MEN WITH GUNS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1053, 30 October 1959, Page 8

MEN WITH GUNS

"SINCE the American cinema first chose a man astride a horse with a six-shooter in his hand as its favourite hero-as, if you like, the symbolic American hero-the pattern of the Western has set hard and fast. The conventions are rigid in this romanticised, legendary world, where the mysterious stranger rides time and again to the help of the oppressed, the good man is a little quicker on the draw than the bad man, the U.S. cavalry traditionally arrives in time, and the bar-room shooting or the man-hunt through the hot deserted streets of a hundred little towns puts a decisive end to all arguments." That’s how one writer, Penelope Houston, summed up the ingredients of the Western film. She was writing, as it happened, about Shane and _ its stranger riding to the help of the oppressed. But she might have been discussing other Western classics-Stage-coach, say, and the arrival of the cavalry during the chase across the salt flats, or High Noon and perhaps the greatest man-hunt of all, when the marshal fought Frank Miller and his three henchmen through the streets of a small see town in the blazing noon-day eat. More than 50 years after The Great Train Robbery was at once the first feature movie and the first Western, horse opera is still as popular as ever. Recently eight of the 10 most popular shows on American television were Westerns; and it’s on the most popular of these, Gunsmoke, originally a radio show, that the Australian radio series of the same name is ‘apparently based. Scripted in its Australian version by Ron Ingleby, Gunsmoke will be back on the air from ZB, ZA and ZC stations end 1XH on Tuesday, November 3. Gunsmoke’s hero is Marshal Matt Morgan of Dodge City, "an indomitable lawenforcer" who once in the buried past was "a trigger-proud pistoleer," his friends then "notched-gun drifters hiring themselves for illegal death and deals." Look up the documents and you'll find that High Noon was set in 1865, the year the Civil War ended. It was from then on for about 25 years-till all free arable land in the West was occupied and the frontier’ closed-that the Western hero as we know him today flourished.

Skip another 13 years and you find The Great Train Robbery launching the Western on the world, and with it the first Western star and hero, Gilbert Anderson as Broncho Billy. Anderson did as much as anyone to make the "cowboy" a myth. As actor, writer and director a big noise in films of the day, he featured Broncho Billy in not far short of 400 Westerns to make him by 1912 the most popular movie character. Unlike today’s lanky. heroes, Anderson was stolid and portly. He was thrown during the first day’s riding on The Great Train Robbery. Of marksmanship he once said, "Heck, in those movies a blank used to turn a corner and kill a man." Anderson’s Broncho Billy movies would seem naive today, but the films

of Thomas Harper Ince, who succeeded him and became the first great director of Westerns, are still praised by the critical. Forty-five years ago Ince signed up William Shakespeare Hart to make Two-Gun Hicks. Probably the greatest of all Western stars, Hart had worked. as a ranch hand in the Blackfeet and Sioux country. He was in Ince’s greatest successes, usually as the "good bad man"-an outlaw who went some way towards reform but still stayed outside the law. Hart’s "attitude towards women contrasts with the more idealistic one of hero to heroine in later Westerns. Hart (one writer has summed it up) "expected all women to be like Louise Glaum, the vamp@in most of his films, with whom he conducted relations on a level of cash, sex and no questions. When, there-

fore, he encountered innocence in the Person of Bessie Love, he either beat a hasty retreat, or attempted — and frequently accomplished — seduction, followed by remorse and tragic atonement." W. S. Hart’s career spanned about 11 years-aged 50, he retired to his ranch in 1925 after his sort of films had failed to compete with such dashing successors as the Old California Westerns of Douglas Fairbanks — remember The Mark of Zorro? Tom Mix, who had been in films before Hart but was not as good an actor, somehow managed to keep going longer and to succeed him as a popular star-probably because he was more adaptable and opportunist than Hart, Anderson or the Farnunis. Even after retiring he made a comeback as late as 1932 in a couple of films. In his hey-day Mix wore the fancy boots and white hat and suit later adopted by such singing cowboys as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Of the older cowboy stars, Art Acord disappeared even before Hart, Harry Carey (who had starred in 30 Westerns for John Ford) turned to straight action films, and Hoot Gibson didn’t long survive the sound film. Of those who did survive it, both Buck Jones and William Boyd ended up making the sort of films that would do even the youngest moviegoer no harm. Although land hunger had been the great driving force that pushed the frontier West, it had little to do with the birth of the Western, which was more interested in a man with blazing guns on a galloping horse. And as Henry

L. Jacobson has pointed out, the horses galloped and the heroes fired not for land but for. abstract concepts of Justice and Honour such as the ritual duel to the death as the answer to the refused offer of a drink. "More pioneers died of dysentry than of Indian arrows or one another’s bullets," he wrote. "A: screen cowboy could only die by homicide, which is much more romantic, both for the audience and for himself.". Nevertheless, land hunger did find its place in ‘the Western 20 years after The Great Train Robbery when James Cruze made The Covered Wagon, and more has been heard of it in recent years in such films as Wagonmaster, directed by the veteran John Ford, whose Stagecoach was an outstanding Western-and, incidentally, one of a number in which John Wayne appeared for the old master. It’s sometimes said that the Western has grown up now, but that in growing up it has stepped outside the accepted, conventional almost formalised violence of the past and become tougher and more sadistic. No doubt this is trueit’s no longer safe to assume that a Western is suitable for children. But in growing up the Western has also brought new satisfactions to filmgoers, above the level of mere entertainment-the sort of satisfactions that help to make a film like Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, a wonderful piece of film-making, one of the best Westerns ever-whether you agree with all the moral choices made in it or not. At the same time it crowned a 25-year career for its star, Gary Cooper, whose first big movie had been a Western, The Winning of Barbara Worth. . Jesse Lasky, the man who decided that The Covered Wagon was to be an epic, has described how he came to this decision while reading the book as he travelled by train across Kansas. "Every time I glanced out of the train window at the rolling prairies, the mountains, the desert, I saw the vast panorama of sky and earth forming a backdrop for those heroic souls whose first wagon train actually took much of the same course three

quarters of a century before." Tt was this authentic background that helped to give many Westerns their sweep and appeal. Nowadays, unhappily, a partial reaction has set in. Filmed for the most part indoors, TV Westerns are known in the trade as "four-wall Westernsas big as all indoors." Yet Time, in its recent salute to "the American morality play," claimed that with all their faults TV Westerns have given television at last a taproot in the American tradition, while television has given the Western a chance to change with the times. One change is towards a more real manwoman relationship; another shows the beginning of an understanding between Good and Evil "where a sudden sympathy flashes between hero and villain." And the magazine ends by saying, a little grandly, of the Western: "In its finest expressions, it is an allegory of freedom, a memory and a vision of the deepest meaning of America." Claims of this sort on behalf of the Western are not new. The French went overboard for it 40 years ago, finding significance in everything W. S. Hart wore or did. They saw his horse, his dog, his dice, his cards and his stone jug of whisky as dream symbols, and his guns, his belt and his studded leather cuffs as the trappings of a god. And there are those who see the Western as an instrument by which America keeps the combative spirit alive in its youth; who comparing America with the cowboyviolent only in action but never the aggressor, and moved to take up his guns only by injustice-warn darkly that if the truce is treacherously broken "there won’t be enough tables to dive under once he draws." : Of course the serious student of the film, the psychologist, the thoughtful parent and the "professional worrier" are bound to consider such aspects of the Western-or of any other film. It’s right that they should. But your ordinary filmgoer'is likely to go on regarding it as he has always done-as a good night out with no hangover.