Professor David Peimer
Cowboy Characters in the Movies: American Myths and Archetypes
Professor David Peimer - Cowboy Characters in the Movies: American Myths and Archetypes
- Okay, so thanks again, Hannah, for all your help. And hi, everybody, everywhere. It’s just to begin by saying just all deepest thoughts to everybody in Israel and around the world, my sister, her family in Jerusalem, and just everybody, wherever you are. And I’m not going to go into it now, obviously, but just, you know, our deepest thoughts in so many ways. Okay, so, as you know, we are are beginning with America and looking at it, some of us as outsiders, but having lived there, I lived in New York for quite a few years studying so, at Columbia. So, you know, not only going from a sense of that, but the outsider sense of America and some of the history for me through literature and film and culture. So going to start with this remarkable invention based on a little bit of reality, let’s say, of the cowboy character in the movies. And obviously the myths that are associated with this character, which I think are extraordinary, obviously for America, but globally. And the impact that such a myth can have in such a huge global context. And over a hundred years later, from 150, 160 years later, since the original idea of a cowboy came about historically. So I think it’s important to look at it because it says so much of our own times and the yearning, the mythical yearnings, which are romantic, idealistic of this kind of character, or the revulsion from this kind of character, depending on where one stands or a combination. So who is this cowboy? Who is the myth of this cowboy? And how did the movies and literature, novels, and newspapers and others take, pick up on this story and such that it became so embodied obviously in American culture and everywhere in the world, I would argue. What’s the reality of the wild west of the west of the times?
The reality of the cowboy compared to the image in the film. I want to just start with a little bit, what I’m going to do today is just a little bit of history, which gives us the context of the main 30 year period where the cowboys existed, 1865 approximately to 1895. So end of the Civil War, 1865 to 1895. Only 30 years when the cowboy as a character, as a real life individual came about and then disappeared in terms of reality and became showbiz, you know, and then afterwards maybe combination of kitsch and romantic idealism and nostalgia, maybe some reality. So I’m going to look at a bit of that and then go into just one play of Sam Shepard’s, the great American playwright, Sam Shepard, who to me with David Mamet are the two Great American playwright of the last decades after the Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams era. And of course there’s Tony Kushner and others as well. But one of Shepard’s plays called “True West.” And then I’m going to look at a couple of the movies and show some clips from the movies. And as we try to pull together some main ideas. Obviously there’s so many movies, there’s so much to say on this cowboy archetype and myth that it would fill, you know, many, many talks, let’s say, at minimum and books. So I’ve chosen specific ideas to share and specific clips from certain films to share together today. Okay, if we can go on to the next slide, please. So this is just an idea to start with. Some of the historical reality briefly, very briefly before going into the films. And this is a picture of some cowboys from the original, from that 30 year period I mentioned, the second half of the 19th century.
And there they’ve caught a fox, and it’s a very unromantic ordinary picture. There it is. On the other side, Rough Rider, King of the Wild West Cattle War. There’s part of the romantic image of it, let’s say, taken up in the early 20th century where not only Wild Bill Hickok, but you know, lots of entertainment shows and combination of kitsch and romance and nostalgia based on the cowboy myth. So reality, and then of course, the entertaining world, taking it up and travelling around the world, you know, the punch ups. There’s the buffalo. There’s the calves and the buffalo. There you can see the obvious. The reality and the myth. And what did film do to take this, to make it something so enduring? And for me, intriguingly fascinating and so resonant in our times as well, and globally such an idea. So for me, we can start with some of the ideas of the image of the Wild West first of all, just that very phrase, Wild West, which is of course an image of wild and nature which is waiting to be conquered by civilization inverted commas. And that also implies an ability of the individual to go out and be free from social constraint. The ideas of independence, free spirit, where social constraint and social laws are very minimal at best. And it’s wild. It’s nature and civilization in a mighty clash, creative and destructive together. And that’s part of the myth of the frontier that I think gets taken up in the films. A little bit more in the reality of that 1865 - 1895 period. The total number of deaths by gunshot in all major cattle towns between 1870 and 1885 in Wichita, Dodge City, et cetera, et cetera, all the towns we know from the films was actually 45. 45 guys were killed by gunshots in the 15 year period from 1870 to 1885 in reality.
