought to tell their side of the story, most notably in 1964's Cheyenne Autumn.
Stagecoach, however, barely registers its Native American characters as people, instead keeping them at the margins of the narrative, the looming threat out there on the horizon. The film demonstrates this clearly in their sudden reveal just before the attack on the coach plays out. They are like ghosts, waiting in the desert for their moment to strike. During the coach attack, Ford largely keeps the Apaches at a remove, remaining in wide shot as they descend upon the passengers.
The film is an example of Ford’s directorial vision, and thus expresses his point of view. According to Barry Keith Grant, “Stagecoach, made at the height of Ford’s optimism, achieves a fine balance of the genre’s specific visual pleasures, the action and mise-en-scene audiences expect from a Western, with generic innovation and authorial expressiveness.” Some of Ford’s directorial perspective comes through in the ideas that the film seems to endorse through its narrative structure and representations of the characters, a lot of which is shaped by the historical context in which Ford is making the film. It was released in 1939, near the end of The Great Depression, but before the U.S. becomes involved in World War II, which has led a number of critics to see the film in the context of Ford’s affinity for then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism, which ignited government spending in order to help ease the pain of economic calamity. Barry Keith Grant largely sees it that way: “The film also offered an upbeat message for pre-war America in which corporate evil is punished, heroic individual virtue triumphs and an ideal microcosmic democratic community is forged in the process. Even as Hitler was marching into European countries, Stagecoach imagined a cross-section of Americans who establish a classless, morally superior community forged by the crucible of the frontier.”
Stagecoach is one of the first classical Westerns, helping establish the parameters that studios and filmmakers would follow throughout the next twenty-plus years of production in the genre. The Western proved to be remarkably durable for quite a long period of time, but change was inevitable.
clip quiz - Westerns
Review the following clips and answer the questions on Blackboard.
HIGH NOON (1952, Zinnemann)
Westerns are instantly recognizable to audiences, even today, when there aren’t as many being made. How does a Western communicate its story to the audience through both form and content? Use this clip from High Noon, one of the most famous of all Westerns, to support your answer. |
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SEVEN MEN FROM NOW (1956, Boetticher)
What themes are essential to the Western? How do you see those expressed in this scene from Seven Men From Now? |
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THE SEARCHERS (1956, Ford)
John Wayne was one of the most important Hollywood stars who appeared in film Westerns. Based on this scene from The Searchers, what do you think made him such an interesting and essential screen presence in this genre? |
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BROKEN ARROW (1950, Daves)
The Western has a complicated relationship with Native Americans; in many cases, they were depicted as bloodthirsty savages, an ever-present looming threat. But in the 1950s, some filmmakers started to change their portrayals. How does this clip from Broken Arrow show that evolution? |
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westerns - man of the west
The Western genre is well-known for its heavy reliance on a number of archetypal characters: the noble lawman, the dutiful wife, the aging ranch hand, the town drunk. Few are more recognizable than the gunfighter, the character lends the title to Man of the West (1958). In it, Gary Cooper plays Link Jones, a reformed thief and killer who has been entrusted by the people of his town to travel west with a bag of money to hire a schoolteacher; things go sideways when Link’s old gang robs the train he is traveling on, and he ends up reunited with them not as a compatriot, but as a hostage.
Man of the West’s director, Anthony Mann, was a veteran of the genre; he had spent the better portion of the 1950s working closely with actor James Stewart on a series of Westerns that were edgier, meaner, and more psychological in their portrayal of damaged male characters than the typical entry. Many Westerns starring the legendary John Wayne, the genre’s most recognizable star, were more traditional, but Mann’s Westerns with Stewart developed a reputation for their violence and exploration of the fragility of their central characters. Pictured below, you can see a bit of that in The Man From Laramie (1955), the final collaboration between Mann and Stewart.
The character of Link in Man of the West is of a piece with Stewart’s characters from the earlier films; had Stewart and Mann not had a falling out at the end of their collaboration, it’s easy to see him in the role. But here, he’s played by Gary Cooper, himself a veteran of many Westerns, the most notable of which was High Noon (1952, Zinnemann, pictured below), in which Cooper played Marshal Will Kane, who stands alone against a gang of killers headed to his town to get revenge for Kane’s putting their leader in jail.
This Cooper character was not always noble and brave, however; he is a man of violence, as an early close-up on his gun in his holster indicates. The West offers characters in Westerns an opportunity to reinvent themselves, to become someone new; Link has decided to leave his life of violence behind in favor of a peaceful, quiet existence with a wife and child, but his violent past comes roaring back to find him. He can’t escape it.
That past is embodied primarily in his surrogate father figure, Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb), the manic patriarch of the gang of killers that Link has long left behind. One major theme of Man of the West is the ad hoc, improvised relationships that animate the West. Surrogate families and societies build up in the absence of actual families and societies. The new world is being forged through the shared experiences of danger and possibility, extreme situations which create strong bonds.
Westerns of the 1950s like Man of the West embraced two relatively new technological developments coming into widespread use in the decade: widescreen aspect ratios and color film stock. Though both had been around for many years, it was not until the 1950s that the two became standard in Hollywood, both of which were adopted as a way of offering something that the movies’ newest competitor, the television, could not.
The widescreen frame showed off the natural locations where the films were shot and placed the characters in those locations, making them look larger than life, or, in some cases, dwarfing them next to its expanse. Westerns are really dealing with myth, and making myth through the use of landscapes and grandiose photography. Almost all Westerns do this to some degree, but the widescreen Westerns are probably the most effective at it because they invest each image with the scale befitting the stories.
Color likewise helped make the films seem big. Though color film stock is the default today, at the time it was coming into widespread use in the 1950s, color film was designed not to make things more realistic, but to make the image seem fuller, brighter, and louder. Color was an exaggeration of reality, not reality itself.
Thematically, Man of the West takes as its subject the consequences of violence, as many Westerns do; this theme is a typical preoccupation of the genre’s best filmmakers (and Mann was certainly one of them). For Dock, the good old days were soaked in blood, and that was precisely what made them great. He’s nostalgic for a time when he committed violence with impunity, which is now slipping away from him. He knows he’s at the end, and he’s raging against his own decline.
Link, by contrast, has tried to deny his past by burying it. Unfortunately, the universe won’t let him do it, and he has no choice but to turn to violence once again as a way of protecting Billie (Julie London), a woman taken hostage by the gang alongside him, from their psychopathic predations. Inevitably, though, Man of the West is hurtling towards a violent confrontation between Link and the other members of the gang, like the sadistic Coaley (Jack Lord), who he defeats in a fistfight, and then, of course, Dock himself. The high-payout robbery Dock imagined goes up in smoke when the town they had planned to rob is discovered to be abandoned, yet another reminder to the old man that the West as he ruled it isn’t what it used to be. Dock’s final moments are pathetic, as he is gunned down from a distance by Link, his erstwhile son.
Classic period Westerns ultimately uphold, though not always without complications, the vision of the United States as historical wonderland, where progress was hard-fought but ultimately won by rugged individuals who did the right thing when pressed. Sometimes, that right thing meant the use of violence, which is one of the lasting contributions of the Western as a genre.
In our contemporary moment, Westerns are exceedingly rare, with their mythological function for audiences and filmmakers alike being served by other genres. But, they remain among the most influential of all Hollywood genres for their sheer number; for about thirty years, they were more or less ubiquitous and synonymous with Hollywood filmmaking in the mainstream studio system.