Westerns

Ford’s elegiac Westerns, after 1939, are unique in subduing action to characterization and feeling. My Darling Clementine (1946), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Wagon Master, The Searchers (1956), Two Rode Together (1961), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) centre on the opening up of the United States. Instead of pushing action to the foreground, personal relationships, the growth of towns, and a sense of collective purpose are emphasized. The lingering images of My Darling Clementine are less those of the “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral”, which is the climax of the film, than of a community dancing in the wooden skeleton of a church that is still being erected or of the group of itinerant actors struggling to maintain a degree of decorum in a wild town in which only one man, Doc Holliday (Victor Mature), appreciates their attempts to perform Shakespeare.

The celebrated, in Ford’s films, are the pioneers, who remain after law and order have been established, when the heroes and outlaws of the American West have gone. There is an awareness of the brutality that the white settlers exhibited towards Native Americans and black Americans and, frequently, the films focus on the bonding of nationalities and races out of which a new nation was formed. Social Darwinism is undeniably the main force, for there is no place for those who cannot come to terms with the requirements of a new society; figures such as the individualistic Ethan Edwards, in The Searchers, who is aghast at the thought of miscegenation, disappears from the nation’s history, without offspring. In She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, which won an Academy Award for its photography, Nathan Brittles (John Wayne) retires sadly but gracefully, full of doubts about the main purpose of his late career, the subduing of Native Americans, popularly known as “Red Indians” in Westerns.

Ford’s films are the inspiration for many film directors. Howard Hawks concentrates, especially in Red River (1948), Rio Bravo (1959), and El Dorado (1967), on the way that male loyalties can overcome a feeling of chaos. Anthony Mann’s heroes (often played by James Stewart or Gary Cooper) are frequently obsessional loners in moral confusion. Winchester 73 (1950), The Naked Spur (1953), The Man from Laramie (1955), and Man of the West (1958), deliberately pose questions of Shakespearean dimensions. His heroes question not only their worst, but also their best, motives; the resolution of their inner conflict may, or may not, end with their death. Budd Boetticher, with films such as Seven Men from Now (1956), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960), all starring Randolph Scott, explores the cost of “moving on”, of having no attachments, only principles, in a landscape that is often only open space.

The American Western has died more than once; it was buried in the early sound period; it disappeared in the early 1940s; it vanished again after the films of Sam Peckinpah, Ride the High Country (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969), which, with their sense of disillusionment and their use of “old”, exhausted Westerners played by Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, William Holden, Warren Oates, and Edmond O’Brien, appeared to be writing its epitaph. However, it has survived the coarsening of the “spaghetti Westerns” and the commercial disaster of Heaven’s Gate (1980, directed by Michael Cimino) to re-emerge, via such films as the Canadian The Grey Fox (1982, directed by Philip Borsos), with celebrated pictures such as Dances With Wolves and Unforgiven.