That’s 1.5 per cattle trading season per year on average. It’s a tiny, almost irrelevant, historically irrelevant, minuscule number of guys killed in a gunfire. If you look back at local western newspapers of the times, they’re not filled with stories of barroom fights and sheriffs with little tin soldiers, little tin stars, and, you know, high noon sort of gun battles, but actually much more about property values, business opportunities, coming of the railroad, et cetera, et cetera. So this is the reality in which we find the idea of the frontier and the Wild West, and of course the cowboy. And I think it’s fascinating that reality compared to the myth that has come down. Of course, there has to be a thread between the reality and the myth and then how it was taken up post-second World War in cowboy movies. Obviously others before that, and then after that as well, which I want to touch on briefly here. So it’s a long time after the end of the cowboy era that this archetype gets taken up, and in reality it’s such a small group of people. And yet, you know, as Bertolt Brecht, the great German playwright and poet before the war, during and after, he escaped to America during the war, during the Nazi period, Brecht wrote, “In your art, aim for impact "rather than success and success may come.” So it’s the, for me, the impact that a small tiny group of guys who are, become cowboys have on an American and global imagination around identity and myth. So powerful. And, of course it started with the, with Mexican guys, you know, who were driving cattle. Okay, if we can show the next slide, please. I’m going to go into two of Sergio Leone’s films. He was an Italian.
He never went to America and made what became known as the spaghetti westerns, made Clint Eastwood’s career, started with Clint Eastwood acting, and then, and made, well quite a few, but two of the great great westerns of all time, “Once Upon a Time in the West,” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” And I’m going to show clips and music from both with the Ennio Morricone remarkable music. So we have an Italian outsider making what became known as spaghetti westerns in Spain, hiring an unknown Clint Eastwood at the time from America to come over who learns a bit of Italian so he can speak to Leone who barely speaks any English. And yet Leone is held up in so many American and global studies of the Western film as the ultimate western filmmaker together with maybe John Ford and a couple of others. So it’s fascinating that the outside of the outsiders is the guy who takes the western so much further in the second half of the 20th century. And I’m going to come down, and I’m going to come with some suggested reasons why he’s able to achieve it. What he does that speaks to a contemporary American and global audience. Before going on with Leone and others, of course, we have the strong silent type, which is John Wayne in “The Searchers,” and we’ll talk a bit about him in the great John Ford movie. What is interesting is that by the time we get to Buffalo Bill’s shows like that image I showed in the last slide, there are no longer Mexican Indian or Black cowboys, although it started, the origin were a Mexican what became cowboy, you know, herding the cows up north into America of the times.
And of course, very interesting fact was that 25% of the estimated 35,000 cowboys of those 30 year period, 1865 to 1895, about 35,000 cowboys approximately in that whole period. 25% were Black, who were obviously very recently freed slaves, end of the Civil War or had already come from the northern territories, northern states, you know, and were cowboys. 25% Black, fascinating. And, of course, the origin is Mexican. I want to give a very surprising quote from Henry Kissinger in 1972, and he said, “I’ve always acted alone like the cowboy. "The cowboy entering the village or city alone on his horse, "he acts alone, that’s all.” That’s Kissinger. In 1972, the Jewish refugee who becomes so important in American and global history rises to the very top. Kissinger identifies romantically or historically or both a bit with a cowboy image riding into town. What on earth is going on that such diverse characters around the world identify or imagine an identification with that myth. And I want to come to the central idea of what I want to say today is that the cowboy is the ultimate free, independent outsider who we can rely on to help us. Doesn’t do it for money, doesn’t do it for even glory or fame, but is ultimately the romantic, the individualist, the ultimate myth of individualism and the romantic era of the poets and others, you know, coming out of Europe, the romantic idealist, but who does it on his own and represents such independence and freedom internally and is the ultimate of the ultimate outsiders, acts on his own as an outlaw therefore, who a society, a group, a small town can mostly rely on to help them in times of need. And that is such a deep archetype, that is going way back in literature of all kinds. Roman, ancient Roman, ancient Greek, Shakespeare, wherever, all of it, it goes way, way back. That is the mythical archetype that I think is at the core of this outsider character and why so many ordinary people around the world can identify and why so many films have been made and will be.
