Le Western

The cowboy, the most durable and popular figure on the U.S. screen, has until recent years generally been dismissed by critics and film historians as an error of popular taste. But in French critical circles, the cowboy has long been regarded with deep solemnity. Many a longhaired Frenchman believes that the western film is Hollywood's finest achievement, a kind of national folklore in the making. In a flood of recently published books and articles, Europe's highbrow critics have been soberly examining the western and discovering in it virtues and complexities which even its most loyal fans never suspected it possessed.

There are eight "great themes" for westerns, according to Critics Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout and Andre Bazin. whose book, Le Western, ou le Cinema Americain par Excellence, is the most exhaustive of the new studies. The big themes (based on a study of 150 westerns): 1) the birth of a nation, 2) gold prospecting, 3) the frontier and the great plains, 4) the linking of east and west, 5) men and beasts, 6) the War of Secession, 7) Indian warfare, 8) representative westerners.

Social Document. Writes Critic Bazin: "The Corneilleian simplicity of the western scenario has often been parodied. It is true that it is easy to detect an analogy to Le Cid: same conflict between love and duty, same knightly deeds, resulting in the virgin consenting to forget the insults to her family . . . But this comparison is ambiguous: to mock westerns by evoking Corneille is also to point out their grandeur, a grandeur perhaps close to puerility, even as childhood is close to poetry . . . Everyone, children and simple men, recognizes the naive grandeur of western movies. Epic and tragic heroes are universal . . . The trek west is our Odyssey."

But the postwar western is gradually moving away from "naive grandeur" toward social documentation and psychological detail, according to Jean-Paul Sartre's monthly Les Temps Modernes: "The 'neo-western' has developed in the direction of ambiguity . . . Under the double influence of 'black' films and psychoanalytical films, westerns have enriched themselves with a clinical description of the half-crazy desperadoes who roam the desert." Examples: Rawhide Ranger (1941) and Coroner Creek (1948).

Accepted Symbol. "On a less dramatic level," says Les Temps Modernes, "one liked the personality of Shane, that nostalgic outlaw of a Racine-like modesty, who troubled for a moment the wife of a farmer . . . The search for the everyday, true incident is hard to reconcile with the epic violence of the westerns, and here again there has been a radical change: the superman has been superseded by a 'new type' of cowboy, who hesitates, who suffers and who is afraid." Examples: The Ox-Bow Incident, Gun fighters, The Treasure of Sierra Madre.

Swedish Critic Harry Schein, writing in The American Scholar, finds the new-style westerns full of political as well as psychological overtones: "High Noon, artistically, is the most convincing and, likewise, certainly the most honest explanation of American foreign policy. The mythological gods of the western, who used to shoot unconcernedly, without any moral complications worth mentioning, are now grappling with moral problems and an ethical melancholy which could be called existentialist if they were not shared by Mr. Dulles"

Even the once blameless sex life of the cinema cowboy has been coming in for some sharp scrutiny from European critics. Critic Schein detects a sadistic dislike for women: "In The Outlaw, the young man, after prolonged abuse, humiliates the woman by choosing, in a tossup between her and a fine horse, the horse. In a priceless homosexual castration fantasy, the father figure of the film shoots off the ear lobes of the young man when he dares to defend himself. The pistol in westerns is by now accepted as a phallic symbol."

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