In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 0 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S p r in g 2 0 0 7 laugh at their credulity, their propensity to overreact, and their ill will toward the feline killer they so gleefully insist on seeing everywhere. Indeed, Wingfield uses humor and small gestures to tell what could have been a darker, more turbulent story. In addition to mountain lion hunters, he affectionately comments on computer gadgets, new-age advice books and self-styled gurus, and the middle-class, midlife anxieties that make people think they need them. Wingfield has surrounded Charlie with the most understanding women (his ex-wife, daughter, current lover, and fantasy crush) this side of a Dickens novel, who recommend books and a guru to ease the distress that Charlie denies. We never forget that Charlie isworking out his midlife reckoning in the con­ temporary West. The novel ispermeated with his observations about sprawl, traf­ fic, vistas shut off, subtle signs of changing seasons where seasons supposedly do not change, subtle gradations of belonging where long term is measured in years instead of generations. And of course the plot traces the collision of an animal native to California— the mountain lion— and one typical of California— the transplanted human. Though Charlie’s personal problems are resolved happily enough, the issues that Charlie confronts remain. New people still pour into Sacramento. A zoo, however generous its appointments, is no home for a moun­ tain lion. Andrew Wingfield has captured a sense of the pressures we live with in the West and our various responses— grim, funny, self-deluding, sometimes gal­ lant. His novel adds another angle to classic musings over the fate of California. Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in Film, Television, & History. Edited by Peter C. Rollins and John E. O ’Connor. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005. 392 pages, $40.00. Making the White M an’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies. By Angela Aleiss. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. 211 pages, $44.95. Reviewed by Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma, Professor Emeritus Though not unprecedented, it is unusual to discover a collection of essays, how­ ever tightly themed and carefully chosen, that is superior to a single-authored book on a single subject. But anyone who wants to learn about film and has time to read only one of these books should definitely choose Hollywood’s West. Not that Aleiss’s book is badly written or incompetent. She screened an impressive number of films— four-and-a-halfpages, double-columned— dug into archives across North America to read production files and other materials, and interviewed as many people involved with the films as she could reach. Moreover, her conclusions are honestly, even painstakingly, arrived at: treat­ ments of Indians have followed cycles; audiences prefer nostalgic portraits to examinations of contemporary Indian problems; many pseudo-Indians, includ­ B o o k R e v ie w s 1 0 5 ing Iron Eyes Cody and Jay X Brands, have passed as Indians; Hollywood has been uneasy about miscegenation. However, Aleiss spends far more time discussing archival material, reviews, and responses in the press than she does in analyzing the films themselves, so that we learn what people intended to do or thought they had done rather than what they actually did. Most films get a few paragraphs of plot summary connected to her arguments. Sometimes a star’sdemands for changes— Richard Harris in A Man Called Horse, Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson— explain changes in fictional or historical narratives. Sometimes governmental objections — the Marine Corps to a planned production of the Ira Hayes story that became The Outsider; Army sensitivity to portrayals of Custer and Geronimo; Office of War Information directives about the treatment of minorities in World War II— influenced the ways in which films were made. But films as films are almost ignored. The Fast Runner gets one paragraph. Smoke Signals gets four, but most of them deal with director Chris Eyre’s com­ ments on what he had done. Aleiss whips through dozens of films in “Hollywood and the...

pdf