Going back just to that last image as well, where I showed you that comic, almost comic illustration of, you know, one of the entertaining shows the early 20th century, Ralph Lauren expressed this in Chaps, his new men’s cologne. Chaps is a cologne. This was part of the advertising jargon of the Times. Chaps is a cologne a man can put on. It’s the West, the west you would like to feel inside yourself. And Ralph Lauren’s advertising jargon gets it. The West you would like to feel inside yourself, the ordinary guy who nevertheless will rise above, ultimate outsider, come to help, can be relied on, independent and free, and then will ride off into the sunset, having changed the world at least the little village or the community. The guy in the Marlborough ads, what does he suggest? Of course, and of course the Marlborough ads comes from nowhere and goes off nowhere, like in “Dead Man,” the brilliant Jim John Moose film with music by Neil Young, which I’m not going to show today. There isn’t time, but if any, it’s a remarkable one with a very young Johnny Depp. So after the Second World War, Sergio Leone revives the Western from Italy, later in Spain. What was so special? It’s a 19th century about the Cowboys. It’s a 19th century European dream, an ideal of the enlightenment, of the romantic poets, romantic writers in the literary genre, a utopia. And of course, in this period in Europe, anything from America seemed bigger, seemed more extreme, more dramatic, unlimited, the myth of the frontier. And its wild, its nature, not just in very common civilization. There are young guys who have neither wealth nor power. They represent independence, freedom, the little man’s right to make himself respected and who is self-reliant.
And that goes into, some of the Al Capone, some of the Al Pacino movies, some of the De Niro films, the little guy who demands a right to be respected and to be self-reliant, demands a bit of freedom, a bit of independence. And that’s very, that’s a European ideal coming out of the romantic poets, but it’s very different from a class, hierarchical obsessed society still in Europe, of course, even though changes have happened under Napoleon and others, but mostly advancement is still through lineage and family. It’s not through merit, you know, it’s a big contrast in what the little guy can do. The cowboy is the hero. Of course, he’s invented and must be a loner. Now that’s a crucial, they must be a loner, must be the individual, you know, that’s what I mean by self-reliant, not beholden to anyone. It’s the myth of an ultra individualist celebrating society, the ultimate. The old Europe is what I said, class lineage, family, family, lineage, hierarchy, family connections, not merit is how you can go up the tree in society. Very different. And so the story of this young guy on a horseback, a sheriff with a little tin star, the romance, the gunslingers, the poker cheats, the barroom brawls, the drinks slid across the table, you know, got to be gulped down in one gulp. And the men who got rich on the railways, the silver mines and other things. And the ultimate acquisition of land. Interestingly, it began in 1803, I want to suggest with the Louisiana purchase. President Thomas Jefferson buys the unmapped territory from the French, from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Mississippi to the Great Divide. And he opens it up for exploration, for expansion, which really means he opened it up for business. Come and go and make your buck, make your fortune. You know, let’s go way back to some of the great English literature.
