“As far as I’m concerned, Americans don’t have any original art except Western movies and jazz.”—Clint Eastwood
The reigning misconception about Westerns in American cinema is that until about 40 years ago, the genre was dominated by clichéd stories of good guy sheriffs and cowboys defeating bad guy outlaws and Indians. Despite the proliferation of B-Westerns—quickly written and cheaply produced fodder for undiscerning audiences—there was a five-decade period in Hollywood when the so-called “Horse Opera” became the most important type of cinematic vehicle for exploring the fascinating historical complexities and contradictions of the United States and the American people.
Accompanying the Museum’s exhibition Ansel Adams: Celebration of Genius, the films compiled for this series showcase the American landscape in the tradition of the master photographer. These Western features—some justly celebrated, some unfairly neglected—most significantly demonstrate the artistic abilities of their respective “auteurs”: directors (and in the notable case of Val Lewton, a producer) who provided their Westerns with an identifiable sense of style and craft. While it’s hardly true that no Western ever resembled another, you’ll see that the diversity of these particular selections reflects the varied backgrounds of the filmmakers who made them, including Americans like Robert Wise, Howard Hawks, and Budd Boetticher, but also European émigrés like Fred Zinnemann, Fritz Lang, Andre de Toth, and Michael Curtiz, who brought their own unique sensibilities to the genre.
As Martin Scorsese has pointed out, frequently these studio-contracted auteurs used the seemingly conventional Western format as a vessel in which to “smuggle” in deeply personal notions about human behavior. One example is de Toth’s Ramrod: a Freudian ranch saga where the phallic imagery even extends to the title! But a hip psychological perspective was not something limited to small-scale pictures; Hawks’ big-budget, widely acclaimed, and fondly remembered Red River is an equally charged story of Oedipal conflict.
In this series, you’ll see still-fresh perspectives on familiar chapters in American history. The thoughtful and even progressive depictions of Native Americans in films like William Wellman’s Across the Wide Missouri will surprise many contemporary viewers who thought all pre-1970 Westerns endorsed Indian genocide. While we do offer one thick slice of ’70s revisionism in Philip Kaufman’s wonderful take on the Jesse James/Cole Younger outlaw gang, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, you’ll discover that Hollywood was always revising its opinions on the legends of the West as in Samuel Fuller’s sympathetic study of that “dirty coward” Robert Ford in I Shot Jesse James; or in Jacques Tourneur’s Wichita, where Joel McCrea plays celebrated lawman Wyatt Earp as a troubled soul who can’t escape his destiny as a killer.
Speaking of killers, “shoot-’em-up” is a term that Western aficionados find particularly offensive in its implications of mindless violence, but one needn’t look further than Anthony Mann’s suspenseful Man of the West to witness a more sobering reflection on the consequences to living a violent life. Likewise, we often forget the elegiac lyricism that Sam Peckinpah brought to so many of his projects, like Ride the High Country, because of the amount of blood spilled in his movies.
While some say this wrongly maligned genre is dead, these selections prove how vibrant and vital Westerns can be.
~Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department
Tuesday, May 1
High Noon (US 1952, 84 min.)
8 p.m. “>Wichita (US 1955, 81 min.)
Tuesday, May 15
7 p.m. Ramrod (US 1947, 94 min.)
8:45 p.m. Western Union (US 1941, 94 min.)
Tuesday, May 22
7 p.m. Terror in a Texas Town (US 1958, 80 min.)
8:30 p.m. Blood on the Moon
(US 1948, 88 min.)
Saturday, May 26
Red River (US 1948, 133 min.) Members admitted free.
Tuesday, May 29
7 p.m. Apache Drums (US 1951, 74 min.)
8:30 p.m. Across the Wide Missouri
(US 1951, 78 min.)
Tuesday, June 5
Virginia City (US 1940, 121 min.)
Tuesday, June 12
Man of the West (US 1958, 100 min.)
Tuesday, June 19
7 p.m. Ride Lonesome (US 1959, 73 min.)
8:30 p.m. Ride the High Country
(US 1962, 94 min.)
Tuesday, June 26
7 p.m. The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (US 1972, 91 min.)
8:45 p.m. I Shot Jesse James (US 1949,
81 min.)
