The Comic-Book Movie: The New Western?

Which is the more expensive and prestigious production?
Douglas Wilson in the 1942 serial ‘Batman’ (left), Christian
Bale in the 2008 feature film ‘The Dark Knight’ (center), and Adam West in the 1966-68 TV series ‘Batman’

Here’s a quick and inchoate thought: Are today’s comic-book (or as some prefer, “graphic-novel”) movies the counterpart of Hollywood’s World War Two-era and postwar westerns?  I don’t mean as the preferred action genres of their respective eras.  I mean as kinds of films with similar histories, two genres that went from pulp to prestige.

While some prestigious westerns were made during Hollywood’s silent era, the genre fell out of favor for most of the 1930s.  This may have been due to the poor box-office performance of expensive examples like The Big Trail (1930).  But for whatever reason, the western genre was relegated to B movies and serials with rather thinly drawn characters, films of poor quality with heavy-handed moral messages.  And these movies seemed aimed more at children than adults. 

John Wayne in ‘The Big Trail’ (1930)

In fact, The Big Trail was John Wayne’s first starring role in an A picture.  Had the film (which, incidentally, was shot in a widescreen process 23 years before the first CinemaScope feature) been a success, it might have been the vehicle that launched him into Hollywood superstardom.  However, The Big Trail’s ticket sales disappointed, and like the genre itself, Wayne was relegated to B movies and serials for most of the decade.  Yes, there were films that were exceptions, like the Oscar-winning Cimarron (1931, the only western to win Best Picture in the first 62 years of the award’s history), but that movie was also based on a respected Edna Ferber novel and (like Heaven’s Gate 50 years later) didn’t seem to sell itself as a western. 

The full arrival and flourishing of the sound-era western as a genre for adults as well as children would need to wait until the financial success of Henry King’s Jesse James and John Ford’s Stagecoach in 1939.  So, for most of the 1930s, the western was thought of as a low-budget pulp genre with black-and-white stories primarily made for juvenile audiences. I wonder if you told the average moviegoer (or movie critic) at the time that, in a few years, this disdained genre would one day be an esteemed, high-budget vehicle for important themes and Hollywood’s best talent — and especially that the B-movie actor most associated with the genre would become moviedom’s most enduring star — that audience member would have believed you.  Would this filmgoer have been able to take seriously the idea of such adult-oriented and critically acclaimed postwar westerns as Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73 (1950), George Stevens’ Shane (1953), and Richard Brooks’s The Professionals (1966), never mind Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969)?

John Wayne as 1930s B western star (left) and as postwar Hollywood icon

Fast-forward to the present.  Until the commercial triumphs of George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977) and Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) (cemented by Steven Spielberg’s serial-inspired megahit Raiders of the Lost Ark [1981]), fantasy and super-hero properties weren’t usually thought of as prime adaptation sources for Hollywood.  Like the western of the 1930s, movies made from comic-book-type material were relegated to shabbily made B movies and serials.  The low budgets often produced laughable results because the heroes’ costumes that looked so impressive on the comics page looked less so on the screen, especially when made by second-rate costumers. 

The few super-hero feature films that were made when theatres stopped showing double bills (and therefore no longer needed B movies or serials) were campy, not serious, and still low-budget — such as the 1966 Batman feature that used the resources of the 1966-68 Batman TV series.  And like the B western, such movies were thought of primarily as offerings for juveniles.  I understand that the producers of Donner’s Superman were desperate to sign Marlon Brando for the project so that the rest of Hollywood would take it seriously and not think it was supposed to be a (full-blown) comedy.  When Tim Burton cast comic (as in ha-ha) actor Michael Keaton in his 1989 production of Batman, fans feared that the director would make another spoof like the 1960s TV series.  The fact that Burton did not make a comedy demonstrated the new earnestness with which Hollywood henceforth would deal with comic-book properties.

Kirk Alyn in the 1948 serial ‘Superman’ (left) and Christopher Reeve in the 1981 feature ‘Superman II’

As with the western of the 1930s, I don’t think that the average pre-Star Wars moviegoer would think that this heretofore-risible (when onscreen) comic-book subject matter would one day command Hollywood’s prime talent, and even deal with serious themes.  In the Production Code days, the industry would shy away from solemn subjects like rape and miscegenation, but when placed in the context of a familiar and long-ago genre like the western, the topics could become more palatable to the audience — hence John Ford’s The Searchers (1956).  Today, the issue of our civilized society slipping into anarchy might be too intense and too disturbing for the usual Hollywood patron, but in the guise of a super-hero film, such a subject becomes more digestible — hence Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008).  I also wonder if that pre-Star Wars filmgoer, who would have lived in a time when dozens of westerns would be screened theatrically each year, would imagine a day when the genre would become an infrequent anomaly in the major studios’ release schedules.

