REVIEW: Paint Your Wagon (1969) – Joshua Logan, Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood

Eastwood and Marvin, Paint Your Wagon

Ben Rumson: “I have read the Bible, Mrs. Fenty.”

Mrs. Fenty: “Didn’t that discourage you from drinking?”

Ben Rumson: “No, but it sure killed my appetite for readin’!”

Going from Dances With Wolves to Paint Your Wagon is skipping from the pinnacle of self-seriousness to the heights of libertarian farce. Part Western, part musical and part satire, Paint Your Wagon has gained a certain cultural notoriety as the Western with singing instead of shooting, notably spoofed by The Simpsons.

Paint Your Wagon is the story of a hastily formed mining partnership between the scruffy, drunken mountain man Ben Rumson (Lee Marvin), and newcomer Pardner (Eastwood, who is not named throughout the movie, in a wink to his iconic role as The Man With No Name). In the mountains of the California gold rush, Rumson rescues Pardner when he and his brother plunge down a mountainside, and they hit a goldstrike together at the brother’s burial. Soon, a mining encampment of 400 springs up, dubbed ‘No-Name City’.

When a Mormon and his two wives enter the all-male town, the affection-starved populace go into a frenzy, and it is soon resolved that the second of the two wives will be auctioned to the highest bidder. A falling-down-drunk Rumson stumbles into the auction in progress, doubles the going bid, and passes out cold, $800 poorer and a wife richer.

It soon becomes clear that an encampment with one woman is very different from an encampment with none, as Rumson’s new wife Elizabeth (Jean Seberg) becomes a major tourist attraction, and demands a permanent cabin rather than a tent. Meanwhile, a jealous Rumson, driven to madness by the hundreds of jealous eyes upon him at all times, persuades the townspeople to found a brothel, quickly turning No-Name City into a thriving boomtown.

Despite Paint Your Wagon’s refusal to take itself seriously, its beautiful scripting and permanent tongue-in-cheek hide a movie with something real to say about the Old West. It masterfully portrays its characters mix of libertarianism and misanthropy with winking affection, and shows how essential some moral flexibility and willingness to adapt is to life on a muddy and frigid frontier, while at the same time handily explaining the conflicting urge to civilise.

One recurrent criticism of Paint Your Wagon is that the central love triangle is under-realised, with Eastwood and Seberg’s relationship mainly established in a much-decried montage. In a way, though, that’s part of the point – the film simply takes the predictability and universality of human nature for granted, and lets the viewer do so, too.

In fact, for a movie dealing with such potentially grim themes, Paint Your Wagon is remarkably good-natured and fun. You know you’re in safe hands when the confrontation of two women by 400 lawless, horny men is handled with such aplomb. There’s a particularly sweet moment when the town’s blacksmith offers to pay $50 in gold dust for the chance to hold the Mormons’ baby. Other moments carry a vicious edge, like when a pastor rides into town howling about sin and damnation, before introducing a Native American girl who is tied to his saddle and looks no more than 12 as “my wife, Princess Hummingbird”.

The production and staging on Wagon is glorious, the repartee is sharp, and there’s some fantastic physical comedy on offer. However, many of the songs are forgettable, and it’s quite a time sink at 164 minutes – points which should take none of the shine off for anyone willing to give it a chance. For the patient, Paint Your Wagon is an underappreciated wonder, and a canonical addition to the Western genre no real fan should miss.

REVIEW: Dances With Wolves (1990) – Kevin Costner, Mary McDonnell

“Nothing I have been told about these people is correct. They are not thieves or beggars. They are not the bogeymen they are made out to be.”

 – Lieutenant John J. Dunbar, Dances With Wolves

Dances With Wolves

The epic revisionist Western that was Kevin Costner’s directing debut clocks in at a hefty 175 minutes, or three and a quarter hours. Or at least the sellout theatrical version does. The director’s cut doesn’t concern itself with such crass commercial pandering and pulls out all the stops, sauntering in at 236 minutes.

It’s become somewhat fashionable to criticise Dances With Wolves in the two decades since its release, and even to despise this. While we’ll get to the criticisms in a moment, they should not be allowed to totally eclipse the real achievements of this film.

Dances With Wolves opens on Lieutenant John J. Dunbar, a Union officer in the American Civil War, in a medical tent. WhenDunbar realises his foot is to be amputated, he instead takes a horse and rides out in front of the enemy stockade in a suicide attempt. When he miraculously survives, and unintentionally inspires a charge, breaking a stalemate and winning the battle.

