Westerns Schmesterns
I’ve never cared much for Westerns. I’m not sure why. Yes, there are a few I’ve liked. I liked Unforgiven and The Quick and the Dead. I liked The Professionals and I appreciate Leone’s Dollars Trilogy to a point. I just don’t want to see those sorts of movies very often.
When I was growing up Gunsmoke was on TV every week. My parents watched it (I think) and I avoided it. In child parlance, it was booooriiiiing. I suppose Bonanza was also on during that time but I wasn’t exposed to it. We ate dinner at Ponderosa steakhouse from time to time but that was as close as I came.
For some reason I was decked out in cowboy chic as a kid and I have the pictures to prove it (see above). I had the Lone Ranger cap guns and gun belt complete with silver bullets (going for $400+ today) and I played with them often. I had cowboy quilts on my bed. I had Zorro toys. I think I should like westerns but I don’t.
What’s funny is the fact that I loved Star Wars when it rolled around (still do). It had a lot of the same elements of the classic western but rolled up in a fantasy/sci-fi wrapper. Take your classic western, add spaceships and lightsabers (and bathrooms and showers presumably) and you get something like Star Wars. Add crazy cars (but not the bathrooms and such) and you get Mad Max. Add the Nakatomi building in place of a whole western town (and reinsert said bathrooms and some expensive clothing) and you get Die Hard. Yippee-ki-yay, etc.
I liked the attitude but not the aesthetics. Maybe I just burned out because I had more fun playing at cowboys than watching them. Maybe it’s because of my name. I recently learned that Lon Chaney Jr. appeared in a series of westerns as a character with my name who also went by the name “The Black Ghost.” Hmmm. That has a ring to it.
I think it has more to do with the fact that westerns just sorta played themselves out and their makers couldn’t figure out how to make them feel new again. Even the best westerns of today (not the hotel chain) have this problem. The westerns of the 50’s had so much cheese ladled on they might as well have been pizzas. The 60’s brought us Sergio Leone’s vison of the American west and the whole thing felt exciting again…right up until the point when The Good the Bad and the Ugly ran over three hours and had more of those BIG shots that 60’s filmgoers were looking for. A Fistful of Dollars was great because of lines like, “I don’t think it’s nice, you laughin’,” not because of beautiful cinematography.
The westerns eventually ate themselves. They showed us all the horses and towns and brothels and sheriffs a bajillion times and then someone thought, “HEY! I should make all of those things legit, in the cinematic sense.” That meant making them look good in that prestige-picture way. SERIOUS FILMMAKING. Bleh. Give me For a Few Dollars More anytime.
March 13th, 2010 at 3:41 pm
Love the 60s-era duds in the pic. Be honest – you went back in time just like Marty McFly in BTTF3, didn’t you? Probably bought your own “Colt Peeeeeeeezmaker” while you were in 1885, didn’t you?
I grew to like westerns later in life, but not the schlocky 1950s-60s era TV shows that so many seem to revere today. Give me Silverado any day.