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

A recent echo of what Westerns used to be comes unexpectedly in a book by the British comic writer George Macdonald Fraser, who, though himself a historian and corrosively unsentimental, admires the Hollywood school of history. In Flashman and the Redskins the rascal-hero is leading out a wagon-train:

That's a moment I remember still: behind lay the woods with the smoke haze rising from Westport: left and right, and as far ahead as the eye could see, was limitless rolling plain, dotted with clumps of oaks and bushes, the grass blowing gently in the breeze and fleecy clouds against a blue sky that seemed to stretch forever. Below, the wagons crawled along the trail, its furrows running clear and straight to the far horizon, where you could just see the last wagon of the caravan ahead. And I absolutely laughed aloud--why, I can't tell, except that in that moment I felt free and contented and full of hope, with my spirits bubbling as high as they've ever done in my life. Others, I know, have felt the same thing about starting on the trial west; there's an exhilaration, a sense of leaving the old, ugly world behind, and that there's something splendid waiting for you to go and find it, out yonder. I wonder if I'd feel it now, or if it happens only when you're young, and have no thought for the ill things that may lie along the way.

There you have the whole essence--youth recollected, hope undimmed, the land of beginning again, morning in America; everything we loved in real Westerns and find totally missing in spaghetti Westerns. This difference holds, for me at least, another special meaning. It represents most vividly my deepest reason, an instinctive reason, for wanting Britain close to America rather than entangled in continental Europe. I want to share the values of John Ford, not those of Sergio Leone.

But does the contrast still apply? If American audiences really have lost interest in the heroic legends of their country, so much the worse for America. If they now prefer violence to chivalry, they have become like the false knights who trample on the Round Table at the end of Camelot. I just hope it isn't true. An American who preferred spaghetti Westerns to proper Westerns would be as shocking as an Englishman who preferred bullfighting to cricket. Very bad days would have come to Black Rock.