Cited for bravery and offered his choice of posting,Dunbarelects to be posted to the western frontier, saying he would “like to see it before it’s gone.” Once there, he finds the fort to which he’s been posted deserted, but chooses to stay and man it alone while he waits for reinforcements.

As he waits, he slowly grows closer to the local Sioux Indians (more correctly known as Lakota tribesmen), eventually marrying one of their tribe, Stands-With-A-Fist (Mary McDonnell), an orphan of European settlers who was adopted by the tribe as a child, while developing an animus toward his own people as he witnesses the dark side of encroaching white settlement.

In terms of production, Dances With Wolves in many ways works in the finest traditions of the open plains Western. With its sprawling plot, a soaring orchestral score over glorious location shots from Dakota andWyoming, in many ways it’s reminiscent of the John Ford horse epics of which it is the polar opposite in politics and sentiment.

Its core love stories, between Dunbar and Stands-With-A-Fist, Dunbar and the Lakota, andDunbarand the frontier, are hauntingly affecting, as all are doomed by the steady onward flow of time, and the knowledge that all of them are doomed to pass into history.

In a sense, Dances With Wolves is the extreme end of an arc of moral development in the Western that began with the doubts and subtexts of The Searchers 34 years previously. For the first time in a mainstream film, a native American tribe were the heroes, and all of European settlement the villain. While most Western films had moved well away from tradition of using Indians as antagonists during the 1960s and ‘70s, they had (excepting 1970′s Little Big Man) simply avoided the issue of the American genocide, whereas Dances With Wolves grappled with it directly, as the tragic, brutal and aggravated erasure of entire peoples and their way of life.

But it is an extreme. The main reason it has been so criticised is that it sounded the bell on an entire decade of mawkish and worthy film-making, at the same time earning a great deal of ill-will by beating out Martin Scorcese’s brilliant and uncompromising gangster story Goodfellas.

There is some substance to the criticism. Just as the Indians of the 1950s were two-dimensional merciless murdering savages to be held off by the heroic United States Cavalry, Costner’s Sioux are a pure and spiritual tribe of beautiful, healthy and somehow spotlessly clean noble savage archetypes, while all the white characters other than the thoughtful and ethically anachronistic Lieutenant Dunbar are leering caricatures, greasy, violent and deliberately wasteful.

Not only are the Sioux treated as qualitatively superior to whites in every way, but so are the animals. Costner bonds with both the horse he rides throughout the film, who we are to believe is so faithful and intelligent that it thwarts multiple attempts at theft throughout the film, and a wild wolf Dunbar dubs Two Socks. Both are given fairer treatment and a deeper characterisation than any non-Costner European character throughout the film.

It’s a bit rich to feel too persecuted by this, of course. In more than a century of Westerns, Indians have been soulless villains in perhaps thousands of films and many other manifestations, so leaping to arms after seeing European characters treated the same way in just one would be incredibly hypocritical. More egregious, however, is how Costner circumvents the need to depict occasional villainy on the part of native Americans.

For this purpose, the Pawnee tribe becomes the all-purpose antagonist, murdering any innocent Europeans who need murdering, and attacking and slaughtering the Sioux to add drama and give Dunbar a chance to be their saviour. This is aggravated by the historical fact that the Pawnee were as much victims of Lakota aggression as the other way around.

Despite its flaws, Dances With Wolves is a triumph, and its claim to be the Best Picture of 1990 is an honest one. It marks an important point in the moral development of Western civilization, and should be viewed in that context. Indeed, so successful and significant was Dances With Wolves, it actually persuaded someone to finance and authorise Costner’s next film, the history-making bomb Waterworld.

REVIEW: Brokeback Mountain (2005) – Ang Lee, Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal

Brokeback Mountain was Ang Lee’s second feature film after the smash international success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Lee’s

Brokeback Mountain theatrical release poster. Image property Paramount Studios.

action movie mastery was put him on the list of A-list directors, so a lot of studio executives must have been very disappointed when he played 2003’s Hulk for pathos rather than thrills, with the effect of creating the infamous emo-Hulk and barely breaking on domestic box office, even without including marketing costs.

Lee’s moody, lingering shots and penchant for thickly emotional scoring work much better in Brokeback Mountain, the tale of two cowboys and their doomed love. Brokeback was a sensation; combining character archetypes at the very centre of red-state identity and mythology with the already touchy issue of homosexuality meant it broke over the American national conversation like a tsunami, becoming an instant, ever-present punchline. It became the go-to move for every lazy hack comedian and launched a thousand think pieces in print and online, to the point that far more people were talking about it than ever saw it in a theatre.

