Ramble on the Western Genre
Aug. 27th, 2006 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat[Note: unedited fairly stream-of-consciousness, rambling entry, due to the fact that my neck and back are killing me and I've got to get of this damn thing. This post is proof that I have seen more movies and tv shows in my 39 years of life than I want to think about. Ugh.]
From reading and responding to a friend's discussion of the Western classic Stagecoach last night, I feel the oddest urge to write a post about The Western - the genre that has become more or less forgotten in the modern age. If you go to your local bookseller, you may find a couple of Westerns tucked away on the last two or three shelves of the Sci-Fantasy section or Romance section or even the Mystery section - in the case of hybrids. But gone are the days when there was a complete shelf devoted to it. The Science Fiction genre has more or less gobbled up what once upon a time was the Western/Adventure novel.
Even on TV and film, we see less and less of them. Every few years, one will pop up, but it is usually more contemporary in tone or literary, falling within the category of mainstream or off-kilter drama. Such as Brokeback Mountain or The Missing or even Dances with Wolves. Literary Westerns.
But back in the 1930's, 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's and even a good portion of the 80's or the 20th Century, Westerns did big business. And were more prolific than Science Fiction or Fantasy shows or novels. The stories, if you've read Westerns aren't really that different than the basic plots of a sci-fi or horror tale - the gunslinger holed up in a house defending the family from invaders, who may eat, maim, rape, or harm them. Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel the Series, Lost, Earth 2, BattleStar Galatica, Star Wars, Cowboy Bebop and even Star Trek borrowed heavily from the Western motif - exploring new territory, me against the establishment, setting out to find my own land and defending it against invaders, the lone gunslinger, the band of people on the run in a land they've never seen with untold dangers that is unhospitable...The Western tended to be simpler in some ways.
I remember as a child watching Westerns on television with my father - who adored the genre. There used to be Western on every Saturday at 7pm. This was when we only had four networks - ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and UHF - UHF was an everything channel, that featured old movies, the predecessor to UPN and WB. UHF was where we watched the old Westerns. While on TV, you could find How the West Was Won starring Bruce Boxleitner and James Arness, old reruns of Gunsmoke - which ended in the mid-70's, Paradise featuring Lee Horsely who played an ex-gunslinger who inherited his sister's kids. Later we got shows like Dr Quinn Medicine Woman which was more of a fronteire drama a la Little House on the Prarie than a true western, and also a tad sacchrine for my taste. The heyday of the Western on TV was the 1950s and 60's, the dawn of television, when you shows like Maverick, Have Gun Will Travel, Paladin, Raw Hide (featuring a very young Clint Eastwood in his first role), Gunsmoke (which Whedon was clearly a fan of, since the Firefly cast almost directly comes from the Gunsmoke line-up - Gunsmoke, was dark, about a world-weary sheriff - played by James Arness, the woman he cares for but would never tell her because she's a prostitute, Miss Kitty, his side-kick (played by the guy who went on to play McCloud and very similar to the Wash character), and other notable characters. The early episodes of Gunsmoke, which can be found on the Hallmark channel on Saturdays, were short noir Western tales, morally ambigous.)Then you had the more family fare: Big Valley with Barbara Stanwick, and Bonanza with Lorne Green (no accident Green went on to play Adama in the first version of BattleStar Galatica). And there were many many more that I have not mentioned.
I also read Westerns. My favorites were by Louis L'Amour, who may have been the most prolific, although Zane Grey may have been a close second - I never read him. A good percentage of the Westerns made by Hollywood were based on novels by L'Amour. Hondo - a 3D western was amongst them. Larry McMurty wrote modern or post-modern westerns - gritty novels that questioned the values and priniciples of the old west, twisted the genre on it's head. The best were Horseman Passed By later turned into the classic Hud featuring Paul Newman and Patricia O'Neal. A gritty, nasty Western, about a tired rancher and his no-account son. Newman played an anti-hero in the film, a role similar to Brando's Stanley in Streetcar Named Desire. Both works are worth a look, and I can't really tell you which is the better of the two. Lonesome Dove - a much longer novel than Horseman is also worth a gander. A well-written and acted mini-series starring Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Diane Lane, Angelica Huston, and Chris Cooper was made from it.
Tony Hillerman also wrote them - but as mystery novels taking place on Indian Reservations.
I can't remember all the ones I read - borrowed from my parents bookshelves as a child.
Of the three categories - books, films, tv shows - I'd have to say my favorite Westerns were on film.
I adored them enough that I actually took a film course in college on the genre, and wrote papers analyzing films such as Red River, The Searchers, and The Wild Bunch.
