Category Archives: The West

SIX-SHOOTERS

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People have often accused Westerns of romanticizing firearms, and there’s truth in the accusation, in the sense that Westerns communicated a respect for firearms and depicted them settling problems. But until the Sixties, Westerns could also be seen as providing instruction in the responsible and even moral use of firearms.

The protagonists of traditional Westerns used firearms only for self-defense or in defense of innocents unable to defend themselves. Transgressing this code identified a man as a villain or as a hero with flaws which had to be redeemed.

Since the Western trafficked in mythology more than in history, the Colt handgun or the Winchester rifle became symbols for any kind of force available to a person, and connected honor and self-worth with using such force thoughtfully and humanely.

All that changed, almost overnight it seemed, with the first scene of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. In that scene, the leader of a band of outlaws, played by William Holden, in the course of robbing a bank, takes a group of innocent unarmed people hostage and tells his cohorts, “If they move, kill ’em.”

Holden and his men are the protagonists of the film.  The passing of their way of life is mourned in lyrical terms and they die heroically.  They were seen as cool — even though they would have slaughtered their defenseless hostages in the bank in order to further a crime.

To Peckinpah this made them tough, ruthlessly efficient, not wicked, and did not compromise their heroic stature.  The commercial success of The Wild Bunch confirmed this attitude as acceptable to many but marked the beginning of the end of the Western, by robbing it of its once-central goal of presenting models of potent but admirable manhood.  By beginning the destruction of the traditional Western mythology, presenting a more “realistic” portrait of the American past, The Wild Bunch blocked off one avenue of improving the American future.

HEAVEN’S GATE

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I saw Michael Cimino’s original cut of Heaven’s Gate when it played for a week in New York in November of 1980. At the time, I thought it was a Godawful mess. I just watched it again in the new Criterion Blu-ray edtion. Thirty-two years later, removed from the controversy which surrounded its initial release, viewed from a perspective of greater maturity, it still strikes me as a Godawful mess.

It was shot on some beautiful locations and magnificently lit by by Vilmos Zigmond.  Many of the images and sequences are breathtaking, though just as often the framing is ordinary or sloppy, with mushy zooms and tiresome telephoto views that take the edge off the compositions. The writing is self-indulgent, dramatically flaccid, frequently pretentious to an embarrassing degree.

The acting is surprisingly good, and in a few of the longer set pieces with minimal dialogue the film actually achieves the kind of elegiac or epic tone it aims for — in the roller-skating dance sequence, for example. There’s probably a decent two-hour film hidden in the footage somewhere, but no director capable of making such an inflated mess of a movie could have been expected to find it.  He just wouldn’t know what to look for.

ELMORE LEONARD OUT WEST

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I’ve been working my way through all of Elmore Leonard’s Western fiction — beginning at the start of his career in the early Fifties, when he published his first Western short stories in magazines.

Doing this you can chart his journey as a craftsman and as an artist, because he didn’t start out writing the masterful novels that made his name. He was always a good storyteller, so the early work is entertaining, but it took him a while to master the crackling stripped-down style of his later contemporary thrillers.

He overwrites at times in those early years, giving us too much information about the landscape and the way the characters look. Partly this was to convey a sense of authenticity, proof that he’d done his research, partly it was out of the mistaken belief that such description would make the tale more vivid. He eventually learned that it does just the opposite — the more description you leave out, the more the reader’s imagination has to work and the more engaged he or she becomes in the tale.

From the start he was interested in strong, active female characters, unusual in the Western genre, but it took him a while to learn to write from inside the female psyche — one of the most impressive features of his later work.  It also took him a while to develop his trademark humor, wry and mordant, rooted in the quirks of his quirky characters.

His 1961 Western novel Hombre marks the emergence of Leonard the master storyteller. It has a structure that is both conventional in the terms of the genre and ambitious in voice. In it, as in John Ford’s Stagecoach, a group of passengers on a journey, most strangers to each other, find themselves in peril, morally and physically, and must try to work together to save themselves. The story is narrated, however, by a secondary character, who is baffled much of the time by the motives and interior thoughts of his fellow passengers.

This points the way to Leonard’s mature style, in which the motives and interior thoughts of the characters emerge more from action and dialogue than from authorial commentary.

The protagonist of Hombre is the first of Leonard’s great flawed heroes — taciturn men who proceed according to a private code not always apparent to those they interact with, or to the reader, until some extraordinary act or decision reveals their fundamental nature.

By the time of Hombre, though, the market for Western fiction was drying up. Leonard stopped writing fiction for five years, supporting himself as a copywriter. He roared back later in the Sixties with the first of his contemporary thrillers, which got better and better, and created his current reputation.

Reading the early Western fiction now is pleasurable for anyone who enjoys the genre, but it also offers a fascinating look at the stages of Leonard’s slow and dogged development as a writer, probably the best fiction writer at work today.