As an actual film on the screen, Brokeback is an achievement. Based on a short story by Annie Proulx, it tells the story ofEnnisDel Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), two cowboys who take a job tending a sheep herd on the titular mountain inWyoming over the winter of 1963-4. After months of long, lonely nights, the two are sleeping in the same tent when Jack drunkenly makes advances on Ennis. Although Ennis resists at first, the two start a relationship.

Although they part ways at the end of winter and both marry and have children, they continue to meet in remote locations for vacations and weekends, with Jack always wanting to run away together, and Ennis always warning of the violence they could face if they were found out.

The genius of the film is that it makes no attempt to differentiate the love story at its heart as a gay love story. Gyllenhaal and Ledger play their characters completely straight, except for the part where they have sex with men. The love scenes between the two heterosexual actors are both compelling and natural, and both play their relationships with their respective wives (Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams) perfectly as substantial relationships nonetheless damaged by submerged truths. Ledger’s performance in particular is brilliant and compelling, despite much mockery of his character’s mumbling speech at the time. It’s the genius he showed in this role most of all that made him so keenly mourned by film lovers when he passed away in 2008.

Shot against the spectacular backdrop of the Canadian Rockies, Brokeback is not only a stunningly beautiful film, it is exceptional in performances, scripting and conception. Even its occasionally syrupy scoring is eagerly soaked up by the frigid open spaces against which it is set. It was widely awarded, winning three Oscars, although notoriously losing the 2005 Best Picture statue to the execrable Crash, a loss widely blamed on conservative academy voters who either refused to see Brokeback, or were willing to vote for anything else, although this still doesn’t explain how Crash won against the other three clearly superior nominees.

Many of the jokes made about the film indicated that Brokeback Mountain profoundly changed the way people saw Western tropes and archetypes. The solitary lifestyle and the exclusive company of men took on a new and sinister tone to those prone to seeing such things as sinister, making the film profoundly important as a revisionist Western. Perhaps its most significant legacy, however, is that at a time when the Bush administration was attempting to amend the US Constitution to ban gay marriage, Brokeback Mountain made a spectacular commercial success out of a gay love story.

REVIEW: Jonah Hex (2010) – Jimmy Hayward, Josh Brolin

Jonah Hex (2010). Image: Warner Bros.

Could Jonah Hex have been good or even great? It’s hard to know. Certainly Josh Brolin should be the perfect gritty gunfighting anti-hero. John Malkovich as a scenery-chewing archvillain should work. Megan Fox is… well, Megan Fox is very popular with horny teenagers. So what went wrong?

All of it. It all went wrong.

Explaining Jonah Hex is like explaining the deeds of a psychopath. No one loved it, someone did something unspeakable to it, and now it’s a monster.

That no one loved it is obvious. It’s just 72 minutes between opening and closing credits, as though it’s trying to slide apologetically by without notice. The script is incredibly half-hearted – although it’s nominally a Western, it seems to have absolutely no interest in the genre, alternatively tossing in superpowers, superweapons and terrorists to avoid the apparently unpleasant task of actually engaging with making a compelling Western. It genuinely seems like a half-hearted Tom Clancy adaptation was repurposed at the last moment when a comic book property became available.

As for the production design… well, Hollywood has been doing Western sets convincingly since there was a Hollywood, so for a film with Jonah Hex’s budget to make everything look like a theme park ride is almost impressive.

What’s been done to it isn’t pretty either. The comic book Jonah Hex is a pretty standard Man With No Name rip-off – in Volume 2, he is even drawn to look exactly like Dollars-era Clint Eastwood, with the hideous scar that is the character’s trademark fixing his face permanently into Eastwood’s wry grimace. In Jonah Hex, however, Hex gains the ability to resurrect and interrogate corpses, with a built-in torture mechanism to ensure their compliance, and with the convenient addendum that being dead gives them the ability to know everything about anyone they knew when they were alive. All of this is spelt out in the nightmarishly laboured expositional narration and dialogue that refuses to take a break even during the action set pieces.

The film refuses to accept the simple but effective laws of the anti-hero. Far from the misanthropic loner of the comics, the Hex of the film grunts and grimaces a good game, but in short order has acquired both a long-term relationship in the form of Fox, and a dog, in a sign that some horrible studio hack did not trust their audience enough to sympathise with a genuinely isolated protagonist. The entire film is shot like a trailer, with generic heavy metal and a sense of ponderous self-importance throughout.

