The Western as Ethnographic Barometer in Gunsmoke and Deadwood

James Arness, the actor who portrays Marshal Matt Dillon in all twenty seasons of Gunsmoke (CBS: 1955-1975), had an interesting take on the ideologies behind the genre’s success. “A cowboy wasn’t tied down to one place or one woman,” he told TV Radio Mirror in 1964. “Nowadays people just don’t seem to have the intestinal fortitude to live the way they’d like. That’s why they tune in on Westerns, to get a breather from stifling conformity. They don’t want to see Matt Dillon—or any other lawman—come home and sweep the kitchen” (McBride 64).

While, perhaps, coy or playing to character, the assertion is odd given the nature of the television medium. The American Western, more than any genre, reflects the morals and cultural feelings of the era in which they were produced. However, unlike the film industry’s predication of rugged individualism dependent on the trope of cowboys riding off into the sunset, during the heyday of the television Western, heroes needed to be domesticated in recurring roles.

Arness’s ideologically ambiguous statement does any amount of cultural work. It presumes the television Western’s narrative is coded with rigid masculinity as well as insinuates its audience is (and its network would allow its program’s target to be) exclusively male. It ties (contrary to the ideological view of the very show he stars in) law and morality to non-conformity and self-government. It suggests the masculine ideal is too individualistic for community yet offers it through a social medium.

Though fragments of these assumptions share some truth with the early Western in print and film, the television Western largely subverts these assumptions through both their serial format and consumerist ideologies. Textual analysis of the first seasons of Gunsmoke and Deadwood (HBO: 2004-2006) will examine how the television Western, though employing traditional genre tropes and themes, does not perpetuate absolute ideologies but is elastic, reflecting the cultures and formats in which they were produced. As paranoid, commercial artifacts of the Eisenhower-era Cold War and the lingering shadow of post-9/11, these programs’ use of Western language exposes an ethnological rift as the culture shifts from the perspective of victor to that of victim in terms of foreign policy.

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Love Me Tender (1956, Robert D. Webb)

It is fitting that Presley's humble beginning in the film industry fell on such an unpretentious work.  A slight but never insignificant western, it is the only Elvis film in which he didn't receive top billing and the only film that had the guts to knock him off.

Love Me Tender is a rare beast in that it benefited from compromise.  Initially titled The Reno Brothers, the studio changed the title due to the overwhelming success of the lead single.  The change of title not only affords the film the right to stray farther from its source material (and distance itself from Rage at Dawn, a film about the same outlaw game that came just one year earlier), it allows tone to be more breezy.  The film kills off Elvis's character, Clint Reno the honest(er) younger brother of Confederate outlaw Vance (Richard Egan).  It's as if Elvis's presence alone gave license to present the Reno family as a victim of circumstance rather than bloodthirsty bandits, but the chemistry between the love triangle (grounded by an understated Debra Paget) smooths over any anachronistic burr.

Early test audiences didn't respond too favorably to the King's on-screen death.  An original ending had the remaining members of the family solemnly gathering over the dinner bell with grim faces and an irreconcilable past.  A second ending was filmed in which Clint was spared, robbing the film of any consequence.  Miraculously, a third ending was constructed as appeasement which reconciles the family (consistent with the justice and loyalty of the West), while immortalizing Elvis who sings the title song as a ghost, superimposed over the family as they walk away from his grave.  This ending gives resonance to Elvis's first non-rock ballad and sincerity to its ghostly echo.

And it shouldn't work.  The ending forces the audience into a spiritual realm that would seem to run counter to the cynical wasteland to which our antihero Vance returns.  Couple this with the fact that the historical Reno Brothers were ruthless murderers and pillagers whose life ended in lynching-- hardly a tale studios would deem worth of an empathetic reimagining in 1956.  But despite any vices and hangups in the picture (indeed, in Presley's own life), the man (and this movie) can't be separated from his faith.  And the film is more engaging because of it.  Any temptation to spiral into melodrama or despairing rigamortis of noir is softened by an unyielding warmth of spirit.  Ghost Elvis gives his signature grin over the closing credits and, though his mother was sobbing at the premiere, we wouldn't have it any other way.

Webb's direction takes on a similar warm, unaffected aura, pleased to let the drama unfold at its own pace, and disinterested in getting in its way.  Sure, we see the occasional shadow of camera equipment, but that never obscured Otto Preminger's vision.  It seems condescending to refer to Presley's acting as "quite good"-- as if back-stepping into the assumption that it shouldn't be.  And certainly there was a backlash from the media initially: one Time review in 1956 had the ill-advised gall to call Elvis (whose film producers banked on his erotic, if not homoerotic appeal) a "sausage".  But much initial criticism sounds like it comes from a Goug Doodman with his fingers in his ears, complaining that he can't understand the lyrics to rock and roll.  Even Presley hated that it called for so many songs (and at this point in his career, it was only four), but the precedent was being set early:  Elvis was a celebrity inseparable from his music.  Initial criticism had him riding the coattails of Richard Egan, Debra Paget and Mildred Dunnock.  As if there were any question half a century later as to whose legacy was more lasting.

