The Western Top 10 is the toughest for me. As some of you may know, while I'm hardly Richard Slotkin or Jane Tompkins, I write, teach, and think about this genre on a regular basis, and, as a result, my views are not only fairly strong, but well-informed. And, where certain well regarded classics are concerned, they are also iconoclastic. This is probably nowhere more obvious than with The Searchers (1956), the film that tops the AFI list.
This film does not resonate with me on any level. I have never found the ending credible. John Wayne does not portray Ethan Edwards with any of the complexity needed for his embrace of Debbie (Natalie Wood) to ring true after his 118 (or so) minutes of hard, racist ranting about Native Americans and his intent to kill her. I also find the photography and production design to be garish without purpose, and for all of its superficial sophistication about Native peoples, the talk of ritual, the use of indigenous language, it only serves to perpetuate the myth of white mastery. After all, it is white men who “know” and understand Native peoples, not the other way around. Native Americans are no less the brutish savages in this film than they are in Stagecoach (1939), but at least that film doesn't pretend to be anything but pulpy fantasy (indeed, it remains my favorite John Ford/John Wayne Western). And the landscape changes in The Searchers drive me crazy. Even though no one seems to actually leave Texas, the weather and land change in absurd ways during the course of the quest. Where are these people supposed to be?
I fully recognize that I am a freak when it comes to this film, and as a result, I'm not going to make a pitch for taking it off of the list, although I do think that it needs to be demoted. The other film worth arguing about is one that I would knock of the AFI list, and that is Shane (1953).
My biggest block with this film is Joey (Brandon de Wilde). The whining, oh the whining. Gah. I can't get past it. At the same time, I don't think that Alan Ladd makes for a convincing hero; he has too much of a “contemporary” presence. Van Heflin's Joe Starrett is virtually the same guy as Dan Evans, Heflin's character in 3:10 to Yuma (1957), and much less interesting. As menacing as Jack Palance's black hatted gunfighter is, he's also more hollow than the norm. And, yes, I understand the subtext about the Frontiersman and his lack of place in civilization, but that theme is punctuated in many a film without Shane's weaknesses.
The selection of Cat Ballou (1965) still seems like some kind of a joke, but it is perhaps typical of an industry that has wanted to bury this genre for the past five decades or so. Red River (1948) made no impression on me when I saw it. Is that a reason to take it off the list? I don't know, but I would have no shortage of replacements if it is.
Part of the difficulty with these lists is how the boundary is drawn around “American” film. I can see where Sergio Leone's movies with Clint Eastwood might be precluded as “American”, but, given some of the other selections on other lists, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) seems perfectly fair game to me (it was, after all, co-produced by Paramount, not to mention featuring a group of notable American actors in all of the lead male roles). Were it up to me, this film would certainly be on the list, and possibly even on top (I might just elevate High Noon, 1952, to the top spot depending on how much of a classisist I want to be).
Undoubtedly, The Wild Bunch (1969) is Sam Peckinpah's magnum opus, but that's hardly a reason to make it his only film on the list. Ride the High Country (1962), for example, is an early elegiac Western that explores Western archetypes in more interesting ways than most of the films on the list from its same general period. The AFI's definition of the Western - “a genre of films set in the American West that embodies the spirit, the struggle and the demise of the new frontier” - also seems to leave room for a movie like Lone Star (1996), or, and I know I'm pushing it here, Serenity (2005) (and you can scoff at this if you want, but Joss Whedon's movie re-imagines the Frontier and the supposed line between savagery and civilization in interesting and vital ways; I think that it certainly makes a more original contribution to the genre than does Shane). Two other recent Westerns for which I have a great deal of affection are The Claim (2000) and Open Range (2003).
I'm not sure I'd end up placing all of the films listed above on a reconstructed list, but I do think that there is a tendency to treat the Western as a “dead” genre, killed at some point in the 1960s, with an occasional raising from the dead, and it's not so. It's also a genre with a fairly well-rehearsed canon. Placing The Searchers at the top of a list like this is much like putting Citizen Kane (1941) at the top of the AFI's ur-list: it's almost reflexive.
Link to introduction.
Originally posted on:Short-Circuit Signs