Ride, Boldly Ride: The Evolution of the American Western by Mary Lea Bandy and Kevin Stoehr (review)

This volume’s originality lies in its detours from a well-worn path. A study of Westerns from Edison’s filming of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1894 to Cowboys and Aliens in 2011, it moves through familiar chronological stages (silent, sound, classic, revisionist, and postmodern Westerns), discussing a plethora of significant directors, actors, and films along the way (John Ford’s work features as a constant, Clint Eastwood’s as a culmination). The result is a valuable survey, well informed by previous film scholarship, if a little predictable when it connects Westerns and American nationalism and a little uneasy when it wavers between criticizing and apologizing for the Western’s justification of violent expansionism, with the “good bad man” at its moral center.

The sparkle comes when the authors linger over what they variously term “underappreciated,” “underrated,” and “oft-forgotten” films. The scholars have a distinct talent for combining technical and aesthetic analysis to probe the “cinematic artistry” of these works while also gesturing to unexpected lineages and influences. They do a beautifully nuanced reading of Ford’s handling of rhythm and space in his first feature-length silent Western, Straight Shooting (1917), and draw a straight line to the effects he achieves in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance forty-five years later. They read The Wind (1928) as “the last great Western of the silent era” and precursor to later “psychological Westerns” such as Ford’s The Searchers (1956). Lillian Gish performs Letty Mason as a “classic westerner”—survivor, killer, self-contradictory in her innocence and passion; Victor Sjöström directs “the ultimate landscape Western” in his handling of nature as character; and the combination discloses “the dark underbelly of the American West’s progress.” They position Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) with Charles Laughton, directed by Leo McCarey, at the height of the comic Western genre, with its dissection of class and other prejudices echoing Wild and Woolly (1917) with Douglas Fairbanks and anticipating Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974). The love triangle in Delmer Daves’s Jubal (1956)—which they reevaluate as “a clear model of the mid-century psychological Western”—sits on a spectrum from D. W Griffith’s “Indian romance,” The Mended Lute (1909), to Liberty Valance and beyond. Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) is linked to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), the noir Western to German expressionism via Fritz Lang.

In this accumulation of the unexpected, the authors acknowledge that some films fit the genre only by broadening its definition, but they do not commit to full-out reorientation of the Western’s history. Instead, they offer intriguing legacies, lineages, and clusters that may well lay the groundwork for such a project.