Director Jimmy Hayward has even managed to dim Fox’s dubious charms as a leading lady by airbrushing and CGI-ing her into the uncanny valley until she looks like an escapee from the animated films he is more accustomed to working on.

This is a film that has had the same degree  creative passion put into it that a sausage maker might put into sausage no. 3,754,104.

In fact, there are only two good things to be said about Jonah Hex. One, it includes Jeffrey Dean Morgan as one of the corpses Hex tortures for information, which adds still another role to an improbably long list of deceased characters for the actor (in addition to Supernatural, Weeds, Grey’s Anatomy and The Watchmen, among others).

And two, it only made US$11 million on a budget of US$47 million, so there won’t be another.

In conclusion, I will borrow from 1995’s Billy Madison. This film is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever seen. At no point in its rambling, incoherent plot was it even close to anything that could be considered an enjoyable film. Everyone is now dumber for having allowed it to come to pass. I award it no points, and may God have mercy on its soul.

REVIEW: The Searchers (1956) – John Ford, John Wayne

The Searchers DVD cover, property Warner Bros.

The Searchers is important. It’s considered the best of legendary director John Ford’s Westerns, and often touted as the best and nuanced performance of John Wayne’s long and iconic career. The American Film Institute named it the best Western of all time, and placed it at number 12 on its list of the 100 greatest American films of all time.

It’s also a deeply polarising film, often accused of gross racism against Native Americans and apologism for genocide. Defenders claim it actually deconstructs the racism and the assumptions of the Western as it existed at the time… as it does, but not particularly convincingly. Mostly, defenders are simply in love with the sheer beauty of the film, which has profoundly influenced filmmakers like Spielberg, Scorcese and Tarantino.

Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a hard-souled Confederate cavalryman returning to his family three years after the war. Ethan is unreconstructed and bitter about the Confederate defeat, and the three lost years are left as an ominous open question, implying that he may have joined with those bushwhackers who refused to accept the end of the war, or as later events suggest, been involved in even grubbier campaigns against the native tribes.

The early scenes deliver a rush of exposition. Ethan is staying with his brother Aaron (Walter Coy) and his family. He dotes on his neices Debbie and Lucy, but treats his brother’s adopted son Martin Pawley (who Ethan rescued as an orphan) with dismissive contempt because of his Cherokee blood.

When the local reverend turns up to raise a posse and pursue Comanche raiders, Ethan and Martin go, leaving brother Aaron and the women at the homestead. However, a day’s ride away, they realise the cattle-killing raids have been a diversion to allow the Comanche to raid homesteads, and that they are too far away to do anything about it. The next day they arrive to find the homestead burnt, Aaron and his wife killed, and the two daughters kidnapped.

Ethan and Martin spend the next five years tracking the Comanche, first for both Debbie and Lucy, then just for Debbie after Ethan finds Lucy murdered. As the journey continues, however, and it becomes clearer that Debbie is living as a Comanche, the nature of their search becomes more confused, and Martin begins to suspect that Ethan’s genocidal loathing for the Comanche and horror of miscegenation mean he intends to kill Debbie rather than rescue her.

The Searchers has some basis in historical fact, in that it was inspired by the 1836 kidnapping of Cynthia Ann Parker during the Fort Parker massacre. Parker was recovered after 25 years, but had come to think of herself as Comanche, and spent the rest of her miserable life being kept prisoner by family members while she tried to escape and return to her tribe. However, for all its relative nuance for the period, The Searchers’ lingering over the rapes and massacres of the Comanche does little to portray them as a people or culture more complex than their antagonism with the settlers.

The Searchers is certainly a beautiful film, and a landmark in Westerns and American film history. Shot in Monument Valley, the spectacular area of Arizona and Utah that Ford so favoured, many of the shots could easily pass as oil paintings, with the characters vanishing into the gorgeous scenery. Ethan is an unusually nuanced character for Wayne – the character’s past informs his present, and he has a genuine arc. He is even used as a potentially unreliable narrator, as several key plot elements – the atrocities carried out on both Lucy and her mother – take place only in his eyes, in offscreen space, making us wonder just exactly what he saw, and whether his characterisation of the events can really be trusted.