You know, these individual, a great expectation of how you can make your fortune, you find your way in the world, you must. Then of course after this opening up of the Louisiana Purchase, 1803, and then much later after the Civil War, railway follows and then settlements. And the goal of turning the wild resources into capital, silver, untilled farmland is up for grabs. You make a farm, set it up, make your buck and make your stand. I’m not going to go into the story of Bass Reeves, it’s a fascinating story and an interesting, okay, film made about him. He was a slave from Arkansas in the 19th century. He became a deputy, first Black Deputy US Marshall. Fascinating story. Anyway for me, it’s also symbolised by Billy the Kid who on the one hand was called satanic Billy, but also is the American Robin Hood. He’s the combination, isn’t he, of both, and a fantastic combination and how myth can work to mould a resonant archetype through film or literature just through the popular imagination. Finally, one of the great ideas that ended the cowboy era around the mid 1890s was actually something quite surprisingly or apparently banal, the invention of barbed wire fencing. Together with the increased privatisation of the land to farm ‘cause you can’t move it through, if you’ve got barbed wire ain’t so easy anymore. You know, move the cattle, and of course the growth of the railroad, which so many of these cowboy movie show. You know, those are the three main ideas I want to suggest that help end the cowboy era, if you like. Originating in Mexico, nevertheless, American cowboys develop their own fantastic style, iconic images, reputation, and a glamorised lifestyle through film and literature and the early entertainment shows that travelled Europe and elsewhere, this rough, lonely, free cowboy image. And last point which is interesting is that of course the Civil War after the mid 1860s, the Union Army, it’s argued by a lot of scholars had largely used up the supply of beef in the north. So increasing the need and demand for beef, thus you’ve got to get the cows up into America, get them out. You’ve got to have food.
And by 1866 millions of heads of cattle were being driven up north, sold in the northern markets for as much as $40 per head. And that’s a fascinating connection to the economics of the time, the ironic opportunistic economics after the Civil War. And that during the winter of 1866, 1886 to 1887, thousands of cattle died because the temperatures reached a freezing point in parts of the West that also helped contribute to the end of the cowboy roaming era. And lastly, a tiny bit of trivia, cowboys made between an average between $25 and maybe $40 a month. Of course they needed the cash. Okay, if we can go onto the next slide, please. “Once Upon a Time in the West,” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” I’m going to show clips from those two of the most, the greatest iconic films of all time I want to suggest and also of obviously of the western cowboy genre. And I want to suggest why they’re so iconic. On to the next slide please. So John Wayne, in “The Searchers,” the great John Ford film, and “Stagecoach,” John Ford made 1939 and then “The Searchers,” 1956 post-war. This is such an iconic image of John Wayne because he is, of course, one of the ultimate early images of the cowboy chap that I’ve been saying, you know, and the tough, rugged, tough guy. Orson Wells said that he watched “Stagecoach” by John Ford 40 times in preparation for making “Citizen Kane.” “The Searchers” in '56, which really helped really make John Wayne’s career so much, shot on location in Monument Valley, tells the story of an embittered Civil War veteran, spends years tracking down his niece who’s been kidnapped by Comanches as a young girl. And we go through all the stuff of the story, and, you know, how this rugged, tough, loner individual who can be a leader of men with a moral cause, the outsider who we can rely on, the outsider who will do good and rescue the young girl from the barbaric savages inverted commas of the Comanches, you know, one of the ultimate images in “The Searchers.”
But what is fascinating in “The Searchers,” if you look closely at John Ford’s filming, it’s not just filled with rugged, you know, can do, I’m going to conquer, I can do whatever, I’m, you know, tough as hell. There is anxiety. There is fear. There are hints of vulnerability inside the character, you know, that John Ford has pushed into getting out of John Wayne. So we start to get a more complex psychological interpretation of the character than just the goodie and the baddie of some of the very early westerns. Okay, and, of course, John Ford, you know, “The Grateful,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” with John Wayne, James Stewart and others, you know, which I can’t go into now, but that’s, but “The Man who Shot Liberty Valance” is actually John Ford bringing the notion of greed into the Western. It’s about greed amongst these guys, not just, you know, the romantic idolised image of the outsider who comes to help everyone, you know, but how greed plays its way out through all these characters who try to make a buck. So Ford always finds something brilliant inside his filming to just make it more complex and add vulnerability and complexity. Okay, go on to the next slide please. “Unforgiven,” you know, the great film Clint Eastwood. And what’s interesting to me about “Unforgiven” is that it’s a story ultimately of these older gun singers, these older outlaws who already, they’re too old for the job of being a young cowboy. And, you know, all the physical demands of being a young cowboy, and the passionate demands. They’re old guys. They’re on the last gig, but why do they do it? They do it because they have a sense of remorse, and there’s a little bit of a hope that they can have self redemption. The motives are very personal. Yes, they’re to help do good. They’re the outsider trying to help and do good for the small group that they get together for the last gig. But they’re doing it for their own bit of personal redemption. It’s an inner need they have. It’s not for the great good of society. They don’t care about that. They care about their own internal need. As older guys reflecting back on their past sins in inverted commas and maybe hoping a little bit of redemption can come do one final good thing. It’s a very subtle, it’s a brilliant film for me of Clint Eastwood, is “Unforgiven.”
