Funnily enough [given the theme of this post] our family with four kids hasn’t been able to sit through a single Western more modern than the Dollar trilogy.

“Get three coffins ready.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmhGYB4NdYc

“The wall is not meant to keep you out, the wall is meant to keep you in.”

“That was the greatest shot I ever saw!” “The worst, I was aiming for the horse!”

The Mexican government insisted on all the peons wearing brand new and clean white shirts in all scenes.

I still rather like High Noon. I had seen it many times and even looked at it semi-critically before I read that it was a metaphor for the blacklist. I was a tad surprised. Of course, I think of communists in the US as the equivalent of the Miller gang, so I suspect the metaphor is rather lost on me…

The Wikipedia page on the movie has a section on this- I had no idea of the permutations or the rift between Stanley Kramer and Carl Foreman during production.

It also gives a good range of reactions- the Soviets criticized its ‘glorification of the individual’ but the American left took the blacklisting line. Wayne and Hawks hated it but Ronald Reagan was a fan. So was Bill Clinton. Zinneman compared it to A Man for All Seasons, which is interesting. Though I’ll refrain from getting started on A Man for All Seasons.

They all double down on their tropes, strike even more poses, perform even more unrealistic shooting tricks and wildly more unrealistic physical moves, without any of the depth. And have no diversity in any substantive elements of their character.

But boy do they look diverse.

And none could deliver the line “Yes. I have the most stylish corner of the filthy storeroom out back. That and one plate of beans. Ten dollars a day,” with the flair and venom Robert Vaughn put into it.

I remember when Unforgiven came out [it is a brilliant film] and everyone swooned about how dark and revisionist it was.

In terms of filmmaking style, use of light, angle, imagery, and sound, Eastwood did do things not too obviously found in most older westerns, but he had been developing the style since at least Pale Rider, and his dark characterization goes all the way back to his ‘spaghetti westerns’ with Sergio Leone a generation earlier [though I appreciate that he added more dark and subtracted the camp; I hate camp].

But in terms of serious themes, the use of both myths and questioning the myths, there was nothing new.

No western does more to tackle the west seriously than “The Searchers”.

It ultimately comes down on the side of the settlers [as well it should from the perspective of those of us who live in civilization in North America and are the beneficiaries of how it was built]. But it shows not only the good side of them, but the side of how their world is made and defended by harder men. And that those men are divided into subsets- men like the Rangers, the hard edge of civilization but not at all beyond it, and men like Ethan, who has gone beyond that edge and become not unlike his enemy in order to defeat him. Unlike some viewers, I never did have much of a problem with some of the stuff Ethan says and does, and indeed he is merely practicing the cultural norms of his opponents on several occasions. But he is a self-made outsider of his own civilization, no mistake.

The movie also gives the Indian his due. The virtues of his culture, even in its dying stages, are clear and represented, whether or not accurate in detail. His motives are the wholly understandable and praiseworthy ones of defending his people, survival, and revenge. Who does not see in Scar a tragic hero as well as villain? Who does not react with recognition when he turns one of Ethan’s remarks back on him- “You speak good Comanche. Someone teach you?”

The ingrained post-frontier American admiration for the American Indian was on full display, without any added unrealism.

Ancient tropes about civilization, barbarism, where the lines are on a frontier, and what is done to build civilization, all tackled.

Similarly, High Noon was a paean to the individual lawman, sure, and an elaborate and misconceived political metaphor as well, but it did bother to suggest that maybe civilized American townsmen weren’t all embryonic heroes but could also be selfish and gutless. Or maybe it suggested they were just people with lives and families, too. Again, try to get such things addressed seriously and subtly in a modern western.

One could go on. Seemingly numberless westerns in the heyday of the genre reinforced, challenged, or just played with or riffed off the myths and archetypes of the age. Even ones that took a more lighthearted approach found time to tackle town versus country, town versus ranch, west versus east, north versus south, civil war and reconciliation, America versus Mexico, and on and on. Even, shock, the strength and contribution of women, whether in old social roles or new ones made available on the frontier. One thinks of Ma Jorgenson ['wise matriarch of the land' archetype] in the Searchers, Angie Dickinson as Feathers ['modern self-defined woman'] in Rio Bravo, and I’m sure others if I wasn’t just pulling this out at random.

Here is a great scene from one of their more popular movies, They Call Me Trinity (1970), or as it was titled here, The left and the right hand of the devil. Now that’s a proper title.