Today, TCM offers up Cimarron, the 1960 remake of the 1931 adaptation of the 1929 novel by Edna Ferber that employs the Oklahoma Land Rush as a major plot element. Also on today, The Sheepman, from 1958, which concerns both sheep herders and cattle ranchers fussin’ and a fightin’. Then there’s 3:10 to Yuma, the classic about a farmer holding on to a wanted man until that damn train arrives at 3:10. Aside from having Glenn Ford in all of them, they’re all considered westerns, despite quite different story lines. And other westerns? The Searchers involves kidnapping; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a menacing gunman; The Magnificent Seven, bandits terrorizing a village; and The Wild Bunch, over the hill bank robbers looking for a final score. And that last one takes place well into the 20th century, a year after the Titanic sunk. So what makes them all westerns? For that matter, what makes any genre what it is?
The obvious answer for westerns comes from the name of the genre itself, that is, movies that take place in the west and generally involve cowboys, outlaws, sheriffs, Indians, and tumbleweeds. That is, until you throw something like Outland, the 1981 remake of High Noon, into the mix and we all decide it’s a western, too, even though it takes place on a mining outpost near Jupiter. And doesn’t Star Wars have clear western elements, as well as those of action-adventure? And wouldn’t most film people place Star Wars more squarely in the western or adventure genre and not the sci-fi genre anyway (I know I would)? Of course, space operas aside, most westerns do take place in the west and, generally, between the 1870s and the 1910s, but the point is that what makes a western a western, at least to a small degree, involves not just time and location but attitude and story elements as well.
Let’s look at some other movies that fall into the western category while also falling into other categories at the same time. A personal favorite of mine, for pure genre overlap, is Blade Runner. Here’s a movie that has enough noir elements (loner cop/detective, femme fatale, urban dystopia) to easily fall into that category. It also contains sufficient sci-fi elements (futuristic setting, advanced technologies, more dystopia) for that category. It’s also a police procedural, an action movie, a horror movie, and a western to boot. For me, noir leads and western leads have always matched up to each other fairly well. I can imagine Deckard hunting down outlaws in the old west just as easily as I can imagine John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards being assigned to hunt down four replicants in the future.
Westerns are also notable for the interchange of hero characters dependent upon story, not stereotype. In other words, in a cop movie, generally speaking (or should that be “genre-ly speaking”?), the hero is the cop. He can be an antihero, like Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, especially at the climax when he shoots another cop and runs off obsessively looking for Charnier, or he can be a true hero, like Steve McQueen in Bullitt. But in a western, the hero can be a sheriff (High Noon), bank robbers (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), or a killer (Unforgiven). A western can have any damn hero it wants which, in a way, makes it an even more cynical genre than film noir where, even given its loner antiheroes, it would be hard to find a character as brutal as Will Munny vying for the audience’s affections.
So what’s the bottom line to all of this? Well, I think it’s that, despite the outward appearances of a western seeming fairly restrictive (horses, desert, frontier, gunfights), it’s possibly the most expansive genre there is. A western can encompass just about anything at all, including switching good guys and bad guys at random, something that makes it uniquely honest when it comes to storytelling. In life, there’s rarely a black and white solution to every problem and even more rarely, a black and white delineation of good and bad in people. Western get that. In The Searchers, it’s clear that Ethan Edwards is the bad guy. It is equally clear that he is also the good guy. This is something that everyone who watches the movie understands and that it is contained within a single story line is fairly remarkable. He represents ideas and ideals that are repugnant to most people watching and, importantly, to his nephew Martin Pawley, but also ideas and ideals of family and loyalty that most people watching embrace, including Martin Pawley. Ethan, like many western characters, cannot be pigeonholed into a neat and easy category of person. Sure, other characters, like the loner detectives in noirs or the rogue cops in cop movies, have good guy leads that are slightly bad but they still fight the good fight. Dirty Harry is a classic example of a rogue cop that is, nevertheless, on the side of law and order. Ethan, on the other hand, could just as easily be on the side of criminality (that gold he has is never explained) as is Pike in The Wild Bunch. Pike is the hero of the story but the fact is, he made his living stealing from people. He is and was a criminal. In the western, that’s okay for a hero in the lead.
In the end, the western is probably best summed up by The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the best western in existence for explaining what a western is. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is about how the truth of a situation changes over time. How fact and fiction meld together. How legends are accepted as truth and facts can make a mess of things. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, in the end, about how a reality can be forged on a legend and the legend can become more important to holding it all together than the facts. If you haven’t seen it (and if you haven’t, what’s wrong with you?!), watch it to find out what I’m talking about. And to discover just how revealing a genre the western can be for getting to the heart of the matter. The western is many people’s favorite genre. It may also be the best genre there ever was.