Westerns

THE A WESTERN IN HOLLYWOOD

While the critically celebrated Stagecoach has often eclipsed the hundreds of westerns that preceded it, there's no questioning the artistry or impact of the film, which associated director Ford and star John Wayne (1907–1979) with the genre for the rest of their long careers. Stagecoach was in fact one example among an increased production of prominent westerns by major Hollywood studios (even as B westerns continued to be cranked out by Poverty Row studios, with Roy Rogers (1911–1998) emerging as Gene Autry's heir when the latter went to war). In the same year as Stagecoach , 1939, Universal was parodying the genre with George Marshall's Destry Rides Again , while Warner Bros. produced the successful Dodge City , directed by Michael Curtiz in Technicolor. De Mille's Union Pacific at Paramount revived the epic, train-centered western of the late silent period, while historical lawmen and outlaws were revived in Allan Dwan's Frontier Marshall for Fox, with Randolph Scott (1898–1987) as Wyatt Earp, and in Henry King's boxoffice hit Jesse James , also for Fox, starring Tyrone Power as Jesse and Henry Fonda (1905–1982) as brother Frank. All of these prominent westerns appeared simultaneously with, rather than as a result of, Stagecoach , even though Ford's film more than any other demonstrated that the genre could produce skillfully crafted narratives and rich characterizations, even while maintaining the commercially requisite thrills of the chase and the final reel shootout.

Across the following decade, and despite the disruption of World War II, the western's popularity continued. The Westerner (William Wyler, 1940) earned Walter Brennan an Oscar ^® for his comic yet moving depiction of Judge Roy Bean. Other notable examples from the period include Western Union (Fritz Lang, 1941), the notoriously erotic The Outlaw (Howard Hughes, 1943), the stark The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman, 1943), the eccentric Canyon Passage (Jacques Tourneur, 1946), and producer David O. Selznick's florid Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946). Ford's return to the genre with the elegant My Darling Clementine (1946) inaugurated his regular engagement with the western throughout the postwar period. Films from the end of the decade also demonstrated the genre's surprising affiliation with film noir and the psychological melodrama: Pursued (Raoul Walsh, 1947) remains the most successful fusion of the western and film noir, while Ramrod (Andre De Toth, 1947) effectively incorporated Freudian undercurrents. In the midst of Ford's loose "cavalry trilogy," consisting of Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), all starring John Wayne, director Howard Hawks (1896–1977) also made one of the genre's masterpieces, Red River (1948), contrasting an often unsympathetic Wayne with Montgomery Clift in an Oedipal narrative set against an epic cattle drive.

The 1950s eventually witnessed the decline of the Hollywood studio system and the rise of television (dominated in its early decades by westerns such as Gunsmoke and Bonanza), but the period also saw a notable upsurge in the popularity of the film western, which critics have attempted to explain in political, economic, and psychoanalytic terms. The era is especially known for its "adult" or "psychological" westerns, which turned the physical violence of the frontier inwards towards phobias and traumas. The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950) dramatized the psychological cost of maintaining a reputation as a fast gun, whereas The Left-Handed Gun (Arthur Penn, 1958) depicted Billy the Kid as a troubled juvenile delinquent. Notably, James Stewart's (1908–1997) first collaboration with director Anthony Mann (1906–1967), Winchester '73 (1950), began a series of bold western psychodramas, including Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), and The Man from Laramie (1955), which were driven by the hero's almost uncontrolled mania for revenge. In the middle of the decade Ford released his masterpiece The Searchers (1956), but its significance, especially in its direct confrontation with the sexual and racial fears that drove the conquest of Native Americans, would only be fully appreciated by a later generation of critics and filmmakers. Films such as Broken Arrow (Delmer Daves, 1950) and The Devil's Doorway (Mann, 1950) also treated their central Native American characters sympathetically, recalling some westerns of the silent period. The era's best-known westerns are the elemental High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952) and the self-consciously mythic Shane (George Stevens, 1953), which might be set against the quirky Rancho Notorious (Lang, 1952) and the campy Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954), respectively featuring aging stars Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford, to indicate the available range of the genre in the period. On a more modest scale, the decade concluded with the first of a series of lean and powerful films directed by Budd Boetticher (1916–2001) and starring Randolph Scott, beginning with Seven Men from Now (1956) and including The Tall T (1957), Ride Lonesome

(1959), and Comanche Station (1960): pared down to basic elements, Boetticher's films show the genre reduced to its core mythology. Challenging the sexual neuroses and Oedipal tragedies of the postwar western, Hawks also released Rio Bravo (1959), a surprisingly effective reassertion of some of the genre's traditional values.