In the summer of 2003, Laramie Street, the western-town studio set that had
been on the Warner Bros back-lot since the 1930s, was torn down. The rough
wooden cantina, the railroad track and the hotel, with its swing doors and
hitching rail, where Errol Flynn, James Stewart, Henry Fonda and other
heroes of the Hollywood western of yore had smacked their dusty chaps and
tied up their tired horses, were bulldozed to make way for yet another
suburban American street. Warner Bros had little choice. With fewer and
fewer westerns being produced, the set had been used for only nine days in
the previous five years.
To many, Laramie Street’s destruction signalled the sad end of what had, since
the invention of the moving image, been one of the most important and
enduring staples of American culture. More than any other Hollywood genre,
the western offered a potent mythology, retold by succeeding generations. As
one critic put it, this was nothing less than “the creation of national
narratives”.
Since then, there have been sporadic attempts at least to get individual
westerns off the ground. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Disney put
The Alamo, perhaps the most symbolic American myth of all, into production,
to capitalise on the sacrifices that a nation under attack was expecting to
make. Of course, the sacrifices – except by the soldiers who have fought in
Iraq and Afghanistan – never came, and the film, which cost $107m to make,
took just $22m in the USA. Only a few other westerns have dared to pop their
head over the parapet, the most successful being Anthony Minghella’s 2003
adaptation of Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier’s civil-war epic, which won a
best supporting actress Oscar for Renée Zellweger and took $95m at the US
box office.
Yet now, as if galloping into town dusty and bedraggled from a long trail
ride, the western is being welcomed by Hollywood again. Just 12 months after
HBO’s critically acclaimed series Deadwood finished, the annual Emmy
nominations, which reward the best television programmes of the year, were
last week dominated by two new western mini-series, Bury My Heart at Wounded
Knee, which had 17 nominations, and Broken Trail, which had 16. And the
theatrical distributor Lions Gate Films recently announced that it was
bringing forward to early September the release of its new western, 3:10 to
Yuma, starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, for which it has big Oscar
hopes. It wants to get a jump on other westerns being released before the
year’s end that are expected to be in the running for Oscars, including The
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which stars Brad
Pitt as James, and No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation
of Cormac McCarthy’s more contemporary western, starring Tommy Lee Jones and
Javier Bardem. Other westerns set for release in the next few months include
September Dawn, with Jon Voight and Terence Stamp, and Seraphim Falls,
starring Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan.
These films and mini-series seem to fall into two categories: those using the
western as an allegory to comment on the existential anxieties facing
America today, and those that use western genre conventions – man and the
elements – to tell stories of human psychology at its starkest.
Broken Trail’s producer, Stanley Brooks, believes that with the right story,
there will always be an audience for the western. “It is still the iconic
American genre,” he says. “Audiences like visiting a time when good guys
were good, bad guys were bad and everyone understood the rules.”
Nostalgia for a mythic past is always comforting, but not since the end of the
1950s, and the classics of John Ford and Howard Hawks, have westerns
presented goodies and baddies in such clear-cut terms. The ambiguity many
Americans, particularly Hollywood liberals, felt about the Vietnam war
undermined the brittle edifice of the righteous American hero. By the late
1960s, as the Vietnam war showed no sign of ending, the heroic John Wayne
westerns had given way to the appalling, amoral bloodletting of films such
as Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Ralph Nelson’s Soldier Blue.
By that time, westerns had also begun to question the very heart of the
American creation myth: that the settlers and frontiersmen had to defend
Christian civilisation against the godless savagery of the American Indian.
By then, in the shadow of the horror of Vietnam, it seemed clear that most
of the savagery – the brutal destruction of a civilisation, in fact – had
been committed by forebears of those who now seemed to be committing similar
atrocities in southeast Asia. By no means coincidentally, at the same time,
the western had been hijacked by foreign film-makers, most obviously by
Sergio Leone, with his so-called spaghetti westerns, starring Clint Eastwood
as a pitiless antihero, the negation of almost everything John Wayne had
stood for.
