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Notes OLD GUNFIGHTERS, NEW COPS Throughout the decade of the 1950s the three major television networks presented twenty or thirty Westerns each week, and feature-length western films were produced every year. That heyday has passed, and most people assume that, though novels with a setting in western history will continue to be produced, the screen Western is virtually dead. Or is it? The hypothesis to be developed in what follows is that the alleg­ edly wise men of the networks are still giving us Westerns—with a difference. Today’s Western is the “cop show.” The subject of the classic Western was the impact of the East upon the West and of the West upon Easterners. The terms were set early in The Virginian (1902), in which Owen Wister’s subject was the process by which the barbarism of the frontier was subdued by eastern civilization. In the films based upon this model the institutions of civilization—church, school, mar­ riage, family—were always threatened by the barbarism of the frontier, embodied in earlier, primitive versions of the myth in the Indian, or, later, and more meaningfully, in the outlaw or the unscrupulous rancher. Those represen­ tations of the effete East who entered this world were either too helpless (the schoolmarm, the minister) or too incompetent (the drunken doctor or the young lawyer played by James Stewart in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”) to subdue this barbarism. But civilization and the redemption of society were made possible by the gunfighter, who was somehow caught up in this crisis, risked his life in conflict with the forces of barbarism, and, defeating them, made possible the triumph of the institutions of civilization, in the process creating a society in which he could not live because of his own extralegal methods. Examples of this plot are obvious. In the flowering of the post-war screen Western, we had “The Gunfighter” (1950) and “High Noon” (1952), though both were inexact versions of the myth;Johnny Ringo had to die to restore the moral order and Will Kane rode away from the town he saved with the con­ tempt its people deserved. But John Ford’s “The Searchers” (1956) showed the perfect end of the gunfighter-redeemer: he restores the lost child to her family, and they enter the house through the door of which we seeJohn Wayne walk away toward the desert which is the gunfighter’s only home. And in George Stevens’ “Shane” (1953) we had the myth in its purity. In the autumn of the genre there were “Hombre” and “Will Penny” (both 1967), and “True Grit” (1969), in all of which we could see at least a 132 Western American Literature partial breakdown of the myth. The three gunfighters were redeemers, but John Russell, the “hombre,” died to save people who were hardly worth sav­ ing; Will Penny rode away only because he thought he was too old for mar­ riage and family; and though John Wayne assured us at the end of “True Grit” that he still had what it takes, the sequel (“Rooster Cogburn”) suggested that what he had was not enough. But before we reached that point we had in Sam Peckinpah’s “Ride the High Country” (1962) a great film which presented the myth in clear though autumnal purity. Here the forces of civilization had triumphed with banks and automobiles, thanks to the efforts of men like Steve Judd, but the mining camp to which Judd and his apparently unscrupulous friend Gil Westrum rode was the last pocket of barbarism. In going to the camp and destroying the Hammond brothers, Judd and Westrum saved the innocent girl and Judd, dying, became a model for the future behavior of Westrum and the innocent “kid,” Hec Longtree. In a recent note, Gerald Locklin and Charles Stetler have noted similari­ ties between “Shane” and the recent Peter Weir film “Witness” (WAL 20, November 1985, 253-254). They are correct in this observation because the modern cops-and-crooks genre is modelled, consciously or not, on the classic Western and all manifestations of it, to one degree or another, resemble the models. The cop-show’s true subject is...

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