And he shifts the whole perception of that Western and the cowboy hero in these ways. If we can go on please. “Django Unchained,” you know, of course brings in the Black character who is not Bass Reeves, but you know, we see the Black cowboy who’s the equal, if not better than the white guy, you know, much better morally, but also very quick, sharp gunslinger and becomes an ace detective as a sheriff. You know, and so on and so on. Is Tarantino trying to bring in, I don’t think for PC reasons, but 25% of cowboys were Black. It’s a truth. So he’s trying to find some way in Tarantino’s typical brilliant style to bring it in. Okay, the next slide, please. Of course one of the great romantic movies of all time, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” that’s what I mentioned about Billy the Kid. You know, is he the satanic young, you know, hired killer or is he much more American Robin Hood? And in the film he’s much more, of course, you know, the contemporary, the Robin Hood archetype of that ancient wonderful legend. Okay, the next slide, please. “High Noon,” fascinating film because what happens, and again, it’s all these brilliant directors just shifting the perception of a cowboy bit by bit each time. And what he does here with the Cary Grant character in “High Noon” is the town turns against the good cowboy type, the outsider, you know, the Cary Grant character. The town that he’s come to help turns against him, and he has to do it on his own. Now that’s a fascinating shift, and he still goes ahead and does it on his own. The townspeople are the cowards, the scaredy cats, not going to help much, pretend bravado, but in reality just want to hide behind whatever the nearest little table they can find.
And they are as fickle as the weather, as fickle as the wind. They’ll come and go whichever way. And so our main character, our hero, cowboy hero has to decide, is he going to stick with these kind of people who couldn’t give a but as fickle as history and the wind, or does he have his own internal beliefs and morals that he will stick with? And he chooses the latter finally in “High Noon.” Fascinating twist in the story, which to me makes it one of the great cowboy films. Go on to the next slide, please. Okay, Sam Shepard’s, “True West,” the play. Shepard grew up, grew up of course in the rural areas, but very, very quickly, the play is about two brothers, Lee and Austin. And they’ve gone to stay in their mother’s house in Los Angeles. And the one brother has a commission from Hollywood to write the ultimate cowboy movie about the west and the frontier. But he is a city slicker. He’s got his family, his kids, you know, in Chicago. And he comes down to LA to write the screenplay. But he’s battling. He can’t write it 'cause he can’t emotionally identify with this so-called, you know, this free, independent spirit, everything I’ve said about the cowboy, and the heroes. And then his brother arrives, who is apparently this cowboy spirit who is free and roams around the area, goes in and out of towns and cities and has no connections, drinks, no family, a loner, the individual, dissolute type. So he appears to be a contemporary version of a cowboy.
And the two of them sit down, and the clash between the brothers is Titanic, which is Cain and Able, It’s a huge Titanic struggle between the two. And eventually the cowboy type brother ends up writing the script for the Hollywood producer. But he is so cynical, and he says in the play, “The West, it’s a dead issue.” In other words, he sees that it’s a romantic piece of nonsense. It’s a myth. It’s become a bunch of drunkards, a bunch of roamers, a bunch of loners, no family, no children, no security, financial or emotional, nothing to look after, nothing to look forward to, dissolute, loneliness, not just alone. And the other character represents everything of the middle class safe. You know, he’s a screenwriter. He’s got his job, his money, his work, his family, everything, et cetera. His house, his two cars and so on. So it’s a clash. But the cowboy, it’s shown as a dead issue, a dead myth. But the conflict between the two characters is brilliantly for me portrayed, and Shepard captures in his play so much of this debate around what is the West, what is that mythology of the freedom, the independence, the self-reliant, the ordinary guy who can get self-respect and, you know, make something of a mark in society. It’s captured in this conflict in the play. Okay, if we can go on please Tarantino on Sergio Leone. Okay, can you show it please?
