Have all the great Western flicks ridden off into the sunset?

By OLLIE REED JR.
Scripps Howard News Service
Thursday, September 20, 2007

I saw the remake of the Western "3:10 to Yuma."

I liked it. It had good action, good acting and a great bad guy (Ben Foster).

I prefer it to the 1957 original, which featured first-rate performances by Glenn Ford and Van Heflin but lacked the adrenaline of this new version. It's been a long time since I've seen the '57 version, but my recollection is that it's a lot of talking in a hotel room.

When I started considering where the remake of "3:10 to Yuma" would fit on my list of favorite Westerns, however, I discovered two things. First, this new movie doesn't make the cut. Second, hardly anything made after 1969 does.

That got me wondering why.

Maybe it's because my childhood and adolescence are framed by the heyday of Western movies.

I was born in 1948, the year "Fort Apache," the first movie in director John Ford's cavalry trilogy, was released.

I was 11 when John Wayne and Walter Brennan helped Dean Martin sober himself up and clean up his town in "Rio Bravo."

I started high school in 1962, the year Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea mounted up to "Ride the High Country," and I graduated the year "The Professionals" were raising hell, slapping leather and kicking dust.

In the summer of 1969, just days after turning 21, I watched "True Grit" and "The Wild Bunch" at the Fort Bragg, N.C., movie theater. I had just been disqualified for military service because of chronic high blood pressure, and, while waiting to be sent home, I tried to fog my shame and disappointment with the smoking action in those movies.

Now, all these years later, I find myself in the camp that believes the last of the great Western movies died in the carnage that marked the climatic gunfight in "The Wild Bunch."

Only two Westerns in my top-10 list were made after that -- 1989's "Lonesome Dove" (actually a TV miniseries but too good to be left out of a dissection of the genre) and 1995's "Tombstone."

Maybe that's because my youth and some of the dreams and expectations that went with it were also casualties of "The Wild Bunch" shootout. Maybe a lot of things seemed better before that.

I asked fellow Western film fans from my generation -- or thereabouts -- if they thought old Westerns were really better. Or if that's just me.

"It's not just white hats and black hats now," said Slim Randles, 65, of Albuquerque, N.M., a former cowboy and mule packer and author of the contemporary Western novel "Sun Dog Days."

Randles means that the Westerns of today are not the simple morality tales of his -- and my -- youth.

"Those old Westerns were very simple and very entertaining," he said.

But not very realistic. Today's Westerns, Randles said, are, for the most part, more true to life.

Randles said that's a good thing. He likes realism, which is why one of his favorite Westerns is 1968's "Will Penny," starring Charlton Heston as a cowboy-loner. That's also why he dislikes "Dances With Wolves," the highly acclaimed 1990 Kevin Costner movie that won seven Oscars, including Best Picture.

"Charlton Heston plays a bunkhouse cowboy better than anyone else I know," Randles said. "All these cowboys have is a horse, a saddle and a dog. They're just one paycheck away from never having a beer again. When (Heston's character) runs up against a woman who wants to spend some time with him, he doesn't know what to do."

By contrast, Randles said "Dances With Wolves" wasn't much more than a well-photographed ego trip for director/star Costner.

"These people didn't know what wolves are like," he said. "I didn't think it was the least bit authentic."

Paul Hutton, 58, and Boyd Magers, 67, both like the new version of "3:10 to Yuma." But both prefer older Westerns.

Hutton, a University of New Mexico history professor, lists "The Wild Bunch," "The Searchers" (1956), "Shane" (1953) and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962) among his favorites.

Magers, an Albuquerque author of books about Western movies and publisher of Western Clippings, a periodical about the genre, names "The Tall T" (1957) and "Winchester 73" (1950) as his top two.

Magers said people get comfortable with the way movies were made when they were growing up, which accounts for the few quibbles he has about the newly released "3:10 to Yuma."

"I didn't like the tight shots and the quick cuts, the MTV editing during the stagecoach robbery," he said. "That was a concession to the younger crowd. I am one of those people who says, 'Back the camera up and let us see what's going on, who's shooting who.' "

Hutton, who has taught a course in Western film history at UNM, said the new "3:10" avoids what he considers the sin of many of the more recent Western movies.