If you are studying cinema or film and haven't seen any Westerns, then you have skipped a huge chunk of cinema history and may not catch some of the references contemporary filmmakers have made. John Ford, Howard Hawkes, and Peckinpah are the ones that most of us know and remember. But there were others. I remember some of the films better than the directors: Shane, Once Upon a Time in the West - a film that has been referenced by at least two films, one with Sharon Stone and one with Antonio Banderas and Johnny Depp - the original is still the best - with Charles Bronsan, Henry Fonda (as the villian), and Claudia Cardinale, Hang-Em High,A Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - or the spaghetti westerns featuring Clint Eastwood, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Two Mules for Sister Sara (A gunman and what appears to be a nun travel into Mexico to save people - stars Shirley McClain and Eastwood), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ( a film about violence and the desire not to do it - with Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne), My Darling Clementine -(Henry Fonda, an early version of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, with Fonda playing Wyatt Earp), True Grit (an old John Wayne with a young girl he's resueing), Rooster Coogburn (the one that Wayne may have won the Oscar for, although he deserved it more for The Searchers and Red River - featuring Katherine Hepburn), Big Country (William Wyler - another great director, with Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Charleton Heston, Burl Ives and Carroll Baker) and one of my favorites, High Noon (Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly - which was sparked two films by Howard Hawkes and John Wayne due to their difficulties with the movie's realism. Rio Bravo is the one with Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Angie Dickenso. While El Dorado features Robert Mitchum, James Cann. The only similarities between the two besides the same plot and more or less the same setting is John Wayne and Howard Hawkes. These two films have influenced more than one cult filmmaker or tv show writer. And often you'll see characters actually fight over which one was better. They also sparked the famous film Assault on Precinct 13 - the famous John Carpenter film that is in of itself a homage to Rio Bravo. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_on_Precinct_13_(1976_movie))
John Wayne has a whole oevre of films - no possible way you can see all of them, well not completely true, since ahem, I think I have. My favorites are the Howard Hawkes and John Ford films. As well as the bunch he did with Maureen O'Hara, who he had amazing chemistry with in my opinion.
Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck, Rod Taylor, Robert Mitchum, and Gary Cooper are the other ones who did more than their fair share. Peck tended to play more intellectual roles. Although there's one, Duel in the Sun - where he plays the sexy bad-boy to Joseph Cotton's upstanding rancher brother. Jennifer Jones is the heroine. Peck was good at villains. Other favorites include: The Gunfighter, Yellow Sky with Richard Widmark, and my all time cheesy favorite McKenna's Gold - which Indiana Jones borrowed heavily from. Stars Omar Shariff and Peck. Jame Garner was another huge star for Westerns, he usually did "tongue-in-check" comedic ones, based on his Maverick character. These were called Support your Local Sheriff and Support your Local Gunfighter, you can find darker ones though -A Man Called Sledge - Garner's forway into the spaghetti Western. Or John Sturges Hour of The Gunn where Garner plays Earp to Jason Robards Doc Holiday.
After the 70's Westerns lost their sparkle and tended to either be dark revenge dramas such as "Young Guns", "Unforgiven". "Wyatt Earp" or more contemporary/realistic fare such as "Brokeback Mountain". The best of the bunch were really done prior to 1980.
I've seen some of the more contemporary ones - in movie theaters no less. My favorite is Silverado. Other's are: Dances With Wolves, a few Clint Eastwoods, the best maybe Unforgiven - which I think you can only truly appreciate if you've seen the Westerns that influenced it, such as The Good The Bad and The Ugly. Part of the wonder of that film is how it comments on the violence of the genre that came before it. If you watch Unforgiven without having seen many Westerns, you may not appreciate the irony at it's core. There's that Sharon Stone/Leonardo Di Caprio/Russel Crowe/ Gene Hackman film that I cannot remember the name of - that borrows heavily from Once Upon a Time in The West - except with a female gunslinger. And the sci-fi, "West World", where Yul Brynner plays a robotic version of his Magnificient Seven role - The Magnificient Seven - starring Steve McQueen, Bronsan, and others. Silverado in some aspects is a homage to Magnificient Seven. Later Westerns tended to be homages to early ones. Or comments on them.
Expanding on what was said before.
Science Fiction also comments on the Western and plays homage to it. You see it in Star Wars, Star Trek, BSG, and most notably Firefly. The idea of man against nature, hunting for that new frontiere, with no real rules, but his own. The gunfighter who walks into the bar and owns it, because he's that good. Societial rules and order pushing against the boundaries of it and the conflict between the two worlds. And no genre demonstrated that conflict quite as well as the Western - where people fled civilization to construct their own, only to have civilization follow.
I haven't seen Deadwood yet, but I'd assume it plays heavily with that theme.
