Two men approach each other on a deserted, dusty street of a wooden framed town. They have guns at their hips and spite in their eyes. They stop 30 paces from each other as a lone tumbleweed rolls between them. One draws, spurring the other to draw, too. One man falls and the other simply holsters his gun.
This is most people’s view of what every Western movie is like. However, Westerns go much deeper than testosterone-driven gun fights.
I find nothing more exciting than flipping through the channels and finding Clint Eastwood or John Wayne standing in defiance of some ruffian who’s a little too sure of himself. Men can really identify with that because they see someone standing up for what’s right and fighting the barbarianism of the West.
Many Westerns, though not all, are interwoven with a call for men to stand up and become more than just bandits, more than simply caught up on themselves.
The Western actually has two prevailing types of characters, though there are many different subtypes.
I will call upon the example of “Shane,” the 1953 masterpiece starring Alan Ladd as Shane. The movie begins with Shane wandering onto a ranch with nothing but a pearl-handled revolver and the suspicious air of a hired killer.
The people whose ranch Shane wanders onto begin to receive threats from a local land baron, wishing to claim their land for his own ambitions. Shane sticks around and eventually sees that he needs to lend a hand. He uses his guns for a cause outside of himself, aiding people being bullied by a selfish man.
The second type of person born out of the harsh Western landscape is someone who suffers from the rough wilderness of the West and falls into an outlaw’s life. “The Outlaw Josey Wales” offers the perfect example of a man who loses it all and turns to a life on the opposite side of the law.
The movie begins with Josey Wales, played by Clint Eastwood, plowing outside his cabin in Missouri with his son helping in a clumsy way, while his wife is cooking inside. Suddenly, a company of Union soldiers attacks them and everything goes black. Wales awakens to find his wife and child dead.
He soon joins a band of rebel guerillas that fight the Union even after the surrender of the Confederacy. They are outlaws, and the movie follows Wales on his path of vengeance.
Westerns follow the stories of people, not just faceless lawmen and bandits. The Western exhibits what some movies are lacking today, the struggle of a man to do what is right and what happens to his soul when he doesn’t.
The Western is not just for men; it is an accessible genre for women, too.
Throughout Western movies, women play a strong role in influencing the events. In the 1968 film “Bandelero!,” Raquel Welch holds her own along side James Stewart and Dean Martin.
This film, again, is a complex story about two brothers, one a criminal and the other a concerned brother out to save his blood from hanging, who escape to Mexico as Welch gets mixed in with them. Welch survives the two brothers in this film and shows that women can be more than a screaming voice tied to the train track waiting for her cowboy in shining boots to come to the rescue.
The Western genre displays the true plight of the human condition, showing the best and worst in men. It shows brotherhood and a house divided against itself. The Western shows men who follow what is right and men who only do what is bad, using a historic playing field to comment on society’s issues. In each film I’ve mentioned, you see problems that we face as a society.
Westerns can be funny or sad, joy-filled or filled with death. The versatility of Westerns shows the diversity of humans, and we should all give these great films a chance to entertain, as well as reveal general truths.
The Western does not hold that every man is good, or that any man is good, but that men have the choice to do what is right.
Don’t be hesitant to explore the Western archive. I’ve cited several good examples, but there are many more movies that delve much deeper into the topics I’ve touched. Watch them and love them.