Home | Nov/Dec 2003 | 100 Years of Western Films

100 Years of Western Films

EDITOR’S NOTE: I

n the last installment, we focused on Clint Eastwood’s films, and so his classic Unforgiven is not covered here. Please note that The Westerns Channel (Starz-Encore) continues to air many, if not most, of the films in this series, in their own yearlong retrospective of the cinematic Western.

 As the 100th anniversary of the Western (as well as this ongoing series of articles) comes to an end, it’s a good time to look back at the last decade or two of Westerns, as well as look ahead to ponder the future of this most American of film genres.

By the 1990s, thematically, the Western was all over the map, and its major actors and directors were retired or dead. New, revisionist Westerns for the first time offered strong roles for women and people of color, telling the Western story from the Native American perspective, and showing a heightened concern for the environment. Overall, there was a renewed interest in historical accuracy as a new generation of players endeavored to take cowboys into the next millennium.

The Western’s new concerns had precedents dating back to the 1950s, when filmmakers began exploring the changing lifestyle of contemporary cowboys. Westerns had done this to an extent even in the 1940s, when Gene Autry fought gangsters who sped away in modern roadsters. In these new Westerns, however, contemporary cowboys struggled to survive in the modern world while living by their old codes. Sometimes they succeed by adapting, as in George Stevens’ 1956 epic Giant, based on the Edna Ferber novel. Ranch owner Jordan Benedict (Rock Hudson) sees the old Texas cattle-raising lifestyle slipping away as it is taken over by vast oil digging enterprises operated by nouveau riche tycoons.

In Arthur Miller’s brilliant and moving Marilyn Monroe vehicle, The Misfits, aging rodeo cowboys, Eli Wallach and Clark Gable—the latter in his last film—try to maintain their old livelihood by lassoing wild horses to be turned into dog food. This theme, of being overtaken by the modern world, was suggested in George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford), unable to continue robbing trains in America, must relocate to Bolivia to carry on their outlaw lifestyle. Another bittersweet look at the Old West was Robert Altman’s moody McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), which finds two-bit entrepreneur McCabe (Warren Beatty) unable to survive when the mining town he helped to create becomes “civilized,” while brothel madam Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) escapes through opium addiction. The beautifully photographed, elegiac Western The Grey Fox (1983) starred sixtyish Richard Farnsworth, who had acted in silent Westerns, as an elderly cowhand witnessing the end of the Western frontier, while finding a new life with a liberated female photographer.

The Western’s Low Ebb

By the late 1980s, though, the Western had fallen on hard times, vastly diminished in number. The decade had started with a sort of scaled down Magnificent Seven-style action picture, 1980’s The Long Riders, directed by Walter Hill. Real-life brothers play outlaw siblings: David, Keith, and Robert Carradine as the Youngers, Stacy and James Keach as the Jameses, Dennis and Randy Quaid as the James’ Gang’s Miller brothers, and Christopher and Nicholas Guest as the Jesse-killing Ford brothers. It spawned a craze for dusters, but didn’t do particularly well at the box office.

Casting a pall over the entire decade was the film many pundits say killed off the Western. Michael Cimino’s long awaited follow- up to his brilliant Vietnam film The Deer Hunter also arrived in 1980. Heaven’s Gate marked a return to the Western epic, but was a complete critical and commercial failure. Costing $36 million, it originally clocked in at over 200 minutes but after being trimmed to 149 fared no better. Silverado, a homesteaders versus cattlemen drama directed by Lawrence Kasdan and starring Kevin Kline, Danny Glover, John Cleese, and Scott Glenn, did not make much of an impact in 1985. In 1988, the Brat Pack showed an interest in the Western, via Young Guns, starring Emilio Estevez as Billy the Kid and Charlie Sheen, Lou Diamond Philips, and Keifer Suther­land as his compadres in the Lincoln County War. This turned into a 1989 to 1992 television series, Young Riders, and spawned a sequel, 1990’s Young Guns II, adding Christian Slater to the cast. Showing how far expectations had fallen for “Western” actors, the packaging for the video of the picture bragged, “During the course of filming, all the actors became accomplished riders, practiced gun-twirling, knife-throwing, and falling backwards off horses until it seemed like second nature.”

A Resurgence

In 1992 the resurgence of the Western and the primacy of the revisionist Western began, with the release of Dances With Wolves, produced and directed by Kevin Costner. Costner plays cavalry officer Lt. John Dunbar, who is given a lonely outpost near a Sioux Indian tribe. The painstakingly PC film, which took several years to complete, features the Native American language (with subtitles in English) and paints a respectful portrait the Indians’ harmonious coexistence with Nature. The Sioux culture is shown to be far superior to the corrupt “civilized” one from which Dunbar hails. He and his Sioux neighbors come to understand and respect one another as brothers, and he marries a white woman raised by the tribe. Winning seven Academy Awards, including best picture, the film set off a craze for Westerns.

Thematically, Dances With Wolves did have a few filmic predecessors, from sentimental silent films The Squaw Man (1918) and The Vanishing American (1926) to Delmer Davies’ Broken Arrow (1950), John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964), Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970), starring Dustin Hoffman, and 1972’s Soldier Blue, featuring Candice Bergen, which conveyed the horrific slaughter of Cheyenne Indians at the Sand Creek Massacre.

For his film, Costner enlisted Native Americans as technical advisors on Indian culture. The carefully made and historically accurate Dances With Wolves cast Native American actors who spoke the tribal language. In the past, white actors, including Rock Hudson, Debra Paget, and Jeff Chandler, played Native Americans. Walter Hill also took care to include Native Americans as advisors and actors in his 1993 bio-pic Geronimo: An American Legend, but it failed to generate the same excitement among audiences.