When I first started filmmaking, there was all these like little like, you know, filmmaking expressions I didn’t know as, and everything. And so I would just kind of make up stuff. And that became the expression as far as the term was concerned on the set. And the biggest one was, I always knew how to say an extreme closeup, but again, I always like, I’m thinking in terms of, in terms of the effect I want. And so I’d say I want a Sergio Leone. Okay, so gimme a Sergio Leone here. Now when I’m saying Sergio Leone, that’s more important than saying an extreme closeup because anybody can give you an extreme closeup. When I say give me a Sergio Leone, I’m implying the feel. It’s just not an extreme closeup. It’s not just a frame,
Okay, it’s Tarantino, and all of them are so influenced. And we’ll see in a few minutes that connection between that closeup and the the long shot, which has become so iconic. And what he means by this, Tarantino, is how you can use the camera to get inside the mind of the character. Not just show it, but try to show the camera in the mind of the character. And Leone’s characters are so much more complex in a violent and morally complex world. The characters are usually lone wolves. They’re hardly ever shaved. They look dirty, sweaty, suggestion of criminal behaviour, the rugged loner, hard times in life. Of course, individual freedom with a terrible past. He brings in a haunted past, pardon me, he brings in skeletons in the cupboard there. Yes, there’s a hint of the criminal, but they’re ultimately romantic. And the phrase, the two phrases that sum up for me the Leone characters, “Cynicism is the last refuge of the romantic job, "I do believe.” And of course, “The ultimate outsider you can rely on.” The characters are morally ambiguous. They’re compassionate and brutal. His movies are a lot revenge tragedies like Shakespeare began writing and wrote a lot of and many others. And retribution, and this is I think the key point of Leone, retribution is emotion driven. It’s not conscience or religious or society driven. It’s an emotional internal reason. And that, for me is so contemporary. It’s not about conscience. It’s not about the morals of a religion or a society even. It’s a very internal motion based on a haunted demon of the past. Very personal. And that’s an entirely different shift of the inner life of psychology of a cowboy character compared to the John Wayne and the other, all the others from the past. Okay, and the other thing that he does, Leone, is that, which keeps audience’s tension, is that he conceals the hero cowboy’s identity, lets us know bit by bit, almost like a drip feed, bit by bit only. Conceals the identity. We get to know little bit by little bit. And then finally at the end we have a big shootout, and we maybe get to know more and more, all the pieces of the puzzle come together for making brilliance. Leone, by the way, turned down the offer to direct “The Godfather,” and it was then offered to a young Coppola out of interest. Okay, if we can show the next one, please. Scorsese,
Myself and my friends went to see “The Searchers” at the Criterion Theatre uptown. We had just graduated that day from parochial school, the eighth grade, and I guess we were 12 or 13 years old, and we treated ourselves to go see “The Searchers.” We came in in the middle, which was the usual at the time. You’d come back in, you’d watch the beginning again. And there it was in Vista Vision, you know, this extraordinary movie. And don’t forget, we had grown up on “Fort Apache,” “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” “Rio Grande,” the kindly John Wayne character. But here was 1956, the repression of the 50s, and things were happening. The movie business was changing. What you can say in a movie was changing too, and you had Stanley Kramer making certain kinds of very socially conscious films. You had Kazan doing that too, the late 40s, early 50s. And then you had of course Otto Preminger, breaking everything, which is fantastic. “The Moon is Blue” was the first, but then there was the incredible “Man With the Golden Arm” and all these sorts of things that were coming out. At the same time, United Artists were making these strange films too like “The Big Knife” and “Kiss Me Deadly” or like the great one, “A Sweet Smell of Success,” which is one of the best films ever made. And it’s coming out, and it shows this underbelly of the American psyche in a way, at that time, you know, journalists, a journalist or a gossip columnist who had such power. We’re coming out of the McCarthy era. And what happens, you go see a Western directed by John Ford, whom by that time I kind of figured out was this terrific director, and John Wayne in it. And by that time I put the two names together, when they were both on a film, it was really very interesting for boys particularly. And you sit there and suddenly this character, this lonely character comes out of the, out of the desert or something. And he’s absolutely terrifying.
