Watching Westerns in Manhattan The classic shoot-’em-up—so readily embraced in the heartland—confronts a different crowd when it comes riding into the big city.

By Terry Teachout

Watching Westerns can be a lonely business when you live, as I do, on the Upper West Side of New York City, the capital of Blue America.

The good news is that the Western is no longer viewed with contempt in my adopted hometown, the way it was back in the days when John Wayne was alive, well, and happy to bait the liberal establishment whenever anyone stuck a microphone in his face. Most film buffs are now perfectly willing to acknowledge the significance of the Western as a cinematic genre. Film Forum, the temple at which New York-based worshippers of the Movie as High Art gather regularly, even went so far in March as to put on a month-long debauch, “ Essential Westerns 1924-1962,” at which freshly struck prints of such critically approved classics as Colorado Territory, Garden of Evil, The Gunfighter, High Noon, My Darling Clementine, Ride Lonesome, Rio Bravo, Shane, Winchester ’73, and (of course) The Searchers were shown.

Alas, such full-fledged wallows are as rare as mother lodes here in Manhattan. For the most part, Westerns are screened only as part of festivals devoted to specific directors or actors. At other times they’re hard to find, and months can pass without the chance to see a classic Western on a biggish screen in the company of a group of similarly inclined filmgoers. Whenever I feel like riding the open country, I generally have to do it in my living room, courtesy of Turner Classic Movies, the Fox Movie Channel, or the video store up the street.

New Westerns, of course, barely exist, and on the infrequent occasions when a Tombstone or Open Range makes its circuitous way from Hollywood to a Manhattan theater, I’m hard pressed to find anyone who’ll see it with me. The trouble is that most of my filmgoing companions are women, and most women don’t like Westerns. Or, rather, they think they don’t like Westerns, which almost always means they’ve never seen one, since under close questioning they invariably betray no knowledge of the genre they claim not to like.

It isn’t just women. “When I taught at the U.S. Air Force Academy, I used John Wayne’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to explicate Aristotle’s Politics,” Ken Masugi, a political scientist at the Claremont Institute, recently recalled. “Several students in each class—future officers and defenders of this nation—had never seen a John Wayne movie.”

“ They’re all shoot-’em-ups, right?” one questionee asked me. “And no women. Or if there are any women, they’re the kind who stay home and cook for the menfolk, right?”

Resisting the urge to gnash my teeth and curse loudly, I shanghaied my skeptical friend into going with me to see a medium-crappy print of Rio Bravo, which happened to be playing at—surprise—a Howard Hawks film festival. Naturally I took for granted that her main interest would be in Angie Dickinson, who shows no signs in Rio Bravo of being able to do any cooking whatsoever (at least not the kind my friend had in mind). As we left the theater, though, she turned to me with stars in her eyes and stammered, “Oh, uh, gee…er…you never told me that John Wayne was sexy!”

Well, duh, he sure was—he wouldn’t have become the most popular movie star of his generation if he hadn’t been—but so were a lot of other Western stars of the ’40s and ’50s. (I mean, Robert Mitchum wasn’t exactly chopped liver, right?) What’s more, the women with whom the Duke and his colleagues consorted on screen included such decidedly unretiring types as Dickinson, Marlene Dietrich, Joanne Dru, Susan Hayward, Grace Kelly, Virginia Mayo, Maureen O’Hara, Ella Raines, Barbara Stanwyck, and Marie Windsor.

Whenever I hear the phrase “women in Westerns” on the lips of a tenured professor of any sex, I reach for the nearest set of earplugs, knowing the odds are at least eight to five that I’m about to hear a politically correct cliché uttered by someone who ought to know better.

As for the shoot-’em-up part… well, my friend had a point there. So far as I know, the only Hollywood Western in which not a single shot is fired, in anger or otherwise, is Four Faces West, and wonderful though that little-remembered Joel McCrea film may be, I can’t say it’s typical in any obvious way of the Western genre as a whole. But even though my progressive neighbors may recoil from the prospect of packing a six-shooter—you can’t even buy a water pistol at the toy store around the corner from my front door—they’re more than happy to partake of on-screen violence, so long as it comes in a sufficiently arty wrapping. So why did Manhattan evolve over the years into a Western-free zone? Is it simply a matter of changing tastes? Or might there be something more deeply intrinsic to the Western that makes it unattractive to the well-heeled folks who live here?
It happens that I do know one woman who is a devoted fan of the Western, though she’s rarely to be found anywhere near my neighborhood. My mother, a child of the Great Depression, saw her very first Western at a campground in rural Missouri, where it was shown for free on a makeshift screen that served as the “theater” for all the hardscrabble farms in the immediate vicinity, including the one on which her family lived. Now she lives in a small town not far from where that campground used to be, and we usually make a point of watching at least one Western together whenever I go home for a visit (last Christmas it was Randolph Scott’s The Tall T).

