Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott?
Whatever it is, it has happened to society too.

By Jesse Mullins

The year was 1973, and the song “Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott?” from the country act known as the Statler Brothers was climbing the charts. Many will remember the chorus, which began,

Whatever happened to Randolph Scott
Ridin’ the trail alone?
Whatever happened to Gene and Tex
And Roy and Rex, the Durango Kid…?

The Statlers, lamenting the fact that, “when you go to the show, you can’t take the kids along,” observed that one was compelled to “know the code” (the then-new movie ratings code), and that that required consulting a newspaper. With Walt Disney no longer alive and “the screen… filled with sex,” anyone not wanting to be offended had to “know what the movie’s about before you even go.” Or perhaps the experience could require “taking your analyst along to see if it’s fit to see.”

Asking “whatever happened to Johnny Mack Brown and Alan ‘Rocky’ Lane… Lash LaRue… I’d love to see them again,” the Statlers arrive at the song’s wistful conclusion:

Whatever happened to all of these
Has happened to the best of me.
Whatever happened to Randolph Scott
Has happened to the industry.

Given that this issue carries a look back at some of the best work of Randolph Scott (Terry Teachout’s piece “What Randolph Scott Knew”) as well as that of John Wayne (Dan Gagliasso’s “The Best of the Duke”), it seems a fit occasion to reflect on the sentiments expressed by the Statlers, for surely many today share those views. Whatever did happen to Randolph Scott? We could ask the question in a somewhat different sense about John Wayne. Though Wayne’s Westerns are still popular, we can ask why moviemakers today do not find, and apparently do not seek, leading men who fit Wayne’s mold. True, finding a John Wayne today would be tough or, more likely, impossible. But do we see Hollywood even trying to do so? If a John Wayne or Gary Cooper still fit their ideal, then at least we’d likely see those qualities reflected in the scripts, roles, and actors that do appear on the screen. But given the stories and characters that are presented to us, the answer would seem to be no.

But this trend has been only part of a larger one. As in the field of music, where everything today has to be marketed under a narrow, exclusionary label such as hip-hop, rap, alternative, or what have you, the offerings in film have undergone steady fragmentation, exploring ever greater varieties of licentiousness. Most of the movies of a generation or more ago would have qualified, per their content, as something fit for a family to watch together, but those films were largely also “adult” films as well, in the sense that they could appeal to the sensibilities and interests of adults as well as children. Great films always reach across the generations and the age brackets. Today, however, “adult” has become synonymous with a level of sexuality or profanity. It’s a sad statement that only the surfaces of things—the salaciousness of the presentation, the profaneness of the language—separate “adults” from children, “adult”-rated films from family films.

Philip F. Anschutz, the Denver-based founder and president of The Anschutz Corporation and lately a producer of Hollywood movies, has taken up the cause of family films, remarking in a recent address that, “Since the year 2000, Hollywood has turned out more than five times as many R-rated films as it has films rated G or PG or soft PG-13.” Anschutz’ subsidiary known as Walden Media produced Holes and Around the World in 80 Days, and is at work on The Narnia Chronicles. Remarking on the flood of R ratings, Anschutz asked, “Is this predominance… simply, as we hear so often, a response to the market? I would say not, considering that of the top 20 moneymaking films of all time, not a single one is rated R, and of the top 50, only five are rated R—with the remainder being G or PG. Don’t these figures make you wonder what’s wrong with Hollywood just from a business point of view? Why, in the face of these statistics, does Hollywood keep putting out so many non-family-oriented movies?”

Perhaps the reason is the same for why Hollywood has largely forgotten about the archetypal cowboy heroes and the kinds of morally aware, tradition-revering movies—not just Westerns but all genres—that portrayed figures such as these. The reason is that these virtues do not appeal to today’s Hollywood movers and shakers. Whatever happened to the John Waynes and Randolph Scotts of our popular culture? Postmodernism happened.

