“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

by David Benjamin

“There’s no living with a killing. There’s no goin’ back from one. Right or wrong, it’s a brand … a brand sticks. There’s no goin’ back. Now you run on home to your mother and tell her … Tell her everything’s all right. And there aren’t any more guns in the valley.” — Shane (Alan Ladd), Shane (1953)

MADISON, Wis.—Lately, the Museum of Modern Art is screening a bunch of “classic” Western movies that show “how Universal Pictures used the genre to explore changing American morals.” I’m intrigued because, since my grade-school days as an avid consumer of Roy Rogers, Johnny Mack Brown and Lash Larue, I’ve watched probably a thousand Westerns. So, I was surprised by the number of films in MoMA’s idiosyncratic retrospective that I’ve never heard of, not seen or consciously avoided seeing—including obscurities like The Hired Hand, Taza, Son of Cochise and The Naked Dawn.

I can’t fault the Manhattan museum for paring a vast oeuvre to a manageable handful, although the list bespeaks a certain parochial New Yorkishness. However, to its credit, MoMA is highlighting director Anthony Mann’s collaboration with James Stewart. Each of three Mann movies, notably Winchester ’73, depicts Stewart as a grizzled cowpoke who symbolizes the tension between the lawless anomie of the wild West and the creeping obtrusion of civil society.

Good for MoMA but, well, I can name at least two Stewart flicks that examine this theme more accessibly. Destry Rides Again, released by Universal in 1939, is spiced with humor and enhanced by a wry sexual tension between Frenchie (Marlene Dietrich) and Tom Destry (Jimmy Stewart).The story contrasts Tom’s late, legendary gunslinging father with a son who prefers to insinuate law and order with no gun at all. Later, in John Ford’s 1962 masterpiece, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the clash is more explicit. Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard, a resolutely unarmed frontier attorney, is pitted philosophically and physically against a pair of trigger-quick antagonists. One, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), is a law-abiding rancher. The other, Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), is a sadistic outlaw.

As I ponder my Top 40, it seems that all my favorite Westerns tend to touch on the gradual displacement of gunslingers, buffalo hunters, muleskinners and Comanches by a wave of sodbusters, shopkeepers, preachers and schoolmarms.

Among these transitional films is Sam Peckinpah’s best work, from MGM in 1962, Ride the High Country. In films like The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, Peckinpah soaked the screen in blood and guts. But he opted for heartbreak in Ride High Country, indicated by his protagonists. To play Gil and Steve, he cast Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea. aging actors with long careers in formulaic B-Westerns. They portray a pair of saddle-tramp sidekicks beyond their prime, each with an outlaw pedigree and gunplay in his resumé. Hired to escort a gold shipment from a mining town, they rescue a damsel (Mariette Hartley) in distress. Their reluctant chivalry occasions a gun battle against the filthy and feral Hammond boys, who represent the dying vestige of a frontier whose rubric Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan) articulated in the best of too many Wyatt Earp movies, John Ford’s My Darling Clementine: “When ya pull a gun, kill a man.”

After absorbing at least two generations of Westerns, my takeaway is that Manifest Destiny was a human tragedy whose apologists rendered a meatgrinder into mythology. In print, the best fiction about the old West turns out not to be the rootin’ and tootin’ of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. More credible in prose is Larry McMurtry’s mercilessly historic Lonesome Dove quartet, where Texas and the cattle trails are a Darwinian hellscape and the cowhand’s only glory is survival.

As MoMA’s retrospective suggests, it’s difficult to compile a sampling of films that capture the romance, mendacity and bigotry that have accrued to the white man’s conquest of the American West. By the time I’d scribbled more than thirty titles of my own, without foolishly trying to rank them, I realized the futility of picking all-time hits. I noticed. for example, that I’d left out some movies—like the Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns that elevated Clint Eastwood from second banana on “Rawhide” to icon status. I had good reason. I don’t like them.

Eastwood’s Italian shoot-‘em-ups added realistic gore to the Western canon, but they overlook the suicidal transience of its ethos. The Leone flick I chose instead is Once Upon a Time in the West, because that very transience is its theme. This is also why my second favorite Eastwood film is the gruesome but brutally genuine Unforgiven.

(My favorite Eastwood is one you’ve never seen: Bronco Billy.)

If you forced me to pick one all-time favorite Western, I’d name the one that depicts most sympathetically the saga of a wild and woolly open range giving way violently to homestead farmers with barbed wire, cute dogs and vegetable gardens. Shane also has the best Western movie ensemble ever, from Alan Ladd, Van Heflin and Jean Arthur to Jack Palance, Edgar Buchanan and Elisha Cook. Ladd’s troubled hero is the living symbol of a free and unfettered but doomed epoch. His departure, slumped on his horse, disappearing into the twilit hills as Joey cries out “Come back, Shane!” is the fictional fade-out of a West that never really was.

Among the phenomena I observed as a filmgoer from mid-century onward is the “changing [white] American morals” about the old West. In Hollywood’s early days, killing Indians was a casual movie motif, justified by a nation’s expansionist imperative and by the resistance of “savages” to the seizure of their patrimony. By the time John Ford made The Searchers in 1956, he had begun to recognize his own depredations against North America’s first people. He depicted the Indian-hating Ethan (John Wayne) as a vengeful racist who ends the film in a quandary of ambivalence over the hatred that had consumed his life and warped his soul.

When Ford directed Cheyenne Autumn in 1964 and Arthur Penn, in 1970, made Little Big Man, American filmgoers were ready to accept that some of the “battles” won by the U.S. Cavalry were actually atrocities and that “Manifest Destiny” was a euphemism for genocide.

Speaking of lists …

One of my younger friends, a Brit named Sam, is a passionate film buff. Right now, he’s prowling the little movie houses of Paris’ Latin Quarter, soaking up Sterling Hayden in B&W noir and Maureen O’Sullivan in Tarzan and His Mate. However, perhaps because he comes from a country where the wildest available West is Wales, he fails to see the charm of the American horse opera.

I’m going to have to educate Sam, ideally by planting him in front of our Trinitron, firing up our DVD player and force-feeding him a marathon of hayburners. But how to start? Which three movies are most likely to hook Sam?

I could start with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but—with that dumb B.J. Thomas bicycle scene and all that smartass dialog—it’s an anomaly in its genre. So, let’s steer by the stars—three actors—John Wayne, Glenn Ford and Lee Marvin, whose filmographies contain a microcosm of the Western genre.

Many movie mavens would elect True Grit as the epitome of Wayne, but for me, it’s too much a parody of Wayne’s image. Better for Sam to watch El Dorado, a lighter vehicle in which the Duke gets to spar cantankerously with Robert Mitchum, James Caan and Ed Asner.

Next: Glenn Ford’s signature Western, as bad guy Ben Wade shackled to Van Heflin in Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma, is one of Hollywood’s great psychological studies, regardless of genre. Yes, better than High Noon.
Finally, Lee Marvin’s Oscar-winning double role in Cat Ballou is comic and dramatic genius. There’s also a young, gorgeous Jane Fonda in the title role and a Greek chorus composed of Stubby Kate and Nat King Cole.

Sam? Irresistible!