'True Grit' may have 10 Oscar nominations but it needn't go getting too big for its cowboy boots – it's far from a great western when you consider the classics that have gone before it, writes EILEEN BATTERSBY
Was the US west won by enterprise and courage? Or did it take greed and brutality?
EUROPE'S DIVERSE history rests on cathedrals and palaces, on battles at sea and on land, on magnificent paintings and music; on rhetoric and revolution. But the story of the United States, particularly that of the real America, the west, is contained in one simple image, that of a cowboy astride his horse, contemplating an endless panorama too vast to be described as "landscape". Admittedly, it is an image that has been romanticised, glorified, even bizarrely distorted as in the Marlboro cigarette campaign. The cowboy remains the ultimate dream concept, his rugged existence a refuge sought as recently as in Sam Shepard's Kicking a Dead Horse(2007).
Mythologised and glamorised, the cowboy is heroic and solitary. Above all, he is a uniquely American icon, owing nothing to either European influences or immigrant cultures. US cinema has a number of favoured genres: the gangster movie and the war epic – which for US directors tends to centre on the second World War, Korea, Vietnam and, currently, Iraq – as well as the international political thriller and those special effects extravaganzas about outer space and futuristic disasters. But cherished above all is the western; closest to home and closest to heart.
My earliest cultural references were not baroque music and 19th-century Russian novels, but endless re-runs of Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Virginianand, best of all, The Lone Ranger. The arm of the sofa became Silver as my masked self galloped up the canyon (the living room) accompanied by Tonto (soon to be revived by Johnny Depp). In more lawless moments, I was Jesse James, robbing banks and trains. Being born in California, childhood pilgrimages included such sacred places as Boot Cemetery in Tombstone, Arizona, final resting place of the Clanton gang obliterated by Wyatt Earp in the shoot-out at the nearby OK Corral, and Dodge City in Kansas, the setting for Gunsmoke. The city hall in Dodge is built over a cowboy burial ground also called Boot Hill. Warily, we drove through Missouri, hoping to glimpse the ghosts of the James Boys.
It is deeply ambiguous. Was the US west won by enterprise and courage? Or did it take greed and brutality? Historical fact is easily lost. The good guy often is not all that good, having come upon his land through participating in an act of mass genocide. Easterners came out west to shoot buffalo for sport. Of the many fascinating elements in the western is the relative scarcity of actual cowboys outside of Texas; instead the central players are settlers, sheriffs, cardsharps, gold miners, professional gunmen, outlaws, landowners, saloon keepers, hard-working prostitutes, school marms and the deeply depressed small rancher’s wife who is usually cooking – although there isn’t that much food.
There is also, as in the Coen Brother's latest entertainment, True Grit,the vendetta. In their engaging remake of Henry Hathaway's 1969 adaptation of the Charles Portis novel, a young girl's father is brutally murdered by an ungrateful maverick.
The righteous child, Mattie Ross, tough and smart, sets off to hire a US marshal to kill him – an eye for an eye. Godlessness undercuts the western but God also has a major part and if the genre has a sacred text it is the Holy Bible.
WHEN HOLLYWOOD INITIALLY decided to capitalise on a uniquely American story, the emphasis seemed to be on long cavalcades of covered wagons carrying pioneers, the hopeful and the desperate, all focused on making a new life in the undiscovered Eden known as the west, a dream land rife with hardship.
Aside from the tough terrain, the desert conditions, the heat, prickly cactus, the dust, the shortage of drinking water and the presence of deadly snakes, there were “the Injuns”, intent on blood, scalps and white women – although the 7th Cavalry often intervened. But for all the whitewash and the obscenely unfair misrepresentation of the Native Americans – the Indian tribes that had inhabited the plains for thousands of years dependent on the buffalo that fed and clothed them – film makers did have a sense of shame. As early as 1939 with Stagecoach, the visionary director John Ford not only identified Monument Valley on the Arizona-Utah border as the ideal setting for a western, he was also alert to the very real contrasts between the innocence of the wilderness and the corrupting influence of the newcomers as represented by the mixed bag of passengers aboard that very stagecoach, itself a symbol of so many things.