I mean, he’s filled with all, well, he’s filled with, he just literally acts out the racism, the worst aspects of racism of our country, you know, and it’s right there. It’s right there. And you could see the hate. You could see it building. You could also understand how he could go that way. Doesn’t mean, it’s the old story. Travis has a fantasy. What makes him crazy and what makes another person not crazy is that Travis acts it out, you see? So this man is acting it out, and he becomes obsessive, like that extraordinary scene. And they’re sitting there, they’re sitting on their horses, and the birch trees and the snow is coming down. He says, “We’ll find them, "sure as the turning of the earth.” It’s like, and he’s a poet, you see, he’s a poet too. He’s a poet of hatred, you know, and he just shows us the worst part of ourselves that’s coming out of the late 40s, early 50s. He just brings it right up to the surface. So we have to deal with it. You really get his character in the moment when, when they unearth a grave of a dead Indian. And there’s some disagreement, they’re discussing. They’re arguing. Suddenly John Wayne says, John Wayne says, Ethan Edward says, “Let’s finish the job. "Do it right.” He twirls out his gun and fires twice shooting out the eyes of the dead Indian. And he says, “If he has no eyes, "he can’t go to the happy hunting ground.” So he’d be a wanderer within the winds for the rest of his life. So in a sense, what he’s doing, he hates so much that he hates beyond the grave, that he doesn’t want to give him the peace of his paradise. You know, he wants to kill the soul of these people. Why? You know, and he envies so much the soul that the young man has, Jeffrey Hunter. He just envies it so much. And there’s this wonderful, there’s this wonderful kind of love between the two of them, which of course comes, which of course brings up the line all the time, “That’ll be the day.” It always winds up with that. There’s these lovable parts of this character, Ethan Edwards, and that’s why when we were there, 13 years old, watching John Wayne like that. It was quite a shock.
Poet of hate. Isn’t that extraordinary? Scorsese gets it in one phrase, and it obviously echoes so much of our times. Okay, if we can show the next clip, please. The scene, opening scene from “Once Upon a Time.” You can hear Morricone music.
Frank.
Frank, stand us.
Did you bring a horse for me?
No, looks like we’re, looks like we’re shy of one horse.
You brought two too many.
Okay, if we can hold it there. We can freeze it there. Thanks, Hannah. And just hold it there for a second. It’s one of the great classic lines in all film making, you know, “Did you bring a horse for me?” We look back, we only see three. There’s three of the baddies. He said, “No, you brought two too many.” We know obviously what’s going to happen, but it’s the closeup and the long shot and how we go straight into Bronson’s face, but a part of it, the hat, perfect. The shadow, the face, the ruggedness, the loner. Everything I said about the cowboy image earlier, Sergio Leone gets in this frame, and then the backtrack of the long shot where the other guys are. And he knows Leone by this day. And he, this is, you know, going back 50, 60 years, 70 years he’s making it. And you know, there’s the Black cowboy, the two white, and here we get this image of the loner is so set up, and in this case against the bad cowboys, not the goodies. So, and he’s come for what? We don’t know. And his name is Harmonica. No other name in the entire movie. And he constantly plays the harmonica. The music is extraordinary in this and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Okay, if we can show the the next one, please. Just the at the beginning. This is the final scene of “Once Upon A Time in the West,” this scene with Claudia Cardinale. Okay, can you show it please? Sorry, the second final.
Hey, you’re sort of a handsome man.
But I’m not the right man, and neither is he.
Maybe not, but it doesn’t matter.
