The rise and fall of the western: the true western, whether book or movie, was more than entertainment; it was an encapsulation of the American myth - includes related article

National Review, Dec 31, 1989 by Anthony Lejeune, Hertha L. Lund

Songs had influence too; "The Chisholm Trail," "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie," "Home on the Range." Dr. Brewster Rigley, who wrote the words of "Home on the Range" sitting on a fallen tree beside a log cabin in Kansas, was not among the world's great poets.

Oh give me the gale of the Solomon Vale Where light streams with buoyancy flow; On the banks of the Beaver, where seldom, if ever, Any poisonous herbage doth grow.

But he did teach us that, in the paradisal West, even "a discouraging word" was rare. A Denver journalist named Arthur Chapman, after a debate about what the definition of "the West" should be, offered his own:

Out where the handclasp's a little stronger, Out where the smile dwells a little longer--That's where the West begins.

Again, hardly great poetry, but it promulgated an idea. In a phrase made famous by Zane Grey, there was a "code of the West." Cowboys were chivalric. Western mythology, like the Arthurian cycle, had acquired a high moral tone.

Thirty years ago, reviewing Jack Schaefer's First Blood, I wrote that it was "morally invigorating": reading it again, I think so still. It's about growing up and learning responsibility ("When there's something that's got to be done and there's no one else to do it, do it"), about the conflict between friendship and duty, and about learning to drive the stagecoaches ("There never was and there never will be anything quite like it, the sweet singing satisfaction of driving willing horses and a well-built coash, the wind in your face and the hooves drumming and the wheels rolling rolling rolling into the receding horizon . . .").

First Blood, strangely, has never been filmed. Schaefer's masterpiece, Shane, which surely comes close to being the perfect Western, is no less fine as a book than as a film: but in general the movies actually deepened and enriched this form of literature. "Stage to Lordsburg" by Ernest Haycox and "The Tin Star" by John M. Cunningham are excellent, tightly written stories, but they lack the unforgettable power of Stagecoach and High Noon, which were made from them. Louis L'Amour, whom President Reagan was delighted to honor with the Medal of Freedom (and the rage of the literary establishment was a joy to behold), wrote more than one hundred fast-moving tales and was proud of their authenticity: but the 45 or so which were translated to the screen reached, and appealed to, far more people than just those who read cowboy stories. To talk about Westerns, from the 1930s onward, is to talk mainly about Western films.

So huge has been the impact of this uniquely American genre that choosing the ten best Western films is a parlor game that almost every adult in the civilized world can play. Let's play it: Shane, High Noon, Stagecoach, The Plainsman, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, Destry Rides Again, The Virginian, Northwest Passage, and Red River. (What about My Darling Clementine, The Gunfighter, Drums along the Mohawk . . .? Decisions, decisions.) Each of these splendid films has, at its core, a moral issue or at least a challenge to the human spirit, the resolution of which, as John Wayne said in The Alamo, "speaks well for men."