In common with True Grit's Mattie, the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach(a young John Wayne), is also looking for revenge; his father and brother have been murdered. Wild passions are central to the western: as many lawmen are corrupt – and at times insane, such as Little Bill, played magnificently by Gene Hackman in Clint Eastwood's seminal Unforgiven(1992) – ordinary people tend to take justice into their own hands. Eastwood's Will Munny confirms that a reformed gunman invariably reverts to his gun, not prayer.
The west resulted from two major 19th-century developments: the Californian gold rush in 1848 and the building of the railways. Sandwiched in between was the civil war that not only tore the young country asunder, it produced disaffected soldiers from both sides who, already hardened by violence, became marauding outlaws, as did the James Boys. Gunmen lurked, waiting to hold up passing stage coaches or raid small holdings. With the expansion out west came settlement and with it building, bringing organised employment and wages. Suddenly there were towns with banks just asking to be robbed, while the salaries for paying the labourers hacking out the railroad, travelled by train and stage coach, provided an easier target for outlaws who galloped away. Dramatic robberies carried out by outlaws soon overshadowed the earlier western theme of pale-face versus red-skin. Along with the new emphasis on crime came rival gangs, invariably led by a charismatic villain.
An early example of this is 3.10 to Yuma. Based on an Elmore Leonard story, the 1957 version directed by Delmer Daves features Glenn Ford as Ben Wade, an outlaw leader with a flair for psychological games, and Van Heflin as Dan Evans, the struggling farmer who undertakes to escort Ben to the train that will take him to jail. It remains a classic yet was surpassed by the 2007 remake in which Russell Crowe as a disturbed, Bible-quoting, darkly intelligent Ben Wade injects a taunting, sexual edge, while Christian Bale's Dan Evans, the settler haunted by a wartime act of cowardice as he battles Arizona's arid dust, is an ideal foil. It is a great western, sharp and menacing with brilliant set pieces, including a tense night around the campfire and a moment during the long wait in a hotel room when Wade disabuses Dan's starstruck young son by assuring him that he, Ben, must be very rotten indeed, in order to control the gang of depraved thugs hovering outside, poised to rescue him.
The dour Evans succeeds in dying a hero. A similar moral response motivates Will Kane (Gary Cooper) in Fred Zinnemann's High Noon(1952). Although he has finally handed in his marshal's badge at the request of his Quaker wife, Kane must respond when news that a killer he helped imprison has been freed. High Noonhas dated, but not as badly as another classic, Shane(1953), starring Alan Ladd as a remote and violent hero.
DEFYING TIME AND cliche is George Roy Hill's delightfully pitched Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid (1969). Even if Paul Newman were not as beguiling, the sharp script and witty train-robbery sequences, as well as Newman's rapport with Robert Redford's laconic, slightly dim non-swimmer, Sundance, would have sustained this poignant comedy. A great truth is spoken when Butch is warned by a friendly lawman that his time is over. This awareness sends the duo to Bolivia in search of safer robberies.
Of the many attempts to articulate the end of the western era since Ford did it so emphatically in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence(1962), none have been as expressive nor have worn their nostalgia with such lightness of touch as Hill's handling of the subject. Its charm offers a contrast to the caustic energy of Sergio Leone's grungy dollars trilogy that began with A Fistful of Dollarsin 1964; all starred Eastwood, who would not only succeed Wayne as the personification of the western but who has responded to its complexities and contradictions. Eastwood began his career as Rowdy Yates, a working cowboy in the television series Rawhide(1959-1965), running long horns. In Pale Rider(1985) Eastwood's enigmatic Preacher appears like a knight of old to assist a mining community subject to vicious attacks. After killing the baddies, he rides off, his mystery intact. In Rango, a new comic variation of the theme, the eponymous hero, a nervous lizard voiced by Johnny Depp, does much the same thing.
