Big Screen Cowboy

Like ninety percent of the boys of my generation, I wanted to be a cowboy and spent many of my Saturdays camped at the local theater watching cowboy films. The popcorn was 25 cents, matching the price of admission. The floors were sticky with soft-drink spills and crunchy with spilled popcorn. We were boys and ignored such mundane destractions. Many of them were pre-World War II films featuring the “Red Rider” and his sidekick, “Little Beaver,” the “Colorado Kid,” Lash” LaRue, Johnny Mack Brown, “Whip” Wilson, “Hopalong” Cassidy and Roy Rogers with his sidekick, “Gabby” Hayes. Each had a special sidekick for comic relief.

Saturdays at the Modjeska Theater in Augusta in the erly fifties also brought stage acts like the archer, explorer and bow hunter, Howard Hill, who had trained Errol Flynn in the use of the bow and arrow for his role in Robin Hood. Hill showed films he had made of himself killing a bull elephant with a bow and arrow. Even at nine years of age, I felt uneasy about that. Killing a majestic animal just to demonstrate that it could be done seemed to run contrary to the cowboy value system I was learning.

One summer while living in Hepzibah, Georgia, where the only theater had closed, my schoolmates and I paid to sit in a tent on hot August nights and watch old cowboy movies, sitting on plank seats. It was then that I first saw the oldest generation of westerns, many silent. Stage actor William S. Hart starred in some of the earliest westerns, creating the stereotype of the western hero. And, I saw the intense Bob Steele who was the spitting image of William S. Hart, portraying the “Colorado Kid,” (who was also with Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon). This was in 1953.

It was about the last summer that small Georgia towns-in decline since the early 1920’s-had theaters of any description. Coming out of the tent we watched a stake- bodied truck drive by with about a dozen Ku Klux Klansmen, night riders, standing up in the bed and wearing their hooded white robes. This caused a little stir, but seemed to have been accepted by the exiting theater goers as a curiosity as they speculated on what the Klansmen were up to. They all seemed sure they were not the target of the Klan raid.

The themes and actions in early westerns were predictable: man loves horse, girl loves cowboy, bad guys get their just rewards, cattle stampede, hero leaves girl at hitching rail and rides off to face other challenges. These were morality plays based on the virtues of justice and courage. The bad guys got rounded up, were sometimes roughed up in a fist fight. There was lots of shooting but the bad guys seldom got killed. And, the films were located often times in a contemporary setting that invariably looked like southern California or nearby desert states. There were usually big bolders and rock canyons, convenient for ambushes.

All this translated well to TV and gave rise to cowboys for kids on TV, mainly Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry. Ultimately small town theaters closed and big towns were lucky to have even a single movie house at all. Then of course, the theaters moved to the new malls. I disliked these. I guess I was growing up. Thankfully, the western made a big comeback as most families bought TV’s. Gunsmoke moved from radio to TV, Matt Dillon became a household name and the Rifleman, Death Valley Days , Wyall Earp and Batt Masterson proved that the American appetite for westerns was insatiable. Gunsmoke became the longest running TV series, and later became the longest running in TV syndication.

Hollywood had to top all this by making REALLY BIG WESTERNS in LIVING COLOR and CINEMESCOPE. Big stars like Gregory Peck, Robert Taylor, Jimmy Stewart, and Burt Lancaster acting in more complex plots and increasingly more violent action scenes were added to the mix to attract audiences back into theaters. All this culminated in the critically acclaimed High Noon staring Gary Cooper. Full blown drama meets western action. It was in its way, the advent of the anti-hero, for Cooper’s story was one of fear.

The movie houses and studios also fought back against television beginning in the early-fifties with biblical and historical epics (literally big since they were in widescreen format, Cinemascope, like Ben Hur, the Ten Commandments and El Cid.. But the smaller theater venues continued showing old westerns, selling cheap candy for high prices and pandering to kids on Saturdays.