I adore Westerns, but I also struggle with them. Women rarely play large roles within the genre, and it tends to be fairly violent. I think what I like about them is the struggle to live in a world that wants to put you inside a box. To make your life safe without losing your freedoms. I often thought the Western as a genre did a good job of depicting that.
From reading and responding to a friend's discussion of the Western classic Stagecoach last night, I feel the oddest urge to write a post about The Western - the genre that has become more or less forgotten in the modern age. If you go to your local bookseller, you may find a couple of Westerns tucked away on the last two or three shelves of the Sci-Fantasy section or Romance section or even the Mystery section - in the case of hybrids. But gone are the days when there was a complete shelf devoted to it. The Science Fiction genre has more or less gobbled up what once upon a time was the Western/Adventure novel.
Even on TV and film, we see less and less of them. Every few years, one will pop up, but it is usually more contemporary in tone or literary, falling within the category of mainstream or off-kilter drama. Such as Brokeback Mountain or The Missing or even Dances with Wolves. Literary Westerns.
But back in the 1930's, 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's and even a good portion of the 80's or the 20th Century, Westerns did big business. And were more prolific than Science Fiction or Fantasy shows or novels. The stories, if you've read Westerns aren't really that different than the basic plots of a sci-fi or horror tale - the gunslinger holed up in a house defending the family from invaders, who may eat, maim, rape, or harm them. Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel the Series, Lost, Earth 2, BattleStar Galatica, Star Wars, Cowboy Bebop and even Star Trek borrowed heavily from the Western motif - exploring new territory, me against the establishment, setting out to find my own land and defending it against invaders, the lone gunslinger, the band of people on the run in a land they've never seen with untold dangers that is unhospitable...The Western tended to be simpler in some ways.
I remember as a child watching Westerns on television with my father - who adored the genre. There used to be Western on every Saturday at 7pm. This was when we only had four networks - ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and UHF - UHF was an everything channel, that featured old movies, the predecessor to UPN and WB. UHF was where we watched the old Westerns. While on TV, you could find How the West Was Won starring Bruce Boxleitner and James Arness, old reruns of Gunsmoke - which ended in the mid-70's, Paradise featuring Lee Horsely who played an ex-gunslinger who inherited his sister's kids. Later we got shows like Dr Quinn Medicine Woman which was more of a fronteire drama a la Little House on the Prarie than a true western, and also a tad sacchrine for my taste. The heyday of the Western on TV was the 1950s and 60's, the dawn of television, when you shows like Maverick, Have Gun Will Travel, Paladin, Raw Hide (featuring a very young Clint Eastwood in his first role), Gunsmoke (which Whedon was clearly a fan of, since the Firefly cast almost directly comes from the Gunsmoke line-up - Gunsmoke, was dark, about a world-weary sheriff - played by James Arness, the woman he cares for but would never tell her because she's a prostitute, Miss Kitty, his side-kick (played by the guy who went on to play McCloud and very similar to the Wash character), and other notable characters. The early episodes of Gunsmoke, which can be found on the Hallmark channel on Saturdays, were short noir Western tales, morally ambigous.)Then you had the more family fare: Big Valley with Barbara Stanwick, and Bonanza with Lorne Green (no accident Green went on to play Adama in the first version of BattleStar Galatica). And there were many many more that I have not mentioned.
I also read Westerns. My favorites were by Louis L'Amour, who may have been the most prolific, although Zane Grey may have been a close second - I never read him. A good percentage of the Westerns made by Hollywood were based on novels by L'Amour. Hondo - a 3D western was amongst them. Larry McMurty wrote modern or post-modern westerns - gritty novels that questioned the values and priniciples of the old west, twisted the genre on it's head. The best were Horseman Passed By later turned into the classic Hud featuring Paul Newman and Patricia O'Neal. A gritty, nasty Western, about a tired rancher and his no-account son. Newman played an anti-hero in the film, a role similar to Brando's Stanley in Streetcar Named Desire. Both works are worth a look, and I can't really tell you which is the better of the two. Lonesome Dove - a much longer novel than Horseman is also worth a gander. A well-written and acted mini-series starring Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Diane Lane, Angelica Huston, and Chris Cooper was made from it.
Tony Hillerman also wrote them - but as mystery novels taking place on Indian Reservations.
I can't remember all the ones I read - borrowed from my parents bookshelves as a child.
Of the three categories - books, films, tv shows - I'd have to say my favorite Westerns were on film.
I adored them enough that I actually took a film course in college on the genre, and wrote papers analyzing films such as Red River, The Searchers, and The Wild Bunch.
