John Wayne - The Early Years Collection | RowdysDVDs.com - Movies, Music and Television on DVD

Iterations:

I rented a copy of "John Wayne - The Early Years Collection" the other day. It consists of a number of movies made from 1934-1936. These were "early" years for John Wayne, but not all that early for movie making: a whole generation of earlier stars and directors had come and gone, whose names we have already almost forgotten.

Wyatt Earp had come to know several after 1901, when he returned to California from the Alaska gold rush. At that time, he was telling them stories and tales of the West that were already not fresh. The shootout at the O.K. Corral had happened in 1881, twenty years earlier. In the interval, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show had fixed the popular image of the West. Earp helped them make movies that had the right feel.

Tom Mix starred in over 300 such movies, most of them made before sound came to film. Most of his films do not exist any more. By the time John Wayne's early movies were being made, the Western was thirty years old, with well-established forms. These changed little until the 1950s.

What we today think of as "the classic Western" is probably High Noon. But High Noon was almost a complete rejection of all the Western's standard modes. The lawman, who wears a black rather than a white hat, enjoys no support from the people; in the end, though he has done what they dared not, he has lost their respect and has lost respect for them. He leaves the town in disgust, rather than riding into the sunset. John Wayne, by then a veteran star of twenty years' experience, called the movie "un-American."

But Wayne made a similar movie himself ten years afterwards -- The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It is in some respects even darker than High Noon. The upstanding Western hero of the film, played by Wayne, is a white-hat wearing cattleman of the classic mold. But when he shoots Liberty Valance, it is from ambush with a rifle; and doing so is the ruin of his life, as he loses his girl, burns his home in drunken misery, and dies in poverty. Meanwhile, a good-hearted lawyer from the East gets the credit, wins elected office, and gets the girl as well.

We today would probably think of these as classic Westerns, because we have even more radical changes to compare with them: the Clint Eastwood Italian westerns, for example, in which the hero is largely amoral. If you were going to say two things about Westerns that made them Westerns, it would be these: 1) The movie is set at least partially in the American West, and 2) it is a film about morality. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is a film about morality -- sort of. A Fistful of Dollars isn't even that. The success of these movies inspired a score or more of (mostly lousy) Westerns about amoral or immoral "heroes," including what must be the least probable portrayal ever of Doc Holliday, by Stacy Keach (later to do a pretty good Mike Hammer, though he was limited by the need for his scriptwriters to write for pre-cable television).

Clint Eastwood came around to making Unforgiven, which he designed to say "everything I've always felt about the Western." It turned out to be the best Western in a generation, because it returned the moral structure that underlies the Western. This was not, exactly, what Eastwood intended to do -- if anything, he wanted to show how that moral structure gave itself over to barbarism. Nevertheless, because his characters were interested in morality, aspiring to it or rejecting it, Unforgiven is powerful as no Western had been in a long time.

There have been several more recent Westerns, and they've been good by and large. They've also been a return to roots. In some respects, Open Range is almost a reversal of High Noon: the entire town comes out with rifles, unasked, to defend strangers they really aren't sure about; and in the end, the ability of one of those strangers to do violence for justice is enough to win him a place in their hearts. Where Gary Cooper left in disgust, Kevin Costner found a home and the respect of a people.

Tombstone, of course, returned the Wyatt Earp legend to its traditional form.

Meanwhile, Tom Selleck has made some great Westerns lately. Though his first -- Quigley Down Under -- was unusual for being set in Australia, it was a solid Western. His later ones are a complete return to roots, usually including even the white hat, and being based on long-beloved stories by famous writers. Crossfire Trail, Last Stand at Sabre River, and Monte Walsh, the last one an ode to cowboying.

I think this underlines a great truth about art. The changes in the Western are similar to the changes in the wider art world, except that they started later and ended quicker. It was not until the 1950s that the structure of the Western felt so stale that directors set out to shake it up, in ways that were shocking at the time ("unAmerican"), but now seem like a classic part of the genre. Like visual artists, the makers of Westerns became excited by the idea of playing with the structure, and they did some great things by thinking new thoughts about the old modes.

But then came a generation of artists who knew little about the classics, and had only studied the rejectionists. They did not understand that the power lay in the eternal form -- the great truth that was being explored by the art. The rejectionists had been able to achieve great things because they involved the audience in thinking about that great truth in new ways. The later generation, never knowing what the truth was, never having learned the basics of the art, made spirtually empty garbage.

It was only through a return to the traditional forms that we could escape that, and recover the meaning and power of the art. This is a lesson that the Western seems to have learned quickly -- perhaps because it was lucky to have Eastwood, one of the first rejectionists, still around to remember what the genre had originally been about. Unforgiven did a lot to set the Western back on track.

The remaining arts must learn the same lesson if they are to survive. If poetry and orchestral music, painting and sculpture cannot learn these things, fewer will study them, and fewer will care to hear or see the works of those who do. The Western points the way for them.

It does that for us, too. That's why it survives, after Tom Mix, after John Wayne, after the 'Old Chisholm trail is covered in concrete,' and "cowboy" is considered an insult in lands that once sent them forth.