You can see where all this was tending and how it would inevitably lead to the surrealistic violence of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Sam Peckinpaw’s The Wild Bunch and 3:10 to Yuma. And, inevitably westerns came to reflect the violence and brutality that dominated the news, with bad guys transformed into heroes and women objectified in ever more degraded ways. The Clint Eastwood westerns- called “spagetti westerns” because they were directed and filmed by Italian crews and filmed in Italy, Spain, Mexico or even Yugoslavia. Aging stars like Henry Fonda boarded this entertainment train. As in most films of the 1970’s, amped-up violence was the main draw. Zooming camera shots, split screens and gritty closeups became the norm.

So, why bother with this? Simply to say that westerns shaped the values and imaginations of many boys of my generation. While I still love westerns, in my opinion there are only a few of real merit. Out of the hundreds made, I can bear to watch only a handful. I’ll I name a few of my favorites and look forward to a short list of yours.

1. Kevin Cosner produced and starred in Open Range (2003) on a shoestring budget. But, Robert Duval as the boss of a cattle drive, Kevin Costner as a one- time Civil War marauder and gunfighter, Annettee Bening as the love interest and Sir Michael Gambon as an Irish immigrant cattle baron trying to keep the freerangers off his land all deliver wonderful-even loving- portraits of the staple characters we expect in western classics. They are the archetypical westerners-the cattle baron, the steady hand, the gun fighter, the lone woman in a man’s world, the honor-bound cowboys standing up to injustice.

2. The Wild Bunch (1969), in spite of the distracting camera work favored by Director Sam Peckinpaugh, is an homage to the many westerns set in Mexico. In this case the cast consists of mostly aging stars portraying aging desperados, men familiar with the western genre, men who helped create it: William Holden, Robert Ryan, John Wayne side-kick Ben Johnson, perrenial crazy/bad guy Warren Oats, cunning character actor Strother Martin and card carrying-bad guy guy L.Q. Smith. Out to pull one last job, they run afoul of Mexican revolutionary forces. Violent it is, but incredibly romantic and true to tradition as well. Its the three musketeers in spurs with the twist that our heroes are outlaws-a popular affectation of 1970’s films in general. Movies romanticising Billy the Kid and Jesse James followed. Gregory Peck as The Gringo in a film reframing of story of the last days and death of writer Ambrose Bierce (The Devil’s Dictionary) is pretty solid but no match for the The Wild Bunch, which likely informed and inspired the later movie Gringo set in Mexico.

3. I am a Robert Duval fan. He is to the western what Anthony Hopkins and Peter O’tool are to the historical drama (though Hopkins made several movies set in the west, including Zorro with Antonio Banderas). Lonesome Dove was a sensational hit on national televison in 1989 . Duval stars as the archetype western character-a tough, tenderhearted, rascal. Based on the novel of the same name by Larry McMurtry, the mini-series was shown in episodes providing the long format in which well developed, multidimensional characters and subplots could add richness and detail to a beautifully crafted storyline. Two aging former Texas Rangers (Gus and Captain Call) played by Tommy Lee Jones and Duval, set out from the sad little abandoned town of Lonesome Dove to drive a cattle herd to the high ranges for summer grass. Its the end of the era of the long drive, of the “Goodnight Trail” north. Female characters (played by Diane Lane and Angelica Houston) have personalities and their lives are complex as-indeed they, too, are heroes in this epic story of the plains. Danny Glover is not there as proof of racial inclusion: he is a fine actor in a well-played role that is as individualistic and character driven as those of the other players. The distances are immense, the cinematography remarkable, the encounters with bad men and Native American hostiles fairly portrayed. This is about the ending of the old west and the adventures of the last knights of the Great Plains. Every character and contest is familiar and yet original, just as they are in the Iliad and Chaucer’s Tales, or in a book of Chekov or O’Henry short stories. With the added vividness of moving images, Gus and Captain Call have become part of our collective memory of what a cowboy is and what it meant to be a free man or woman in a new nation, honor-bound to the “Code of the West” which remains the essence of the American character.