The American western must be the most adaptable of cinematic genres. As times have changed, so has the western, to reflect the world around it – which seems funny, in a way, since the figures at its core are so resolute.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” we reflect on the evolution of the western hero with music from four films.
“Shane” (1953) depicts a classic western archetype, the reluctant gunfighter, a drifter with a past, who pauses on his way to nowhere to defend a family of homesteaders against injustice at the hands of a greedy cattle baron. Mysterious, laconic, but with an unshakeable moral compass, Shane can be counted on always to do the right thing, resorting to violence only when he’s out of options. Alan Ladd’s mythic turn is supported by one of Victor Young’s best-loved scores.
Dimitri Tiomkin was once asked how a composer of Ukrainian origin could write such convincing western music. He responded, in accented English, “A steppe is a steppe is a steppe.”
Tiomkin would become the composer of choice for the American western throughout the 1950s, due to his distinctive handling of “High Noon” (1952). The success of its title song, “The Ballad of High Noon” (otherwise known as “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’”) – with its melody integrated into the orchestral score – provided a western blueprint for well over a decade. Tiomkin was honored with two Academy Awards, for Best Song and Best Scoring of a Dramatic Motion Picture.
In “High Noon,” we are presented with a very different hero from that of the “Shane” archetype, a hero allowed to show uncertainty. Gary Cooper’s Marshal Will Kane seeks help for the final showdown, but winds up having to stand alone. As Mark Twain observed, “Courage is not the absence of fear. It’s acting in spite of that fear.”
Clint Eastwood’s The Man With No Name, the anti-hero of Sergio Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy” of spaghetti westerns, is very much a product of the 1960s – cynical and self-serving, with his own moral code, lots of grays clouding up the black and white. The character was introduced in 1964’s “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), a western remake of Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo,” with a wandering gun-for-hire standing in for Kurosawa’s ronin, or masterless samurai.
The Man With No Name assumes a mercenary pose, his allegiance shifting with the most profitable wind. However, he is revealed to have his own sense of justice, unorthodox as it may be.
Ennio Morricone brought a fresh sound to this new kind of hero and earned international attention, which would intensify a few years later with his iconic score for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”
By the late ‘70s, the western as a genre appeared to be in its death-throes. But never underestimate the durability of a good myth. Even as galloping horses and dusty plains grew increasingly scarce on movie screens, the tropes and iconography of the western endured, transferred to the final frontier of space.
Following the success of “Star Wars,” in 1977, with its cantinas and space cowboys, shoot-‘em-ups and showdowns were, increasingly, set in distant galaxies, though, regrettably, often without much of the former “western” moral gravitas.
“Outland” (1981) is a gritty update of “High Noon,” transferred to a mining colony on one of the moons of Jupiter. This time Sean Connery plays the marshal, like Gary Cooper’s Will Kane, determined to do the right thing, even as he is left to stand alone against hired gunman. The score is by Jerry Goldsmith, who, earlier in his career, had written music for a fair number of true westerns, on both big screen and small.
I hope you’ll join me for four faces of the western hero, on “Picture Perfect” – music for the movies – this Friday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.