Romance is a key element, and reluctant dentist-turned-writer Zane Grey (1872-1939) used it well in more than 60 works, including Riding the Purple Sage(1912). Elsewhere violence and gun fights inevitably overshadow routine courage. Admirers of the Western genre acknowledged anew its versatility on the publication in 1985 of Cormac McCarthy's brutally surreal Blood Meridianin which a young drifter known as The Kid sets out on a life of mindless killing. He falls in with various killers and bounty hunters all driven by hate as they indiscriminately slaughter Indians, Mexicans and passing cowboys, and are in turn often butchered by their prey. The constantly changing gang of killers ride on across the hungry prairie, under McCarthy's trademark blood-red sun. Set in Texas in the 1840s, the Miltonic prose charts an ongoing series of ritualistic massacres. There are no dreamers, and less romance.
McCarthy, shaped by the west, followed his odyssey of death with All The Pretty Horses(1992), a gentler reworking of the quest theme, but this time it is a mid-20th-century pursuit of the romantic. Young John Grady Cole, unhappy son of an absentee actress mother and an apathetic father, has a dream: he wants to be a cowboy. In the company of his like-minded pal, Lacey Rawlins, he runs away from Texas. The boys ride off towards an adventure that turns dangerously wrong but not before they have had a taste of living like cowboys, working horses on a Mexican ranch. McCarthy's finest novel to date, The Crossing(1994), is a hymn to the enduring physicality of the west. No Country for Old Men(2005) though a poor novel became a great movie, winning the the Coens the Oscar for best movie in 2008.
The first cowboys worked the range, driving huge herds up north from Texas to the abattoirs of Missouri and Chicago, while city youths envied the romance and adventure. No one actually ventured beyond the Rockies until 1804 when Merriweather Lewis and William Clarke set off on an expedition devised by Thomas Jefferson in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase. It was from this point onwards that the move to west became both challenge and mythic quest.
In William Wyler's The Big Country(1958), Charlton Heston convinces as Steve Leech, a cowboy by birth and inclination who manages a wealthy landowner's immense spread. Leech also symbolises the traditional west confronted by the east in the shape of the refined former naval captain James McKay (Gregory Peck). The two clash over the landowner's spoilt daughter. But the real story concerns an old feud about access to water for a rival cattleman's stock.
There is no denying the new True Grit,with its playful period dialogue is fun, yet its subversive panache and quickfire comedy limits it to being merely a good movie, not a great western. Ang Lee's handling of Brokeback Mountain(2005), though not as subtle a love story as Annie Proulx's original, offers an insight into the life of the modern cowboy, including the rodeo. Long before the Old West was dead, many cowboys were staging theatrical demonstrations of their skills for increasingly urbanised audiences.
Unforgivenand 3:10 to Yumaare great modern westerns. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kidis still crisp, beloved and timeless. Interestingly, Debra Granik's magnificent Winter's Bone(2010) displays all the core values –, including quest, revenge, clan loyalty and Missouri – without being a western and deserves to win the Oscar for best film tomorrow night.
BUT TOWERING ABOVE everything through its eerie grace, beauty, archaic elegance and haunting atmospheric score is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford(2007). Slow-moving and intense, Andrew Dominik's elegiac, masterfully choreographed study based on Ron Hansen's novel follows the final months of the life of Jesse James (an intelligent performance from Brad Pitt) as he ponders mortality and the obsessive attention of his crazed disciple and eventual killer, Ford, played by an inspired Casey Affleck. Caught in a haze of paranoia, James and his outlaw buddies have run out of time, energy and desire. It is an insightful exploration of fame and the vagaries of celebrity in which James the killer has become folk hero. Most astutely of all, it evokes a weary west on the run from its past, its present and even its future.
