WHAT MAKES A WESTERN A WESTERN?

As someone who has made (modest) earnings and gained some acclaim through writing westerns – and who loves the genre – I was interested in a discussion I saw recently on Social Media about ‘what makes a western a western.’ Especially when I realised that the question, which might seem easy to answer, is actually anything but.

I’m sure an initial response would be that western exists in the familiar zone of cowboys manning ranches and driving cattle to market, Native Americans facing their final conquest by the U.S. army, and settlers populating even the most remote regions of the U.S.A.; of Colt pistols and Winchester rifles, law and order finally replacing outlawry and a fastness of nomadic tribes, buffalo and beaver replaced by towns, trails, railroads and farms. What tend to be male-centric, action-heavy adventure stories dependant on the struggle between good and evil, law and lawlessness and what could be loosely defined as ‘civilisation’ and ‘savagery.’

Key elements are that the western takes place on a ‘frontier’ - that ephemeral region where densely-settled and well-policed areas gave way to sparsely settled semi-wilderness and then true wilderness peopled only by indigenous peoples. Where the furthest reaches of modern industrial civilisation met – and sometimes clashed with - supposedly more primitive societies.

But just when it seems the genre can be easily defined, it becomes amoeba-like, stretching out in all directions, shape-shifting across history, geography and even beyond the Earth!

After all, the ‘frontier’ elements I’ve described as defining the western existed elsewhere in the world, most particularly in the 19^th Century, as depicted in movies set on the South American frontier like ‘WAY OF THE GAUCHO.’

Rory Calhoun and Richard Boone in WAY OF THE GAUCHO

Could these be westerns in disguise?

Australian tales like ‘NED KELLY’ and ‘ROBBERY UNDER ARMS,’

NED KELLY (2003)

South African adventures like ‘UNTAMED’ or even ‘ZULU.’

UNTAMED

Or ‘THE SEEKERS’ set in New Zealand where British settlers clash with the Maori?

THE SEEKERS

Or even ‘THE SEVEN SAMURAI’ set in 16^th Century Japan, which re-surfaced as ‘THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN’ of course.

And now I read Kirk Douglas (in his autobiography ‘The Ragman’s Son’) describing ‘THE VIKINGS,’ a Dark Age epic set in Northern Europe in the 9^th Century, as ‘really a western!’

Kirk Douglas in THE VIKINGS

Not to mention ‘STAR WARS’…

I think this part of the discussion should come to a juddering halt. In my view, these films may have similarities to the western, but a western for me, has to be set in the geographical American West.

A landscape that stretched from the Mississippi to the Pacific. But even within that vast land mass the western is selectively located. The Pacific Northwest, Idaho and Utah rarely feature. (Even if Monument Valley, Utah is perhaps the most famous western location, most of the movies filmed there are set elsewhere – in ‘The Searchers,’ for example, Monument Valley stands in for the Texas plains.)

Monument Valley

The most favoured locations for westerns tend to be Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and the Great Plains states from Montana and North Dakota down to Texas.

Historically the bulk of westerns take place in a period of history that lasted barely two generations, from around 1860, as the American Civil War was about to begin, to 1890 when the Census Bureau announced the end of the frontier, meaning there was no longer a discernible frontier line in the west, nor any large tracts of land yet unbroken by settlement. The same year saw the last major clash between the Native Americans and their conquerors in the tragic encounter at Wounded Knee.

Inside these three turbulent decades the vast majority of westerns are set – from novels written by Louis L’Amour and Larry McMurtry, to movies directed by John Ford and/or starring John Wayne to TV westerns from ‘Gunsmoke’ to ‘Bonanza’ to ‘Deadwood’ to ‘The Virginian.’

But immediately we can see the western bulging out of that time frame. In its early seasons at least one of these keynote shows, ‘The Virginian’ was located after 1890 – the elegiac episode ‘West’ was set in 1897, whilst other episodes featured the Spanish-American War of 1898. The highly popular movie ‘BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID’ was set at the same time, when the Hole-in-the Wall gang plundered freely, taking the western into the early years of the 20^th Century.

Paul Newman and Robert Redford in BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID

‘RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY,’ often held to be one of the greatest westerns ever made, opens with shots of ‘horseless carriages’ on the streets of a western town. Sam Peckinpah’s violent masterpiece ‘THE WILD BUNCH’ is set even later, during the Mexican revolution of the 1910s, as is ‘THE PROFESSIONALS.’ Both are unmistakably what aficionados would regard as westerns. Clearly a western requires a lawless environment, where anarchy and outlawry is still prevalent, whatever the date on the calendar.

William Holden goes down fighting in THE WILD BUNCH

Quite where the mainstream western turns into a ‘modern western’ is a subject for debate. Perhaps a cut-off date might be 1920, separating films like ‘THE WILD BUNCH’ from movies set later, even up present day – movies like ‘BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK’, ‘LONELY ARE THE BRAVE’, ‘NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN’ and ‘WIND RIVER.’