However, when the western was Hollywood’s most popular genre, the American motion-picture industry still produced a wide variety of films.  But nowadays, with the rise of pop culture’s respectability (at least financial respectability) and the spiraling costs of feature films, most releases from the major studios (with only a few exceptions, such as raunchy or romantic comedies and Oscar bait) need some sort of readily identifiable, pre-sold identity to the audience.  For the past few years, whenever I watch a trailer for a Hollywood movie in a multiplex, the advertised film contains some kind of fantasy/horror/science-fiction/comic-book/super-hero/action/video-game/television-series subject matter.  In twenty-first century mainstream American cinema, the aura of the fantastical that was once associated with the typical comic book has now become the dominant element in most of Hollywood’s big-screen productions — while more down-to-earth subject matter is increasingly relegated to smaller distribution arms and exhibition spaces.  I wonder when the homogenizing ubiquity of Hollywood’s fascination with the fantastical will finally, like the western genre, ride off into the sunset.

Trailer for the sci-fi film ‘Cowboys & Aliens’ (2011), based on the graphic novel: virtually the only way you can get anything like a western made these days

Westerns

John Wayne in ‘Stagecoach’ (1939)

Here is a recently rediscovered Internet article that I wrote back in 2001 for a website no longer on-line, an article that I thought was lost forever.  I wrote it not long after reading several books about western movies, among them The B.F.I. Companion to the Western and Sixguns and Society.  I also included some thoughts derived from Robert B. Ray in A Certain Tendency in the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980.  I wasn’t as thorough with my ideas as I hoped to be (I have added some observations in brackets), but at least I got my comments back from Internet oblivion:

Movies deal with myths. And myths are a way for peoples and cultures to set up and play out the problems of life, survival, and sheer existence. For the full panorama on the importance of myth and its role in making sense of who we are as humans, I refer you to the books of the late, great Joseph Campbell. 

The genre of the western arose, I believe,  because Americans of European ancestry needed to make sense of their (our) existence in a “New World.” In particular, Euro-Americans were living in a land in which they were not the original inhabitants. So, Euro-American culture needed a mythology to shape and make sense of the conflicts of European survival in the New World. And in doing so, the ideology of such a mythology functioned, in part, to confirm the rightness of Euro-Americans to inhabit the North American continent over that of the indigenous people, the Native Americans. 


Why did Americans of European ancestry need a mythology? Because, I imagine, when North America started to be settled by white immigrants, they were not certain of their identity or the possibility of their survival on the continent. These uncertainties are best illustrated by Wener Herzog’s German film Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), the story of an ill-fated mission by Spanish conquistadors in the Amazon jungle. Although the context is Latin American, Aguirre’s concerns are just as applicable to those in a North American context. Herzog’s film portrays a world where European culture seems inherently incompatable with the American continent. In the end, the American wilderness crushes the party of European adventurers, who are portrayed as petty and corrupt, unworthy of survival. Aguirre is the ultimate anti-western. If it was to survive, the European presence in America needed stories that affirmed the goodness and justness of white American culture and its worthiness to flourish. This is what the mythology of the western provided. 


As it arose and developed in both literature and film, the western taught its audience that the important problems of existence occupied a rural context, and that these problems needed to be solved through physical action, intelligently employed. Consequently, westerns are marked by their rural settings and their action-filled climaxes. Therefore, an action story set in an urban setting would have difficulty claiming to be a “western” as the gere is commonly understood (e.g., Coogan’s Bluff, Death Wish). And a story with a Wild West setting that is not resolved through a violent climax would likewise have trouble being seen as a western (e.g., The Ballad of Cable Hogue, The Good Old Boys).   


[In other words, the western is an action genre.  If the movie’s central problem isn’t solved by a shootout, a fist fight, or some other form of physical struggle, it’s not an action film — and hence not a western film.  I roll my eyes every time I hear Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) described as a “gay western.”  Since the film doesn’t end with an action scene — in fact, there’s hardly any violence in it at all — the label “western” doesn’t do justice to this drama.  Now, if the film had been about Jesse James getting it on with Billy the Kid...]