Puzzled by her devotion to a branch of filmmaking that at first glance seemed incompatible with her own uncomplicated niceness, I once asked her why she liked Westerns so much. “Because they always tell a good story,” she replied unhesitatingly, “and you know who the bad guys are.” I had to chomp down hard on my tongue to keep from laughing, not because her answer was naïve but because it was so completely to the point. I could have talked for a half-hour without putting it a bit better than my mother did in 15 perfectly chosen words.

The moral landscape of the classic Western isn’t always simple, but it is most definitely moral, by which I mean what the Oxford English Dictionary means: “Of or pertaining to the distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil, in relation to the actions, volitions, or character of responsible beings.” I can’t think of a single classic Western of any importance, not even the seemingly nihilistic The Wild Bunch, to which this definition can’t be applied exactly as is. The “good story” of every great Western is a drama of moral choice. At its center is a man asking himself, What should I do? How shall I live? To be sure, the greatest Westerns are the ones in which that drama is presented with all the rich complexity of real life—but even in Westerns as subtle as, say, Gary Cooper’s Man of the West or Audie Murphy’s No Name on the Bullet, the complexity of the questions being asked is never used by any of the characters as an excuse to avoid the responsibility of at least trying to answer them. In the classic Western, anyone old enough to carry a gun is assumed to be a responsible being who understands that the inability of mere mortals to be wholly good doesn’t make right and wrong interchangeable. The existence of shades of gray does not presuppose the nonexistence of black and white.

I can’t begin to tell you how unpopular this point of view is among those New York intellectuals who hold that nothing is anyone’s fault and nobody is expected to take the rap for anything (except perhaps admitting at a cocktail party to having voted for George W. Bush). If I had to sum up in a couplet the moral attitudes of most of my fellow Upper West Siders, it’d be this one, from West Side Story’s “Gee, Officer Krupke”: “We ain’t no delinquents, we’re misunderstood./Deep down inside us there is good!” Maybe so, but what matters in the Western is what you do, not what you say, and those who do bad things are bad guys, period.

Nor is anyone in a Western likely to be in much doubt about which things in particular ought not to be done. Zane Grey, Luke Short, and Louis L’Amour may not have known the phrase “natural law,” but they knew in their bones what it meant, and the countless films adapted from or inspired by their novels leave no possible doubt of what it means in practice. Even if John Wayne never really said “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” that’s just what it means to live under the aspect of natural law. He’s got to do it, or face the consequences—now and later.

This, I suspect, is the main reason why the classic Western has fallen from favor among the cinematic cognoscenti. No matter how beautiful the cinematography may be, most people don’t go to movies just to look at pretty pictures. More than anything else, they go to them to have their values reinforced. My mother likes to know who the bad guys are because she believes in the reality of evil. Show her a movie in which everybody is bad and she’ll change the channel before you can say “film noir.” Me, I happen to like noir, but for me it only has meaning when set in the larger context of a morally aware world. Only in such a world can a radically disillusioned film noir such as Out of the Past reveal its true significance, which is tragic. Many Westerns are tragic, too, including more than a few of the best ones, but mostly they’re heroic: They remind us not merely that evil exists but that it can be overcome. In the concrete canyons of my adopted home range, by contrast, heroes are old-fashioned and evil a matter of opinion. How could anyone who feels that way possibly enjoy Rio Bravo?

For that reason alone, I’m not hanging by my thumbs in anticipation of the opening of a Manhattan revival house that shows a Western every Saturday. It isn’t going to happen, any more than the executives of Hollywood are going to wake up one morning and decide en masse to put their collective muscle behind the making of a dozen brand-new, big-budget, big-screen Westerns. Even if they wanted to, they wouldn’t know how to do the job right. That’s too bad, not least because Westerns never look their best on a TV set. They were made to be seen in theaters, where the viewer can feel the awesome contrast between the lonesome cowboy and the seemingly infinite landscape in which he lives and works.

Still, I’m not complaining, at least not very much. For all its inescapable limitations, TV has given the classic Western a second life, thereby making it possible for a new generation of viewers to discover what my generation took for granted. As for me, I can curl up all by myself with a Western DVD whenever I find the canyons of Manhattan too bleak to contemplate. In my Upper West Side living room, Joel McCrea is still noble, Randolph Scott stoic, John Wayne and Gary Cooper sexy—and right different from wrong. That’s the way I like it. So does my mother.

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, music critic of Commentary, and author of several books, including A Terry Teachout Reader (Yale). He blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com. He was recently appointed to the National Council on the Arts by President Bush.

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