"We think we are so sophisticated these days we can't appreciate those values that were important to the American experience and to the Western movie -- land, loyalty and a certain sense of optimism," Hutton said. "'3:10 to Yuma' is very modern in its sensibility but doesn't wear it on its shoulder like 'Unforgiven.' "

Hutton said he has never understood the acclaim accorded "Unforgiven," Clint Eastwood's dark 1992 Western, which won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Eastwood.

Johnny D. Boggs, 45, Santa Fe, N.M., author of Western fiction and nonfiction, appreciates what he considers the historically correct depiction of gunfighters in "Unforgiven."

Boggs, whose most recent novel is "Northfield," based on the James and Younger gangs' 1876 raid in that Minnesota town, lists some other favorites: "The Searchers," "Shane," "Ride the High Country," "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" (1949) and "The Ox-Bow Incident" (1943).

And he said good Westerns didn't die in 1969. He pointed to films such as "McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), "Jeremiah Johnson" (1972), "The Cowboys" (1972), "Ulzana's Raid" (1972) and "The Shootist" (1976) as evidence.

Boggs does think most new Westerns are too long.

"They don't know how to end movies these days," he said. "The old directors did know how. There's nothing loose (in the older Westerns). Those are tight, lean, hard movies."

Melody Groves, 55, an Albuquerque author of "Ropes, Reins and Rawhide," a nonfiction book about rodeo, as well as some Western fiction, said her favorites are the Robert Redford-Paul Newman outlaw-buddy movie "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969) and "High Noon," the classic 1952 Western starring Gary Cooper as an outgunned but unflinching lawman.

"'High Noon' just screams Western -- the whole independent person, the ultimate showdown," she said.

But Groves, a member of a gunfighter re-enactment group, said she had a difficult time sitting through the classic 1960 gunfight film "The Magnificent Seven."

"I think I slept through some of it," she said. "Maybe I see some of these movies through slightly different eyes because I do re-enactments.

"But I thought 'Dances With Wolves' was magnificent. I liked the way it humanized the American Indian."

So, where does that leave me?

I had a hard time sitting through "Dances With Wolves" but will stop and watch "The Magnificent Seven" anytime I stumble across it on TV.

"Dances With Wolves" had powerful segments -- the buffalo hunt, the terrifying and heartbreaking Indian attack on a lone teamster. But I found most of it tedious and annoying.

And as far as humanizing the American Indian goes, that had been done earlier and better in "Broken Arrow" (1950) and "Little Big Man" (1971).

Slim was right when he said a lot of the older Westerns -- especially the low-budget B Westerns -- were simple morality tales. But not all of them.

Topping my list of favorite Westerns is "The Searchers," which, besides being a grand, wide-open-spaces adventure, is also a dark, complex story of racial hatred. My list also includes "The Wild Bunch," in which the hats are black and blacker.

So, it's not simple, direct stories that draw me to the older movies.

No, I think it is the directors and the casts, especially the supporting actors, that make older Westerns memorable for me.

Ford, George Stevens, Sam Peckinpah and a handful of other directors from their era could create images on camera that were as spectacular as anything Western painters Charles Russell and Frederic Remington could put on canvas with a brush.

I like this latest "3:10 to Yuma," but there's no image from that movie that sticks in my consciousness like Wayne's epic-sized silhouette at the end of "The Searchers," Alan Ladd's night-shrouded ride to a showdown in "Shane" or Holden and compadres' determined march to destiny in "The Wild Bunch."

Directors like Ford had a connection to the Old West they made into movies. Ford knew and talked to the aging lawman Wyatt Earp, and Ford's company of stunt men and character actors included hombres who grew up sun-baked and on horseback, men such as Yakima Canutt, Hank Worden, Ben Johnson and Harry Carey Jr.

You could tell by the way these men climbed into the saddle and stretched a horse out in a dead run over rangeland that they were the real deal.

But the men who had one foot in an older West and one in the movies were just about all gone by the late '60s.

Boyd Magers said that since we don't make Westerns regularly anymore, we don't even have a stable of savvy movie horses, horses that know how to act in a stampede or a running gunfight.

So, there it is. What I liked about the older Westerns is that they looked so real you could smell the leather and the horse sweat.

That's not the way it is now.

I've never been able to sit through "Young Guns" (1988) and "Young Guns II" (1990). I've tried. But all I see is kids playing cowboy.

(Reach Ollie Reed Jr. at oreed(at)abqtrib.com. For more stories, visit scrippsnews.com.

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