However, it is at best a flawed masterpiece.  Much of the scoring is excessively dramatic and some of the musical cues are on-the-nose, and there are other artefacts of the time, such as characters being visible standing stock-still on their marks for a moment in transitions before the action starts. The pacing is messy, rushing through the opening scenes too quickly, giving an inadequate feeling of the time that passes in the five year search, then wasting long minutes on a very unnecessary vaudevillian comedic detour when the searchers interrupt a wedding. There’s also the egregious sin of Ken Curtis’ Charlie McCorry, an awful, one-note character that sucks away suspension of disbelief in every scene in which he shows his face. It would be entirely too generous to say the film is entirely innocent of the racism and racial caricatures endemic to the times.

Nitpicking is unfair – Ford directed his first film in 1917, so to be making major advances in his craft forty years later is an incredible feat – and to some extent, The Searchers needs to be judged by what came before as much as what came after. Its iconic final scene, shooting out to the Monument Valley landscape through a homestead door, echoes throughout the decades of cinema history since its release. To say it is the greatest Western of all time, however, is drawing a very long bow indeed.

REVIEW: A Fistful of Dollars (1964) – Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood

Image property United Artists

A Fistful of Dollars is the original Spaghetti Western, and the film that began the break from the John Ford/John Wayne era to the overlapping Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood era when it was released to American audiences in 1967.

The term ‘Spaghetti Western’ referred originally to a film movement that emerged in the 1960s, where Italian directors and producers created some of the great Westerns of all time. The films were shot on shoestring budgets,  in either central or southern Italy, Sardinia or southern Spain, in areas that looked similar to the American South West.

Since then, the term has come to refer more to an ouevre, seen in recent films like The Good, the Bad and the Weird, Sukiyaki Western Django, and Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi trilogy. The Spaghetti Western has less emphasis on horseback time and rarely involve clashes with Indian tribes as was common in earlier Westerns, and much more emphasis on stylised and unlikely gunfights.

I first saw A Fistful of Dollars on television late at night in about 1998 when I was 15, and I thought it was perfect. The brooding atmosphere and pacing, the aloof protagonist in his brown hat and poncho, and the nerve-shattering tension of its final scenes were everything I wanted in a movie, and so far from the cheezy Westerns in the style of John Ford that my father liked. It created and drove my interest in Westerns which continues to this day.

Fistful‘s (Per Un Pugno Di Dollari in its original Italian release) plot is elegant in its simplicity. A nameless gunfighter (called Joe, Americano or gringo in the film, or The Man With No Name otherwise) rides into a town on the Mexican border, which is being terrorised by the feuding of two rival gangs – the Baxters and the Rojos. Setting up camp at the hotel between the two gang lairs, which face off against each other down the wide and dusty main street, the gunfighter acts as a mercenary for both sides, after proving his usefulness by gunning down four of the Baxters’ fighters.

His downfall, however, comes when he intervenes to rescue the captive mistress of Ramón, the most deadly and cunning of the three Rojos brothers. He goes to the small house where she is being kept apart from her husband and child, shoots the five guards, and gives the small family the two gangs’ money to escape with.

As a result, he is captured, beaten and tortured, and the Rojos kill every one of the Baxters in a surprise attack. The Man With No Name escapes with the help of a few of the townsfolk to recover and return for a final showdown with the Rojos.

The final showdown is a work of art in itself. The sequence revolves around Ramón Rojos’ well established favourite weapon, a lever-action rifle which gives him an insurmountable range advantage over Joe’s single-action Colt .45. The Man With No Name faces off against the Rojos brothers and two henchmen down the wide main street, to an immortal theme of at once soaring and mournful brass, above menacing strings.

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Joe advances on Ramón and taunts him, telling him to “aim for the heart”. Ramón fires all seven of his shots into Joe’s chest one at a time, yet Joe continues to advance. Finally, Joe flips his poncho out of the way, to reveal the iron plate which has been protecting him. Discarding it, Joe shoots the rifle out of Ramón’s hands, and guns down the four men behind him as well, leaving Ramón at his mercy.

This is the film where Clint Eastwood created the persona which arguably carried him through his entire career – the laconic, wind-etched, hollow-cheeked pistolero, The Man With No Name.  Attired identically in all three of the original Dollars trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, 1965′s A Few Dollars More and 1966′s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), he is the archetypal Western protagonist. His past is unstated, as are his motives (as he makes fortunes throughout all three movies yet spends nothing). Before A Fistful of Dollars, Eastwood was already an established cowboy on the TV series Rawhide, but he played a standard, smiling white-hat, whereas forever after he was associated with the stoic, brown-hatted Joe, which made his career.