Love Me Tender is an often simple, always pleasant little feature that stands on its own legs but knows its place. It's a film that Elvis owed a lot to, and which owed a lot to Elvis.  Without him, it would be all but forgotten.  -- ***/four stars


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Hud (1963, Martin Ritt)

Hud is not really a Western.  Sure, it takes place in Texas and Paul Newman pokes some cattle, but there is a change in the frontier.  We're not moving west to fulfill our manifest destiny; in fact, there is nothing to fulfill.  Hud takes place at the end of an age: one that looks upon the past with a deep, ephemeral nostalgia.  Classic Western trope shares the mindset of many of Bruce Springsteen's characters: while the good ol' boys may butt heads with impending mechanization, even the letter of the law-- however perverted in its minutia-- doesn't stray too far in its intent from their grounded values of honor and sacrifice.  At the end of the day, a torch still burns, fueled by a rear-view optimism.

In Hud, the torch is extinguished and all the world is ash.  Hud is a parable of manifest destiny imploding on itself: the vast expanses don't represent freedom and glory, but foreboding and treachery.  A worldview has shifted in Paul Newman's Hud Bannon:  man, in all his least-common-denominator path of achieving carnal desires through lack of discipline, has becomes the measure of all things and "the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner," so long as its his.  Even his father Homer (the brilliant Melvyn Douglas), a man of deep principle, approaches death's door on his hands and knees on a dirt road in the black of night.  Stuck in the middle is Hud's nephew Lonnie (Brandon De Wilde, once doe-eyedly seeking a savior in Shane), who concedes with a whimper that the old man is not in a better place, "not unless dirt is a better place than air."  If his resolve weren't bleak enough, it is all the more devastating that Hud's antagonist was embraced as counter-culture anti-hero and De Wilde's own life ended like James Dean's.

If Cormac McCarthy yens for this same nostalgia with a postmodern bent anigh to nihilism in No Country For Old Men, Larry McMurtry (author of Horseman, Pass By, upon which Hud was based, as well as the similarly-themed The Last Picture Show) won't succumb without a fighting chance.  And as such, can be unabashedly preachy in a film full of memorable monologues.  One of Homer's cows dies of foot-and-mouth disease and, like Job, his entire fold and livelihood must be exterminated.  Hud suggests he quickly pawn the herd off up north, out of sight, out of mind, washing his hands of any epidemic that might ensue.  As Homer defies such irresponsibility, Hud becomes increasingly reproachable, going so far as to try to declare Homer legally incompetent in order to secure his own inheritance.

For Hud, looking out for number one has become a bondage he can't shake.  "If you don't look out for yourself," he informs us early on, "the only helping hand you'll ever get is when they lower the box."  The alienated anti-hero accepts death as the outcome, but fails to see that his reaction to it informs his emptiness.  The film's central metaphor relates the emptiness of Hud's existence to the infected cattle.  Hud is a parasite who takes what he wants ("The only question I ever ask any woman is 'What time does your husband come home?'"), by force if necessary.  Homer's housekeeper Alma (Patricia Neal, in an Oscar-winning performance) falls victim to Hud's drunken demands-- a man to whom his family has become but a stumbling block.  There is no relationship for Hud, and he wouldn't have it any other way.  In a world where "you don't value nothing," everything is worthless.  Hud is the answer to everything in Hud, and everything is morally gray and sparse.  The striking cinematography and minimalist score brilliantly follow suit.

No, Hud is no Western.  Even where revisionist additions to the genre question the tropes of honor and manhood, there is not revision without "vision".  Newman's Hud, in fragile moments, waxes nostalgic about his dead mother and brother before drinking away the memory.  It tragically reminds of Patricia Neal's series of strokes that hit her in 1965, rendering memory problems when she returned to the screen.  The Western is a genre of memory, Hud is a story of forced forgetfulness; a cautionary if unashamed tale of the price one pays in refusing the cost of love.  Paul Newman's rebellious on-screen persona makes it look effortless, but its a Greek tragedy whose antagonist abides alone in a self-made prison and, conversely, whose good men are helpless against entropy.  Not, however, without submitting to a higher standard.  -- ****/four stars

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