Childhood culture: Colm Keena on the Wild West

When I was growing up in Dublin in the 1960s, my exposure to culture had two main sources: cowboy novels and cowboy movies. Ireland may have been a near-theocracy back then, but it was also awash in technicolour films in the cinemas where cowboys sat deep in their saddles as they crossed awe-inspiringly open landscapes, and bare-chested Indians watched from the crest of a hill, smears of warpaint on their proud, sculpted faces. It was all Geronimo and Jesus.

One of the first books I got when a young boy was a hard-backed book about the tribes of North America. Each two-page spread had a single illustration that filled both pages and came with some text about a particular tribe. I came across the book recently when searching in the attic for something else and the illustrations really brought me back. We forget about the intensity of childhood dreaming.

In the mobile library that stopped at the shops near our house, there was a whole section devoted to westerns. Zane Grey was my favourite. His books had titles such as Riders of the Purple Sage, The Rainbow Trail, The Spirit of the Border. Often the main female characters shared the male hero’s dream of a life more noble than plain survival, despite the challenging and often violent surroundings in which they found themselves. They were morality tales writ large.

Later, in my teens, I read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee – a history of the slaughter of the indigenous people in North America and the eclipsing of their way of life – and it left an enduring shadow of sadness, not solely in relation to what happened to the indigenous people of North America, but also because of what it tells you about humanity’s general capacity for cruelty.

Blowing a Gaskin – Frank McNally on gasconades, gasúns, and Ireland’s Bay of Naples

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In the long run – Alison Healy on the bizarre Olympic marathon of 1904

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Valour invalidated – Frank McNally on a mysterious Irish anti-hero: the “Great Gaiscí”

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Frank McNally on royal typos, Tennyson’s Tories, and the mystery of ‘Operation Sonnet’

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My primary school was run by the De La Salle Brothers, one of whom must have been a film enthusiast. On Friday afternoons when we returned after the lunch break (we all ran home at lunchtime, where our mothers would have dinner waiting), the whole school went to the halla for a movie. As often as not it was a western. Years later when I saw John Martyn in the Olympia Theatre perform his song, I am John Wayne, I had no difficulty getting the cultural reference.

Westerns were also a regular at our local cinema, the Casino, in Finglas village. I have a particularly strong memory of being transfixed by Cheyenne Autumn (1964). Directed by John Ford and starring, among others, Richard Widmark and James Stewart, it tells the story of the attempt by members of the Cheyenne people to go back to their native territory in what is now Wyoming. What lingered as much as, or perhaps even more than the story, for me, was the part played by the landscape; you were left with the sense that it had a character and message of its own that was the very heart of the movie.

I was reminded of all of this recently when, after dinner at home, I moved to the sittingroom and watched William Wyler’s 1958 film, Big Country, which I hadn’t seen before. More than 2½ hours long, it stars Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston, but once again, arguably, the real star of the movie is the landscape it is named after. Peck plays a blow-in from the east who can find his way around on his own in the huge open country without getting lost because, as a former sea captain, he is used to crossing oceans.

Behind the starring role played by landscape in every good western, there is usually another, more abstract star or, maybe more correctly, a constellation of stars that are connected to the landscape. These include the lure of beauty, wonder at the natural world, wonder at the company of another species (a horse), good triumphing over evil, the search for a better, more meaningful mode of existence, the wretched sadness that comes with humanity’s repeated failure to circumvent cruelty, and, perhaps most of all, the dream of freedom and the right to be left alone.

That sounds a bit grandiose, but I came across an interview not too long ago where the great filmmaker Steven Spielberg spoke about how he has made every genre of movie other than the western. Westerns, he said, are hard to make. “The idea of making a western as good as my forefathers have scares me.” High praise indeed for the cultural staple of the 1960s child.