Indeed, much of Fistful is instantly iconic, from the opening credits, to the incredible score by Ennio Morricone, and of course the tense final showdown. The super-closeups on characters’ faces used throughout the film have become so identified with Sergio Leone’s style, the shot type is often referred to as The Leone. Among many tributes to Fistful in film, Steven Spielberg’s Back to the Future III largely recreates the final showdown, while Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill borrowed heavily from its soundtrack.

A Fistful of Dollars is not a perfect movie. It is dubbed in the Italian style, which is slightly jarring to modern audiences, and in the absence of squibs and blood packs, characters simply hurl themselves over unconvincingly when shot. It’s not even genuinely original, being an unauthorised remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 samurai film Yojimbo. However, the feeling of impoverishment and the rough edges are part and parcel of the film’s greatness, and it wouldn’t be the same any other way. It is impossible to argue against Fistful‘s brilliance, or to argue that it created nothing original. It changed the entire genre, and its blood runs through every successful Western made today.

The term ‘Spaghetti Western’ referred originally to a film movement that emerged in the 1960s, where Italian directors and producers created some of the great Westerns of all time. The films were shot on shoestring budgets,  in either central or southern Italy, Sardinia or southern Spain, in areas that looked similar to the American South West.Since then, the term has come to refer more to an ouevre, seen in recent films like The Good, the Bad and the Weird, Sukiyaki Western Django, and Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi trilogy. The Spaghetti Western has less emphasis on horseback time and rarely involve clashes with Indian tribes as was common in earlier Westerns, and much more emphasis on stylised and unlikely gunfights. The films of Sergio Leone led the way with their slow, menacing pace and instantly identifiable scoring. 

The Celluloid Saloon

Welcome to The Celluloid Saloon, the hard-drinkin’est, hard-fightin’est place on the digital frontier!

The Celluloid Saloon, as you may have guessed, is a blog about Westerns. Updating twice a week, it will offer news, reviews, previews, and the occasional interview. It will focus on Western films from 1960 to today, but won’t shy from the occasional foray backwards in time or out of the cinema, or even to pursue the soul of the Western out of its own genre if need be.

The Western has been a Hollywood staple throughout film history, dating back as far as 1903’s The Great Train Robbery, with its Golden Age taking place between the 1930s and 1950s.

The frontier mythology of individualism, nobility and violent justice has become an inextricable part of the American character, and the cultural lexicon of the entire world. The Western gave the US one of its most revered Presidents in the form of Ronald Reagan, its distinct indigenous political ideology of libertarianism, its sense of itself as the world’s policeman (or sheriff).

There’s no doubt that the basic appeal of the Western is through male fantasy fulfilment. In a society where we are more and more regulated and quiescent, where a man’s home is his castle so long as he doesn’t want to do anything crazy like build a shed near the fence line, and justice is a court appointment eight months away, the Western offers a world of utter moral simplicity, where a horse, a revolver and a good pair of boots are the only necessities of life.

The archetypal Western hero is the ultimate individualist, riding from plain to plain without personal bonds, answering to no master; where he is drawn into the affairs of others it is through his own nobility, in defending the innocent, or through his stoic sex appeal, which of course draws any women who cross his path directly to him. Yet, by the end of the movie he is always able to ride onwards, disappearing into the sunset.

In each man’s moral universe, antagonists may be passive-aggressive co-workers, overbearing bosses, or the interminable burden of debt and wage slavery; the Western offers a world where the bad guys are all the way bad and violence is always the solution. While real-life violence hurts a complex individual and has far-reaching consequences, the fantasy violence of the Western is against a leering Black Hat, a cypher whose death is an absolute good.

The Western is far more complicated than that, of course. Starting in the mid ‘50s, the background of the Old West has been used to criticise the eye-for-an-eye philosophy so fundamental to the Western, and to explore the genocidal conquest of America from its indigenous tribes. Western motifs have been used to explored the furtive and tortured nature of homosexual love in a conservative society, and the accretion of conventions and concessions that forms a society where none previously existed.

Far fewer Westerns are produced today, but if anything they have become more critically respected. 2010’s True Grit, 2007’s There Will Be Blood and 2005’s Brokeback Mountain all received Best Picture nominations at the Academy Awards, and 2007’s No Country for Old Men, 1992’s Unforgiven and 1990’s Dances With Wolves actually received the statue. Clint Eastwood, the most iconic cowboy after the Duke himself, is one of the world’s most revered filmmakers.

There’s so much more for Westerns to tell us, and so much more to be said about them. So, let’s get started on the discussion.