[Although there are exceptions, the typical western is set in some place (specific or non-specific) on the North American continent west of the Mississippi River sometime between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century.  Why this time period?  Like other film critics, I believe that the overwhelming majority of westerns are set after the Civil War because the United States needed to overcome its founding flaw of slavery and the national disunity that schismatic issue provoked.  Only afterwards could the mythology of a truly unified country develop.  In many westerns, lingering resentments over the “War for the Southern Confederacy” emerge, only to be resolved by the end of the story.  And the 1890s marked the end of the Indian wars.  Afterwards, the continental United States was officially settled.]

Gary Cooper in ‘High Noon’ (1952)

Another intriguing aspect of the genre is that the classical western hero, usually a cowboy or gunfighter, exists at the intersection of civilization and the wilderness. He (the western hero is almost always male, of course) is seen to embody the best of both worlds: the intelligence and expansionism of civilization, and the instinctiveness and brute strength of the wilderness. He can’t be completely one or the other. This is why the sixgun is so important to the wilderness-dwelling western hero: it marks his primary connection to and reliance upon Western civilization, of which he is a harbinger on the frontier. 

It’s very interesting, for example, that the mythology of the western did not develop to privilege “going native” narratives, where Europeans or their descendents completely cast off Western culture and adopt Native American culture (even James Fenimore Cooper’s Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans remained resolutely tied to his white identity). To do so, of course, would have suggested that Western culture was somehow inherently suspect, and the purpose of the western genre was to convey exactly the opposite. The classical western hero needed to be bound to his European roots. So, even though there have been a few successful “going native” westerns — particularly Little Big Man (1970), A Man Called Horse (1970), and Dances with Wolves (1990) — this is not the mainstream of the western movie.

In fact, Little Big Man and A Man Called Horse were made during the Vietnam era, when many Americans were questioning the very validity of Euro-American culture, and these films are a reflection of that crisis of identity. Apparently, the “going native” mythology was so threatening to the legitimacy of Euro-American culture that America’s most successful and enduring rendition of the “going native” myth — Tarzan — had to be set on another continent. 

Although the western, at its core, affirms that white people are more deserving to live in America than the Indians are, this isn’t necessarily to say that all westerns are overwhelmingly racist — no more so than other mythologies that seek to affirm the European presence in the non-European world. Because he exits at the crossroads of Western culture and the wilderness (to which that culture stands in contradistinction), the western hero may be seen as an implicit critique of Western civilization, as well as its harbinger on the frontier. The western hero may stand as an ideal symbol of rural Euro-American culture before it became “corrupted” by the more impersonal forces of urban civilization. Therefore, not only can the western hero be the uncritical champion of Euro-American civilization, but he may also function as a figure of resistance to it. 

Because of this, it’s not all that surprising that when American culture reached its greatest identity crisis of the second half of the 20th century — the quagmire of the Vietnam War and the counterculture that crisis spawned — the outfits and hairstyles of the counterculture drew largely from the western: blue jeans, denim jackets, cowboy hats, long hair, droopy moustaches, etc. For example, the two main characters of that exemplary “counterculture” movie Easy Rider (1969) were both named after western icons: Wyatt (as in “Earp”) and Billy (as in “the Kid”). So, the Vietnam-era “counterculture” was at least as beholden to the western mythos as it was critical of its expansionist ideology, of which the Vietnam War was seen as an extension. At the same time, the Vietnam Era (the 1960s and ’70s), marked an upsurge in revisionist westerns: Lonely Are the Brave (1962), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), Soldier Blue (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Culpepper Cattle Company (1972), The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), etc. — films which criticize the western myth, but also may be seen to affirm it in other ways. 

‘The Wild Bunch’ (1969)

I think the primary reason why big-screen westerns aren’t being made as often as they used to is because American ideology now views contemporary problems primarily in an urban and technological context. Also, the crisis of the Vietnam War may have tarnished the rugged “purity” of the frontier setting: in light of the war, the American frontier of the 19th century came to look increasingly like just another European military expansion into the Third World, rather than the mythic landscape for the triumph of white American culture. In other words, the western lost its innocence.

In any event, Euro-American culture no longer seems to be uncertain of its legitimacy to inhabit North America, so that crisis of identity may now have been played out and resolved — at least in a rural, pre-computer-age context. This would explain why the urban/gangster thriller and the science-fiction adventure have now displaced the western as Hollywood’s primary action genres.  However, the mythic images of the western — the idea of a rugged loner drawing upon his best resources and physical strength to resolve a great crisis in an “unspoiled” landscape — remain too powerful to die out completely, even in the imaginations of those who aren't white, aren't American, or aren't male. Westerns are still being made, though primarily for television. And the occasional big-screen western still makes its appearance, such as this year’s [2001]  American Outlaws. Because it is so basic to the shaping of the American identity, the western — in some way, in some form — will always be with us.