If modernism was the cultural movement of the first two-thirds of the 20th century, then “postmodernism”—that odd name applied by cultural observers—is the label that has denoted the prevailing outlooks and attitudes within the arts ever since. Postmodernism, often defined as a reaction against modernism, can be seen as a break with the larger past as well—the past not just of the modernists but of their forebears, the past not just of the moviemakers of golden-age Hollywood but of the great historical figures and types that Hollywood was once proud to celebrate. Postmodernism, with its anti-authoritarian stance and its rejection of earlier generations’ representations of truth and order, has little use for these ways and traditions. For all of its supposed openness, postmodernism has seized upon the merest handful of issues and made them inviolable: multiculturalism, secular humanism, and moral relativism. For all of its supposed tolerance, postmodernism has given us political correctness.

The difference in worldviews contrasted here is fundamental. It is the difference between a world of absolutes—a world in which right and wrong are real things, not mere opinions or preferences—versus a world of moral relativity, a world in which truth is whatever the individual or culture deems it to be.

Teachout states, in his article: “There is a difference between hard choices and meaningless ones.” Yes there is, and if a person accepts a world in which right and wrong are real and universal, then one has accepted that some choices will indeed be hard.

We see this real world pressing upon Randolph Scott in those roles he played. As Teachout wrote: “ …he continually found himself forced to make moral choices that were always clear but rarely easy. What Scott should do at any given moment is never in doubt, but we also understand that doing it will never make him ‘happy’ in any conventional sense of the word: He must do the right thing for its own sake, not in the hope of any immediate reward.”

But why must one heed such a call? It must be because one’s worldview embraces much more than just these isolated, immediate circumstances. Whether that worldview is thought of as “old school” or “Old World,” there is something unmistakably old about it, just as “Western Civilization” is old, just as “natural law” is old. For this kind of hero, the ethics are never “situational.” This hero’s world is one of absolutes.

Part of the appeal of Westerns was the way they dealt so directly with life’s absolutes. And always, when absolutes are evoked, there also is evoked some kind of idea, however clear or vague, of the Absolute. Elsewhere in his works, Teachout touches upon this connection. Writing about Whittaker Chambers—the Cold War-era accuser of Alger Hiss, who was tried for espionage in the early 1950s—in a piece that appears in his new collection of criticism (A Terry Teachout Reader), Teachout praised Chambers’ 1952 book Witness as a “memoir in which [Chambers] expounded at length his belief that ‘the crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God.’ ” He quotes Chambers further: ‘God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom.’ And yet further: ‘Religion and freedom are indivisible… Faith is the central problem of this age.’”

It’s not as though culture has to preach. But if man is a creature of mind, body, and spirit, there has to be room for the spirit, as well as the body and mind. With postmodernism, not only has there been a dearth of spirit—at least in the sense that Chambers perceived spirit—but one could even question whether the mind is truly engaged, on its deepest levels, where postmodernism’s vacuous themes are concerned.

But perhaps hope exists. In the introduction to his Reader, Teachout muses that we may be seeing a cultural sea change:

“ I’m not fond of trend-sniffing, but it seemed to me at the time, and still does, that Sept. 11 may well have brought an end to the unthinking acceptance of postmodern relativism,” he wrote. “On that never-to-be forgotten morning, Americans awakened to the crudest possible reminder that some things aren’t a matter of opinion. You can’t explain away 3,000 freshly slaughtered corpses. Outside of the pseudo-intellectual lunatic fringe, few tried, and those who dared to defend the indefensible were promptly relegated to the margins of respectable society. All at once, my fashion-obsessed Manhattan neighborhood was awash in fear and bedecked with flags, and the word evil reentered the vocabulary of a generation of educated innocents who thought there was no such thing.”

Sounds like the times are right for America to get itself reacquainted with some real-life heroes. And we know just the kind…

Jesse Mullins is editor of American Cowboy magazine. His commentary above, as well as Terry Teachout’s article “What Randolph Scott Knew,” appeared in the November/December 2004 issue. For more information on American Cowboy, visit www.americancowboy.com.