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8 PART ONE: Westerns – hatred and discrimination. What happens to a community when these things exist.’2 A Burst of Vermilion eventually reached the screen some five years later as One-Eyed Jacks, directed by Brando himself when Stanley Kubrick departed after a couple of days’ shooting. The film was no laughing matter, and Brando has less reason to be ashamed of it than he has for many of his pictures since On the Waterfront. In 1961, One-Eyed Jacks accorded with a new pattern which had developed in the western. Some brooding, over-indulgent sequences, a strong undertone of masochism – these could be, and were, attributed to Brando’s direction. But in viewing this study of the relationship between two former friends – one who retained his integrity as an outlaw, the other who revealed his weakness and hypocrisy through taking a job as lawman in a settled community – no one thought the elaborately detailed characterisation, the carefully worked out symbolism of cards and bullets, the loving creation of mood and the situating of people in the landscape, the atmosphere of dark pessimism and the suggestion of homosexuality, particularly new or remarkable. And anyway the film’s considerable length was punctuated by set-pieces – a bank robbery, two jail breaks and several gunfights – which were exemplarily staged enactments of familiar events. Clearly a certain innocence had been lost: the children had got hold of Dr Spock and the nursery would never be the same again. A Catch-22 situation developed in which the charge of fausse naïveté could be brought against those who attempted to recapture a lost simplicity, while the too knowing or ambitious would be accused – not always unjustly – of being pretentious, decadent over-reachers. Nevertheless, moviegoers and filmmakers alike have continued to carry in their minds a firm notion of the archetypal western where everything goes according to a series of happily anticipated moral and dramatic conventions – or clichés. Perhaps there was a time when this was so, though it is certainly no longer true. What created this feeling (and has sustained it) is the way in which westerns good, bad and indifferent have always tended to coalesce in the memory into one vast, repetitious movie with a succession of muddled brawls in bar-rooms, tense and inscrutable poker games in smoky saloons, 2 ‘The Duke in His Domain’, Selected Writings of Truman Capote (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1963), pp. 417–18.
page 23
Politics, etc. and the Western 9 gunfights in empty streets, showdowns among the rocks with whining bullets, cavalry pursuits and Indian ambushes, mysterious strangers riding into town in search of vengeance or redemption, knights errant galloping to the relief of the oppressed. This simple image of the ‘traditional western’ provides the moviemaker with a model upon which to ring variations and the audience with a yardstick by which to judge the latest product. The late Frank Gruber, a prolific author of western screenplays and novels, is responsible for the widely quoted dictum that there are only seven basic westerns: the railway story, the ranch story, the cattle empire story (which is the ranch story epically rendered), the revenge story, the cavalry versus Indians story, the outlaw story, and the marshal or ‘law and order’ story. While it is true that the vast majority of cowboy movies can be accommodated within these pigeonholes, Gruber’s Law would tell us little about the tone or character of any individual picture so deposited. For this reason a form of critical shorthand has grown up over the years which testifies to the problems writers have faced in indicating the kind of cowboy movie they are talking about. An incomplete list, which at least suggests some of the apparent variety within the genre, would include: epic western, sur-western (or super-western – a French coinage to describe large-scale works which betray the genre’s essential simplicity), adult western, satirical western, comedy western, chamber western, liberal western, sociological western, realistic western, anti-western, psychological western, allegorical western and, most recently, spaghetti western (seized on by TV commercial makers to sell spaghetti hoops) and paella western. These are epithets to pin down the character of a movie. A further set of terms exists to locate, in time and space, action movies that resemble cowboy pictures but cannot strictly be regarded as westerns. At one end of the time scale there is the ‘pre-western’ which deals with the coonskin-capped frontiersman armed with a flintlock musket and travelling by foot in the late eighteenth-early nineteenth century, the Fenimore Cooper Leather-Stocking figure. At the end of the first half of The Alamo (1960), John Wayne as Davy Crockett abandons his coonskin cap and appears on the mission battlements wearing a black Stetson to join his fellow heroes in a monumental grouping and stare out stoically at Santa Anna’s Mexican force. The siege of the Alamo was in 1836, and marking as it does the death of two of the last legendary frontiersmen and the beginning of Texan independence from Mexico, we can regard this as a reasonable

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8

PART ONE: Westerns

– hatred and discrimination. What happens to a community when these things exist.’2

A Burst of Vermilion eventually reached the screen some five years later as One-Eyed Jacks, directed by Brando himself when Stanley Kubrick departed after a couple of days’ shooting. The film was no laughing matter, and Brando has less reason to be ashamed of it than he has for many of his pictures since On the Waterfront.

In 1961, One-Eyed Jacks accorded with a new pattern which had developed in the western. Some brooding, over-indulgent sequences, a strong undertone of masochism – these could be, and were, attributed to Brando’s direction. But in viewing this study of the relationship between two former friends – one who retained his integrity as an outlaw, the other who revealed his weakness and hypocrisy through taking a job as lawman in a settled community – no one thought the elaborately detailed characterisation, the carefully worked out symbolism of cards and bullets, the loving creation of mood and the situating of people in the landscape, the atmosphere of dark pessimism and the suggestion of homosexuality, particularly new or remarkable. And anyway the film’s considerable length was punctuated by set-pieces – a bank robbery, two jail breaks and several gunfights – which were exemplarily staged enactments of familiar events.

Clearly a certain innocence had been lost: the children had got hold of Dr Spock and the nursery would never be the same again. A Catch-22 situation developed in which the charge of fausse naïveté could be brought against those who attempted to recapture a lost simplicity, while the too knowing or ambitious would be accused – not always unjustly – of being pretentious, decadent over-reachers. Nevertheless, moviegoers and filmmakers alike have continued to carry in their minds a firm notion of the archetypal western where everything goes according to a series of happily anticipated moral and dramatic conventions – or clichés. Perhaps there was a time when this was so, though it is certainly no longer true. What created this feeling (and has sustained it) is the way in which westerns good, bad and indifferent have always tended to coalesce in the memory into one vast, repetitious movie with a succession of muddled brawls in bar-rooms, tense and inscrutable poker games in smoky saloons,

2 ‘The Duke in His Domain’, Selected Writings of Truman Capote (Hamish

Hamilton, London, 1963), pp. 417–18.

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