Colin Callendar, head of HBO Films, which backed Bury My Heart, doesn’t
believe there is a committed audience for the western any longer, but thinks
people are looking for untold stories that can help them understand their
history. Adapted from Dee Brown’s seminal 1970 history of the systematic
slaughter of American Indians by the US federal government, Bury My Heart
tells the story of the Wounded Knee massacre, the last big armed conflict
between the Dakota Sioux and the United States, from the Native American
point of view. “I don’t think it’s about the west,” Callendar says. “There
is an abiding interest in looking back at our history and exploring it with
an honesty and reality that help us understand the world we live in today.”
Some of the new westerns are much more overt in using the past to comment on
the present. September Dawn, which will be released in America at the end of
August, retells the story of the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857. About
140 pioneers from Arkansas were brutally massacred in Utah by a raiding
party believed to have been led by Mormons inspired by Brigham Young,
president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. Known as the
“American Moses”, and first governor of the Utah Territory, Young was
determined to keep nonbelievers out of the state. “I was most interested in
the parallel between the fanatical world at that time and today’s
religious-fanatical world, which dominates the news and our lives,” says the
films’s director, Christopher Cain. Voight, who plays a rabble-rousing
Mormon leader, says: “We have the same problem facing us now, with the
Islamic fanatics calling for the destruction of America and all of
democracy. It seems there’s always a face of evil putting on a mask of
godlike beliefs to destroy true believers of innocence and good.”
David Von Ancken, director of Seraphim Falls, which is out in the UK on
Friday, says that he wanted to make “a primal, elemental chase film”. Set
against the backdrop of the American civil war, the film is about one man’s
relentless pursuit of another across the American west. Von Ancken and his
co-writer, Abby Everett Jaques, say they deliberately tapped into the mythic
nature of the western. “It was really inspired by that,” says Everett
Jaques. “The primal, universal power of the landscape and the way it strips
away everything but the truth of men’s souls.”
Similarly, the Coens’ No Country for Old Men explores the genre-mythologising
that the western allows. Set in 1980, as drug-running is becoming a real
problem on the Texas-Mexico border, the film is a nihilistic thriller – “an
ultraviolent neo-western”, one critic called it – both a powerful
psychological study and a homage to the pitiless brutality of the border.
“That’s a hallmark of the book, which has an unforgiving landscape and
characters, but is also about finding some kind of beauty without being
sentimental,” says Ethan Coen. Early internet reviews of the long-delayed
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which was shot
more than two years ago, also extol its “mythic” qualities. It’s “the
closest thing to a Terrence Malick movie that Terrence Malick never
directed”, according to one who has seen the film.
Von Ancken says that, in Seraphim Falls, his intention was to do something
more than delve into the western’s psychological mythologies. He also wanted
to use a civil-war backdrop to comment on the wars that America and others
fight today. “Our modern world is tragically filled with examples of how,
once the killing starts, it breeds more killing, inexorably,” he says. “If
you succumb to that, you are destroyed. Whether you were in the right to
begin with makes no difference.”
It will be fascinating to see how accepting the public is of these westerns
that offer a displaced commentary on the events consuming American politics:
the post-9/11 world of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the evidence so
far is that Americans are not yet ready to confront those events in dramatic
form. This year’s most shocking movie failure has been Michael
Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart, about the kidnapping and beheading of the
journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, and the search for him by his wife,
Mariane, played by Angelina Jolie. Despite terrific reviews and a huge press
campaign that started at the Cannes festival, the film has performed poorly,
taking only $9m in the USA. Perhaps the new westerns will allow audiences to
face these events obliquely, much as the genre did during the Vietnam war.
It wasn’t until some years after that war was over that films such as Coming
Home (1978), The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) began to
explore the Vietnam tragedy and its consequences head-on.
Yet while some see the current resurgence of westerns as a tangential critique
of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, others believe the true meaning has
always lain elsewhere. “For Americans, westerns were always about paradise
lost – a world already gone,” says Adam Simon, a director and cultural
critic. “Revivals correspond less to times of war than times of
environmental anxiety, when we most fear that a way of life is on the verge
of extinction.
“The funny thing is that this feeling of a way of life on the edge of
extinction was already the point in the first westerns,” he adds. “From its
origins, the western was already an elegy. The western always comes after
‘the west’.”
