Go west, young man

I spoke with a young film-maker here who loves American movies, but says westerns just leave her cold; she could never get into the whole “Wild, Wild West” thing.

I understand. It seems so yesterday, the Hollywood western. Yet many of her generation have no trouble watching Tarantino riff on World War II, which is also “so yesterday.”

I try to explain about westerns. “Do you like film noir?” I ask. Well, duh. Of course. Who doesn’t like film noir? “Well, the best film noir is about an anti-hero, someone who tries to live by a certain code that’s often in conflict with a morally ambiguous society. Often, they fail.”

Same thing with westerns.

I would even argue that the re-imagined western — the old frontier as seen through the eyes of maverick directors like Sergio Leone, John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, Robert Altman, Nicholas Ray and Clint Eastwood — is every bit as rich and varied and metaphorical as the best film noir. But young people won’t watch these classics, because there are horses in them and people wearing cowboy hats.

Too bad.

Where to begin with westerns? You could start with The Searchers, John Ford’s 1956 look at the “Indian wars” of the American frontier. John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a hardened, racist Civil War vet who visits his brother and his wife’s cozy homestead ranch; but when local “Injuns” burn the place down, kill the husband and wife and abduct their children, Ethan goes waaay off the reservation: recovering their surviving daughter Debbie (a young Natalie Wood) becomes his mission; hunting down Indians is his single-minded obsession.

Welcome to Hell: The mining town of Lago is transformed into Hell in Clint Eastwood’s surreal western, High Plains Drifter.

If the plot sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because Martin Scorsese glosses it in that neo-noir classic, Taxi Driver (1976). Travis Bickle is also Ethan, transplanted to modern NYC, wanting to rid the streets of “the scum and filth.” Protecting Iris (a young Jodie Foster) is his obsession; he even has to battle Sport, an ethnic-looking pimp (Harvey Keitel) who dresses like a Native American (feather in his pimp fedora).

The Searchers also has that classic final image: John Wayne, walking away from the homestead, the camera aimed outward through a framed doorway. It’s not just a cool image that’s been referenced by everybody from Coppola (the door closing in the final shot of The Godfather) to Spielberg (the Ryan homestead); it really shows how Ethan can never be part of “civil” society because of his twisted personal “code.” In that single shot, Ford shows he’s as complex as any noir master.

Just as noir has its stock imagery — the shadowy interiors, the neon-lit streets, the foreshortened compositions — classic westerns have familiar motifs: saloon doors swinging, dusty main streets, open prairies, hitching posts. But like the best noir, great westerns transcend the familiar, creating whole new worlds.

To see how noir and westerns intersect, you need look no further than Dashiell Hammett’s proto-noir novel Red Harvest, which Kurosawa sourced for his excellent period drama, Yojimbo. Of course, Italian director later sourced Yojimbo (without asking permission) in a remake called A Fistful of Dollars — starring Clint Eastwood as a gunslinger who plays both sides of a local gang dispute in the Old West. And the Spaghetti western was born.

The Leone/Eastwood trilogy is a litmus test for movie fans. If somebody claims not to have enjoyed The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, I think their cinematic tastes are highly questionable. It’s an absurdly entertaining movie. Yes, Leone can be leisurely: he loves to unfold a yarn. But his casting, his sense of detail and morality, are impeccable. Eastwood and Eli Wallach make an unforgettable screen pair. And name another movie that claims Bernardo Bertolucci, Dario Argento and Leone as screenwriters (as 1969’s Once Upon a Time in the West does). Leone was also exploring a widescreen visual style that would influence later comic and graphic novel artists, as well as directors like Sam Raimi (about whose well-meaning neo-western, The Quick and the Dead, the less said the better).

It’s not that people can’t do a good western nowadays; it’s just that there seems to be no raison d’etre. Recent attempts like The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford or the 3:10 to Yuma remake just demonstrate how the westerns of the ‘60s and ‘70s actually reflected the social consciousness of the time: today’s westerns, in comparison, are just empty, stylistic homage.

I was watching Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter (1972) the other day, marveling at its surrealistic touches, its gallows humor, its eerie film score. In it, Eastwood (who also directs) plays a man with no name, entering the mining town of Lago and quickly turning everything upside down. Lago’s cowardly citizens — who once stood by as a town marshal was whipped to death by hired guns — fear the gunmen will come back and burn their place down. They hire Eastwood to protect Lago; he quickly appoints a dwarf as sheriff and mayor, and orders the townspeople to paint the town red with 200 gallons of paint. Eastwood provides his own surrealistic coup de grâce, painting the word “HELL” across the town sign.

High Plains Drifter is that rarity: a supernatural western (as opposed to a psychedelic western, like El Topo). By the end, you’re left wondering if Eastwood is a ghost, a reincarnation of the murdered marshal, or simply a passing stranger with a quick gun. They don’t make them like this anymore.

Nor is there a poetic western to match Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), and not just because it features Leonard Cohen music and one of the most balletic slow-motion death scenes in cinema history. It’s a metaphysical western, about the need to act versus the insignificance of action in a slowly dying universe. Or something like that. The last scene is as graceful and moving as the final line from James Joyce’s The Dead. (“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”) See it and swoon.

Lady in red: Joan Crawford is Vienna, an aggressive saloonkeeper in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar.

Few have taken the western in as strange a direction as Nicholas Ray, whose Johnny Guitar (1954) is almost neon-like in its lurid intensity. Joan Crawford runs a frontier saloon, Sterling Hayden is a guitar-slinging ex-boyfriend trying to prevent the townspeople from running her off the land, but it’s the weird psychosexual tensions that make this one so riveting. (You’ll never forget sexually aggressive Crawford in a white dress having a gun duel with black-attired lesbian Mercedes McCambridge.)

And when it comes to modern screen violence, Sam Peckinpah is the grandfather to Scorsese, Tarantino and a slew of other gore-slingers. Yet The Wild Bunch (1969) is more than just a bloodbath of slowly-dying cowboys: it’s an epitaph on the American western’s tombstone. It acknowledges that the “old ways” eventually must end, giving in to technology, youth, everything that moves forward. The fact that Peckinpah can pull off such a rich, philosophical mood piece and still be so entertaining is proof enough that the western never really dies: it just passes into new hands, some gifted and visionary, some not so.

What is it about the western? It’s a metaphor for possibility, for testing rules, or lack of rules. It’s a landscape for mapping out the human condition, limited only by imagination. At its center is a hero, and he (or she) need not be perfect; they just need to stand up for something. And sometimes, fall down for something.