[75 years ago this week, the first network TV Western, Hopalong Cassidy debuted. Few genres have been influential for longer or across more media, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy Hopalong and other Westerns—add your responses & analyses in the comments, pardner!]
On AmericanStudies
contexts for three stages in the Western icon’s filmography.
1)
Spaghetti Westerns: Clint Eastwood had been acting on TV
since the mid-1950s, and his first significant role was in
a popular TV Western that debuted a decade after Hopalong Cassidy, Rawhide
(1959-65). But it was his film work toward the end of that show’s run, in a
trio of mid-1960s films from Italian director Sergio Leone—A Fistful of
Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, The
Bad, and the Ugly (1966)—that truly cemented not just his stardom but his close association with the
genre. I think those “Spaghetti Westerns” exemplify the stereotypical
layers to the genre and its gunfighter protagonists that I highlighted in
yesterday’s post, not only in their actual details, but also in the very fact
that they were made in Europe by a director who had apparently never
visited the United States. There’s no one way films have to be made nor one
person who can make them, of course, but I would just say that Leone’s American
West has a lot in common with Tintin’s.
2)
Revisionist Westerns: Eastwood continued to
make those kinds of iconic Western films for another decade-plus, further
cementing that overall association as well as other specific echoes of
characters like Wister’s Virginian (such as the Confederate veteran protagonist
of The Outlaw Josey Wales [1976]). Then he took about a decade off from
the genre, and when he returned to it, it was to direct as well as star in one
of the most famously
revisionist Westerns, Unforgiven (1992). No other Eastwood film is
quite the same as that one, but I would say that the next two he directed and
starred in could also be defined as revisions of Western character types and tropes:
A Perfect World
(1993) and The Bridges
of Madison County (1995). What links all three films is both a
recognition of the costs of violence and a willingness to complicate and even
soften the gunfighter protagonist stereotype, each elements that hearken back
to layers of earlier texts like The Virginian that had been largely absent
from the 60s and 70s versions.
3)
Extending Stereotypes: Eastwood hasn’t made
any films in the subsequent three decades that explicitly qualify as Westerns,
but I would argue that a number of the films he’s directed during that time
have unfortunately returned to and reified Western stereotypes in contrast with
the more revisionist efforts. Topping that list would be Gran Torino
(2008), with Eastwood playing a laconic violence-prone community-savior
who literally makes finger
guns at the film’s black-hatted villains. A decade later, Eastwood directed
and starred in The
Mule (2018), a film in which he plays a war veteran who is forced to return
to his violent past due to outlaw crime lords who would not be out of place in
the Wild West. And I would also put American Sniper (2014) on this list—Eastwood
did not star in that one, but directed Bradley Cooper in a role that updated a number
of gunfighter stereotypes for a War on Terror setting. None of these films
are simplistic, but I nonetheless find it telling and frustrating that toward
the end of his career Eastwood seems to have returned to some of those foundational
Western tropes.
Last
Western tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Westerns you’d analyze?
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