Donald Clarkeon the rise and fall of a genre
CLINT Eastwood once argued that the two most important art forms to originate in America were jazz music and the western. Well, neither has quite gone away, but at some point in the 1960s they both became minority interests.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which cost just under $40 million to make, appeared, it is true, on only a small number of screens in the US, but it is still worth noting that John Carney's fine , which cost bottle tops and jam jars, has taken more at the box office than the Brad Pitt film.
What became of this once reliable genre?
INTO THE WEST
Way back in 1903, The Great Train Robbery, one of the first narrative films of any significant length, put many of the western's durable conventions before appreciative audiences. It quickly became apparent that increasingly settled, ordered communities were eager to identify with - or, at least, follow - rootless characters surviving in half-formed civilisations.
WAXING AND WAYNE-ING
The classic era of the western, defined by the films of such directors as John Ford, Howard Hawks and Budd Boetticher, demonstrated how flexible the form could be.
Ford's (1939), one of Orson Welles's favourite films, brought the world the John Wayne we know. Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952), with its disaffected, isolated sheriff, so appalled Hawks (it seemed a tad un-American) that he responded with the timeless Rio Bravo (1959), in which a gang of misfits stand together against evil.
TRIGGER HAPPY WESTERNS
While these larger budgeted pictures were keeping mainstream movie stars busy, a body of yodelling, joshing specialist actors - Tom Mix, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry - set about the Indians and the bad guys in cheerful low-budget programmers. There were musical westerns, comic westerns, left-wing westerns, reactionary westerns and, in The Terror of Tiny Town (1938), westerns featuring gun-slinging midgets.
The genre even managed to survive Hollywood's eventual realisation, expressed in films such as Robert Aldrich's Apache (1954), that Indians were human beings after all.
THE WILD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
In 1969, Sam Peckinpah delivered one of the greatest westerns of any era with The Wild Bunch. A year earlier, Sergio Leone, heroic pioneer of the spaghetti western, had conjured up the magical, financially ruinous classic Once Upon a Time in the West. Yet an examination of these fine films offers us some clues as to the western's decline as a popular form.
The Wild Bunch is cynical about the myths of the west, distrustful of the lawman's motives and pessimistic about the advance of civilisation. Once Upon a Time in the West is ironic in its deployment of stereotypes and cheeky in the way it allows Henry Fonda, traditionally the embodiment of integrity, to subvert his popular persona. Most significantly, both films - like Clint Eastwood's The Assassination of Jesse James and so many other subsequent revivals - are proudly, miserably elegiac. They mourn.
DEAD OR ALIVE?
The decline in respect for authority in the 1960s managed to kill off the classic western, in which the lawman represents authority and the coming of civilisation is always a good thing. Every cowboy flick that followed seemed to be a critique or a subversion of a genre that had already taken itself off to Boot Hill.
There are a multitude of reasons to savour fantastic pictures such as last year's The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and the Coen Brothers' upcoming No Country for Old Men, but their subtle musings on the traditional western will, sadly, be lost to most contemporary ears.
It will take more than the modest success of 3:10 to Yuma, the closest thing to a classic western hit we have seen in aeons, to cause the genre's stinking carcass to rise from its grave.