The ‘modern western’ – WIND RIVER

What defines these movies is that they’re all set in the U.S. west of the Mississippi – but is that exclusive western territory? After all both ‘THE WILD BUNCH’ and ‘THE PROFESSIONALS’ take place largely in Mexico – and the roistering Rory Calhoun adventure ‘THE TREASURE OF PANCHO VILLA’ is entirely set there, yet contains all the elements of a western.

And what about Canada? Movies set north of the 49 are just as obviously westerns – such as ‘PONY SOLDIER’ ‘O’ROURKE OF THE ROYAL MOUNTED’ and ‘THE CANADIANS’ – where Tyrone Power, Alan Ladd and Robert Ryan play Royal Canadian Mounted Policemen trying to prevent Indian wars breaking out in the 1870s.

Mountie Tyrone Power in PONY SOLDIER

Perhaps in defining the western we can allow for some overspill into adjacent regions where similar conditions to the American frontier prevailed.

Nor is there anything set in stone about 1860 as the beginning of the ‘classic western’ era. It’s just that not many western films and TV shows take place earlier. But the pre-1860 west has occasionally featured. The California Gold Rush was the backcloth to movies from ‘THE OUTLAWS OF POKER FLAT’ to the TV movie ‘The Desperate Mission’ about the legendary gold rush bandit Joaquin Murrieta.

Dale Robertson and Cameron Mitchell in THE OUTLAWS OF POKER FLAT

The wagon trains crossing the continent from the 1840s onwards were the backcloth to ‘MEEKS CUTOFF’ and ‘WESTWARD THE WOMEN.’

Wagons head west in MEEKS CUTOFF

The fur-trappers immortalised as ‘mountain men,’ whose heyday was 1810-1840, feature in ‘KIT CARSON’, ‘JEREMIAH JOHNSON’ and ‘ACROSS THE WIDE MISSOURI’ etc.

Robert Redford as JEREMIAH JOHNSON

And in 1835-1836 there was the short but bloody Texas War of Independence, where movie-makers have tended to focus on the dramatic stand at the Alamo in films like ‘THE ALAMO’ – 1960 and 2004 versions – THE LAST COMMAND and THE FIRST TEXAN.

Films like ‘THE ALAMO’ highlight that movies can, of course, be two things at once. They depict a battle between two modern armies, both using artillery, so can be described as ‘historical epics.’ But, as the two most prominent Alamo defenders were legendary western icons Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, how could these films not be westerns also? Crockett particularly is regarded as the epitome of a frontiersman… which raises another issue.

Davy Crockett (John Wayne) takes his last stand in THE ALAMO (1960)

Crockett was born and died on the frontier… but his birthplace was eastern Tennessee, which was as much a frontier at the time of his birth in 1786 as Texas was when he died there in 1836.

The real David (‘Davy’) Crockett in 1834

The point is the frontier kept moving, and it started on the very easternmost seaboard of the U.S.A.

In 1625 the frontier – the beginning of ‘the West’ – stood in Virginia and New England. By the mid 18^th Century ‘the west’ had advanced to somewhere in the neighbourhood of western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley. Around 1780 it was Kentucky and Tennessee.

But the frontier could switch north and south as well as continuing west. When young Davy Crockett went off to fight the Seminoles in September 1814 he marched south-east from his Tennessee home to the newly-opened up frontier of Florida.

Similarly, settlement advancing west across the Great Plains leap-frogged Oklahoma and left it behind as the ‘Indian Territory.’ When first opened up for mass settlement in 1889 there was an explosion of lawlessness and violence in Oklahoma that ran through the 1890s – long after surrounding areas of Kansas and Texas, and states further west like Colorado, had become relatively ‘civilised,’ tamed by the advance of settlement speeded up by the railroads.

If the classic requirements of the western are American ‘frontier’ elements you can certainly argue that movies like ‘DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK,’ ‘LAST OF THE MOHICANS’ (both set in New York State in the late colonial period,) ‘SEMINOLE’ (located in the swamps of Florida in 1835) and the TV Series ‘Daniel Boone’, (set in Kentucky in the 1770s) are westerns, regardless of how far east they’re located on the map.

Fess Parker played ‘Daniel Boone’ on TV

On the other hand movies set in the ‘classic western’ time frame but far from the frontier can’t be called ‘westerns’ in my view. If every movie set in the U.S.A. between 1860 and 1890 counted as one, that would mean ‘GONE WITH THE WIND’ (set in Georgia in the 1860s) was a western! Not to mention ‘THE RAID’ (set in Vermont in 1864) ‘THE AGE OF INNOCENCE’ (New York 1870s) and others. Personally I don’t think Quentin Tarantino’s ‘DJANGO UNCHAINED’ can be called a western – despite its ‘spaghetti western’ trappings the movie’s set in Tennessee and Mississippi long after their frontier days.

Jamie Foxx as DJANGO UNCHAINED

I came to the conclusion that a better definition of a ‘western’ might be to term them ‘frontiers’ – but I can’t see that catching on!

I don’t know if I’ve cleared up any confusion with this discussion or just created more. But feel free to disagree!