Carcanet £14.95 pp247

They are as old as cinema itself. The first film drama was a western. In 1903, Edwin S Porter’s The Great Train Robbery ran 12 minutes and audiences flinched when the kerchiefed bandit leader fired his revolver straight at the camera. Clichés, such as someone made to dance while his feet are shot at, were born. “Bronco Billy” Anderson, the film’s star, lived until he was 88, and witnessed the ascendancy of William S Hart, Tom Mix, Randolph Scott, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.

Cinema formalised the old west, creating conventions as ritualised as Japanese kabuki. Face-offs on dusty streets between lone gunfighters. Bad men in black hats, always first to draw. Bartenders sliding loaded bottles along the counter, and taking down the mirrors at the first sign of trouble. We’ve seen it a thousand times.

In the days of double bills, the B-picture studios churned “oaters” out on production lines. Further up the ladder, top stars such as James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper, Steve McQueen, Yul Brynner, Burt Lancaster and, of course, Wayne gave their best to westerns. Certain directors, such as John Ford, Raoul Walsh, John Sturges, Budd Boetticher, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah, excelled. Michael Cimino’s expensively ambitious Heaven’s Gate (1980) is usually blamed for the decline, but as Kevin Costner’s Open Range showed last year, the genre is not extinct, just less popular with the money men.

Books on the western would fill a library. The British contribution is strong, including two encyclopaedic volumes edited respectively by Phil Hardy and Ed Buscombe, plus excellent overviews by Jim Kitzes, Peter Cowie, Kim Newman, and a study of spaghetti westerns by Christopher Frayling.

My own choice of an assimilable, near-comprehensive guide is a small book by Philip French, first published in 1973, and reissued, slightly expanded, in 1977. The book, Westerns, seemed to encapsulate all that one needed to know, at least until then. Now comes a welcome new edition, preserving the original content, but doubling its size and worth with a new section titled Westerns Revisited. French’s book is still wonderfully concise and digestible. To cover so much territory, with knowledgeable commentary supported by perceptive, wide-ranging analysis and references to hundreds of films and directors, while adroitly avoiding looking like a laundry list, is a substantial feat. Ideas cascade in torrents, with clear signposts pointing the reader onwards for further enlightenment.

The book is unillustrated, although mental images of big skies leap from the page. Perhaps, in this age of the DVD, stills are unnecessary. As French notes, so many great films are now readily available, which was not the case when he started the book when he was in his thirties. His text is stimulating, witty, and occasionally provocative.

Disarmingly, he sometimes disagrees with himself, revising his thoughts with experience. In 1973, he dismissed the spaghetti and paella forms of the western as not worthy of inclusion. Sergio Leone’s work persuaded him to change his mind. Initially, he undervalued John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) — “much charm and great crudity”. Further viewings of Ford’s superb film elevated it into his personal top 10.

Like French, I grew up on westerns. I saw them as the American equivalent of Greek myth and medieval legend, a consciously created New World mythology, using a brief period of recent history as the landscape for heroic encounters and epic deeds. Notable participants in the manufactured myths, such as Wyatt Earp, actually ended up in Hollywood subscribing to the folklore. His real gunfight at the OK Corral in 1881 was over in fewer than 30 seconds, but Hollywood would never want you know that. I shared French’s disappointment on visiting the original Tombstone to find it located in uninteresting terrain entirely devoid of the giant saguaro cacti and spectacular buttes of Ford’s film My Darling Clementine.

Ford, perhaps the most intuitive of all western directors, moved Tombstone to the dramatic Monument valley in Navajo country, where he shot many of his films from Stagecoach onwards, one of my early favourite films. I saw it as a child in the first year of the second world war. British audiences in 1940 would have appreciated the parallel of the outnumbered, beleaguered travellers abandoning their social differences to unite against a powerful enemy, although the opportune arrival of the 7th Cavalry may have been harder to take.

Almost all westerns are metaphorical, intentionally or accidentally. It is easy to see the anti- McCarthy stance of Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, and its antithesis, Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo, the one tautly enacted within its actual time frame, the other sprawling for two-and-a-half hours, and written as it went along. Style reveals the production context — the Kennedy westerns, the Nixon westerns, the Carter westerns. French claims he can, with reasonable accuracy, identify within a few minutes’ viewing not only when a film was made, but its studio.

Today, Costner (Dances with Wolves) and Eastwood just about keep the flame flickering. One yearns for more. Sadly, in 20 years, Eastwood has directed and starred in only two westerns — each a classic. In Pale Rider (1985) he is the archetypal figure who rides in from nowhere, sorts out an oppressed township and moves on. Like Shane, he is so mysterious he might not even be real. In Unforgiven (1992) he is the retired gunfighter who once again straps on his weapons to avenge a wrong. But justice is no longer a simple black-and-white matter and, as French persuasively argues, Eastwood’s great film symbolises the confused, tangled state of America as the 20th century draws to its close. This is a masterly, highly commendable guidebook.

TOP GUN

After The Great Train Robbery (1903), actor/director Gilbert “Bronco Billy” Anderson, left, went on make nearly 400 other cowboy films, often writing the script in the morning and filming in the afternoon.

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