Costner’s most recent Western outing is the recently released Open Range, starring Costner (who also directed), Robert Duvall, and Annette Bening. With an approach much like that of classic John Ford films, the period Western slowly unfolds, developing the characters and showcasing the gorgeous landscapes. Duvall plays wizened cowhand Boss Spearman, while Costner is former bad boy-turned-good guy Charley Waite. The two saddle tramps go up against a domineering rancher and corrupt sheriff and all hell breaks loose. The movie received mixed reviews, and its opening weekend was adversely affected by the worst blackout in the nation’s history, but the excitement generated by the film bodes well for the future of Westerns. Though the pacing and structure hearkened back to the classics of the 1940s, the film’s strong female character––a working woman who’s not a saloon hall girl but a nurse––illustrates a change in the consciousness of the Western in the 21st century.

Roles for women, whose point of view had been ignored by traditional Westerns, started getting meatier in the 1990s, via 1994’s Bad Girls, featuring a gang of female outlaws; 1993’s The Ballad of Little Jo, a well-made drama based on the true story of Jo Monaghan; and the Sharon Stone vehicle The Quick and the Dead, also starring Gene Hackman as her adversary and Leonardo DiCaprio as the archetypal Kid gunslinger.

The Latin experience also has been expressed in more positive ways in 1990s Westerns. Antonio Banderas returned the dashing masked crusader to the screen in The Mark of Zorro, which has a sequel in the works, and Robert Rodriguez created a new series of action films with his Desperado series. John Sayles’ compelling Lone Star cast a look at contemporary Tejano culture and Mexican-gringo relations and prejudices in a Texas border town. A big budget HBO film directed by Bruce Beresford premiering in September focuses on the Mexican outlaw hero Pancho Villa and the true story of Hollywood’s attempt to turn him into a movie star in 1914, when D.W. Griffith’s production company paid Villa $25,000 for the rights to film one of his battles. To improve the look of the silent film’s “stars,” the movie company outfitted Villa’s bunch in sharp looking uniforms and applied makeup to Villa’s rugged visage. Starring as Villa in the HBO film, Antonio Banderas told the press, “Some people say I don’t look like Pancho, ‘he was fatter than you,’ stuff like that. But we’re not trying to make a wax museum version. We are trying to describe the personality of this man relating the very special event of shooting a movie and how it affected him.” The more things change, it seems, the more they stay the same.

Since the 1990s, African-American actors have been featured more frequently in Westerns beginning in such Eastwood films as Hang ’Em High. Mario Van Peebles’ 1993 effort, Posse, was a strong action Western featuring a predominantly black cast, and Silverado, starring Danny Glover, delved into the racism encountered by black Americans in the 19th-century West.

One of the Western’s most popular subjects, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, was revived in a concurrent pair of movies made in the early 1990s. Each one, of course, claimed to be the definitive accounting: 1993’s Tombstone, starring Val Kilmer (Doc Holliday) and Kurt Russell (Wyatt Earp), and Wyatt Earp starring Kevin Costner (Earp) and Dennis Quaid (Holliday). Buffalo Bill also came under scrutiny again in Buffalo Gals, based on the Larry McMurtry novel, and starring Angelica Houston as Calamity Jane and Reba McEntire as Annie Oakley. 

Attempts to cash in on the Western’s renewed popularity were characterized by “remakes” of popular 1960s tele­vision series. James Garner’s humorous Maverick TV series became a clunky motion picture starring Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster, with Garner getting a cameo. Though Will Smith was an interesting casting choice for James West, the remake of The Wild Wild West was also a dud. The reverse––taking the Western to the small screen––seemed to be much more successful in the 21st century. The Tom Berenger vehicle, The Peacemaker, on the USA network, became the second most popular series on cable during the summer of 2003. Tom Selleck’s remake of the chestnut Monte Walsh also garnered a large viewer­ship on the TNT channel. HBO is reportedly planning the launch of a new Western series, Deadwood, in January. Of course, the greatest television Western event was the 1980s miniseries Lonesome Dove, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall. The extraordinary series also spawned an excellent sequel.

The rodeo cowboy lifestyle, depicted by Sam Peckipah in Junior Bonner, starring Steve McQueen, got a worthwhile portrayal by Clint Eastwood in 1980’s Bronco Billy, and was taken into the honky-tonks by Urban Cowboy, which set off an unprecedented mechanical bull riding craze. The more recent 8 Seconds, a bio-pic of the late rodeo star Lane Frost, did not do much for Luke Perry’s post Beverly Hills 90210 career. Another former television heart throb—Johnny Depp—made a much more stirring appearance in Jim Jarmusch’s artful Dead Man Walking, a quirky exploration of Western myth-making that also had something to say about ecological issues.

RICHARD CARTWRIGHT © DISNEY ENTERPRISES INC., COURTESY OF AMERICAN PAINT HORSE ASSN.

As of this writing, though, the hope for the return of the Western lies in the success of new films that are more like traditional cowboy pictures, such as Open Range, the forthcoming The Alamo, the Viggo Mortenson film Hidalgo, about a cowboy who wins a grueling race through the deserts of the Middle East in the 19th century, and the Tommy Lee Jones Western, The Missing. As a 2003 recipient of a Golden Boot Award, Jones spoke his own mind about the future of the Western. “We need Westerns!” he told the audience. “And the only way we’re going to get to keep making them is to make sure we make good ones!” Let’s hope that Hollywood heeds Mr. Jones’ words.

Holly George-Warren is author of Cowboy: How Hollywood Invented the Wild West (Reader’s Digest Books, 2002).

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