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

Noble savages ahve had their role ever since Fenimore Cooper, but, because Westerns were an epic of the pioneer and the settler, Indians were primarily a threat and an obstacle. Congress felt no qualms, in 1859, about commissioning a mural entitled Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, which shows a band of pioneers, at the crest of a mountain pass, looking joyfully toward the setting sun. "Empire" was not then a dirty word, and there was little inclination to do what Dr. Johnson called "counting in favor of savages." Many classic films maintained a fair balance, until the modern obsession tipped it over, replacing the dignified relationship between the old cavalry officer and the old chief in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon with the disgusting shambles of Soldier Blue. The Indian-loving stance of Broken Arrow; which had seemed a novelty in 1950, became the new cliche.

It could nevertheless be said of the Western, as Bruce Catton said about the myth of the South's lost cause in the Civil War, that the legend has served America well, softening old conflicts by presenting them through a veil, elevating them into a realm where they were no longer explosive, transforming them into the stuff of romance.

The golden-age Wester, like the golden-age detective story, was not violent; violent incidents might be essential to the plot but they were ritualized, because violence was never the point. It was all conspicuously innocent: and innocence finally attracted the tempter. Sergio Leone, accustomed to the harshness and crudities of Italian's cinema, believed Hollywood was missing a commercial trick by no longer satisfying the popular demand for minimalist tales of blood and revenge. So he created the "spaghetti Wesern," corpse-strewn, amoral, unromantic.

LEONE WAS RIGHT. There is indeed a huge international audience for this kind of thing; an audience that laughs at scenes of slaughter. Where he was wrong was in supposing that the Hollywood Western, in its pristine form, had ever been crude in such a thoroughly un-American way. But bad currency drives out good. A Fistful of Dollars and its graceless offspring infected the native American product. Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider, for example, has been described as a reworking of Shane; which it is, Shane sourced and coarsened. Whereas Shane began with a deer threatened only by a child's toy gun, Pale Rider begins with the slaughter of a cow and a pet dog. Whereas in Shane there was precisely one killing and one gunfight, Pale rider is crammed with brutality from start to finish.

The most worrying aspect is that so many filmgoers and critics appear scarcely to have noticed, or not to mind, the extent of this degeneracy. They talk as though Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood differed only marginally from John Ford and Gary Cooper, as though the gloomy killings in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch belonged in the same aesthetic world as the solitary hero's reluctant but triumphant battle in High Noon. They seem unaware that the two categories, the American Western and the spaghetti or post-spaghetti Western, are virtually moral opposites. Where the old Westerns were compassionate, the new Westerns are callous: American Westerns were lyrical, spaghetti Westerns are ugly.