If you are studying cinema or film and haven't seen any Westerns, then you have skipped a huge chunk of cinema history and may not catch some of the references contemporary filmmakers have made. John Ford, Howard Hawkes, and Peckinpah are the ones that most of us know and remember. But there were others. I remember some of the films better than the directors: Shane, Once Upon a Time in the West - a film that has been referenced by at least two films, one with Sharon Stone and one with Antonio Banderas and Johnny Depp - the original is still the best - with Charles Bronsan, Henry Fonda (as the villian), and Claudia Cardinale, Hang-Em High,A Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - or the spaghetti westerns featuring Clint Eastwood, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Two Mules for Sister Sara (A gunman and what appears to be a nun travel into Mexico to save people - stars Shirley McClain and Eastwood), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ( a film about violence and the desire not to do it - with Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne), My Darling Clementine -(Henry Fonda, an early version of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, with Fonda playing Wyatt Earp), True Grit (an old John Wayne with a young girl he's resueing), Rooster Coogburn (the one that Wayne may have won the Oscar for, although he deserved it more for The Searchers and Red River - featuring Katherine Hepburn), Big Country (William Wyler - another great director, with Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Charleton Heston, Burl Ives and Carroll Baker) and one of my favorites, High Noon (Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly - which was sparked two films by Howard Hawkes and John Wayne due to their difficulties with the movie's realism. Rio Bravo is the one with Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Angie Dickenso. While El Dorado features Robert Mitchum, James Cann. The only similarities between the two besides the same plot and more or less the same setting is John Wayne and Howard Hawkes. These two films have influenced more than one cult filmmaker or tv show writer. And often you'll see characters actually fight over which one was better. They also sparked the famous film Assault on Precinct 13 - the famous John Carpenter film that is in of itself a homage to Rio Bravo. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_on_Precinct_13_(1976_movie))
John Wayne has a whole oevre of films - no possible way you can see all of them, well not completely true, since ahem, I think I have. My favorites are the Howard Hawkes and John Ford films. As well as the bunch he did with Maureen O'Hara, who he had amazing chemistry with in my opinion.
Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck, Rod Taylor, Robert Mitchum, and Gary Cooper are the other ones who did more than their fair share. Peck tended to play more intellectual roles. Although there's one, Duel in the Sun - where he plays the sexy bad-boy to Joseph Cotton's upstanding rancher brother. Jennifer Jones is the heroine. Peck was good at villains. Other favorites include: The Gunfighter, Yellow Sky with Richard Widmark, and my all time cheesy favorite McKenna's Gold - which Indiana Jones borrowed heavily from. Stars Omar Shariff and Peck. Jame Garner was another huge star for Westerns, he usually did "tongue-in-check" comedic ones, based on his Maverick character. These were called Support your Local Sheriff and Support your Local Gunfighter, you can find darker ones though -A Man Called Sledge - Garner's forway into the spaghetti Western. Or John Sturges Hour of The Gunn where Garner plays Earp to Jason Robards Doc Holiday.
After the 70's Westerns lost their sparkle and tended to either be dark revenge dramas such as "Young Guns", "Unforgiven". "Wyatt Earp" or more contemporary/realistic fare such as "Brokeback Mountain". The best of the bunch were really done prior to 1980.
I've seen some of the more contemporary ones - in movie theaters no less. My favorite is Silverado. Other's are: Dances With Wolves, a few Clint Eastwoods, the best maybe Unforgiven - which I think you can only truly appreciate if you've seen the Westerns that influenced it, such as The Good The Bad and The Ugly. Part of the wonder of that film is how it comments on the violence of the genre that came before it. If you watch Unforgiven without having seen many Westerns, you may not appreciate the irony at it's core. There's that Sharon Stone/Leonardo Di Caprio/Russel Crowe/ Gene Hackman film that I cannot remember the name of - that borrows heavily from Once Upon a Time in The West - except with a female gunslinger. And the sci-fi, "West World", where Yul Brynner plays a robotic version of his Magnificient Seven role - The Magnificient Seven - starring Steve McQueen, Bronsan, and others. Silverado in some aspects is a homage to Magnificient Seven. Later Westerns tended to be homages to early ones. Or comments on them.
Expanding on what was said before.
Science Fiction also comments on the Western and plays homage to it. You see it in Star Wars, Star Trek, BSG, and most notably Firefly. The idea of man against nature, hunting for that new frontiere, with no real rules, but his own. The gunfighter who walks into the bar and owns it, because he's that good. Societial rules and order pushing against the boundaries of it and the conflict between the two worlds. And no genre demonstrated that conflict quite as well as the Western - where people fled civilization to construct their own, only to have civilization follow.
I haven't seen Deadwood yet, but I'd assume it plays heavily with that theme.
I adore Westerns, but I also struggle with them. Women rarely play large roles within the genre, and it tends to be fairly violent. I think what I like about them is the struggle to live in a world that wants to put you inside a box. To make your life safe without losing your freedoms. I often thought the Western as a genre did a good job of depicting that.