You don’t understand Jill. People like that have something inside, something to do with death.
Hold it there for a moment. So sorry, if we can go back to that scene just to freeze it there. Yeah, thanks. So what this captures for me so powerfully is something to do with death. It’s a phrase that’s gone down in film lore, L-O-R-E, and it’s basically, it’s a small town, and she’s had terrible things happen and has been helped by this cowboy character and the Bronson character. And she’s basically falling in love with the Bronson character, Harmonica. But we don’t know what his real motivation is, his name, where he comes from, anything. But he is this ultimate loner, free individual, rugged, tough guy who you can rely on as the outsider to come and help no matter what and to protect and look after the individual, her, and the small town and whoever. But it’s an emotionally driven reason that I was saying earlier that Leone brings into the character. It’s not conscience, you know, it’s revenge driven by emotion, and that’s it. And we’ll discover the reason why in the next clip of what happened that made him come back to the town and take his revenge and play the harmonica, and the music has this refrain all the way through of the harmonica. What I want to point out here is that it’s a story of a few individuals, and the revenge, you know, the classic revenge story, but it’s Shakespearean in the way of being so internally driven, not just as I say, for the good of society. He’s a mysterious stranger, and he’s up against the baddies. And we’re going to see Henry Fonda in the next clip. You know, the blue eyed Henry Fonda who was the ultimate baddie because of what he did to him, to the Bronson character as a kid. What makes it the great Western is the combination of the long shots, the zoom, and only the essential phrases that are needed. And every look and every glance adds meaning to the character and the story, takes it a step further. There’s nothing that is superfluous, and the lighting, the sweat, the colour, the shade, everything for me still evokes a remarkable film atmosphere. And this is very far from the original cowboy movies, and the original cowboy image. You know, this is into another whole world of a contemporary psyche of the ultimate individualist. Okay, if we can skip this, and we can go onto, there’s something in him that is of death and that has become, this phrase in that clip is so powerful in the film. Sorry, is there not one more of “Once Upon a Time?” There should be one other. The long scene. “Once Upon a Time in the West,” it’s this one. Sorry if we can carry on here. Hannah, Thank you. Yeah, from there. She realises it’s not going to happen. The love’s not going to happen. He’s going to go on.
Now I got to go. It’s going to be a beautiful town someday.
I hope you’ll come back someday.
Someday.
If we can hold it there. Everything, everything. what Tarantino meant by the Sergio Leone closeup, so much is read into a closeup, and he’s not scared to extend it a few seconds. Normally in so many films, it’s quick, da da da da da. You know? We read so much of the inner life of the character. As the great playwright, the Russian playwright Chekhov said, “If you tell me what a character wants, "I’ll tell you who they are and what they are.” We get what they want. She wants love. He wants her and love, but he wants and needs his independence, his freedom much more, the ultimate cowboy hero, but driven from an internal need. Can you just try and refind where, you know that link of that image of the hanging? Thank you. This is where we discover the truth. What the baddie Henry Fonda has done to a young Bronson character and Bronson’s brother. The flashback kicks in. Flash forward, just before the final gun sling. It’s all about going inside the mind.
Keep your loving brother happy.
This is the flashback of course. So the bad guy, the young Fonda has put the young Bronson’s brother on top of him with a noose around his neck. Those are two brothers there. Then older brother kicks the young Bronson down, so he can survive maybe at his own, the price of his own death in front of the young Bronson. And then we have the final shootout where the older Bronson kills the baddie. If we can freeze it here. So it’s a remarkable image, one of the great images in all film history, that image and, but it’s how Sergio Leone builds it frame for frame, for frame, theatrically, how he builds it and visually. Also how we go into the character. We are going to flashback, into memory, into feeling through those closeups all the time. And that’s a huge change from the origin of the Cowboy and the Western film. And that is so contemporary, going deep into the inner life, the inner psychology of the character, so deep. So it goes further than a retribution or a revenge tragedy movie. A classic, you know, sort of theatrical style going back hundreds of thousands of years. It goes further, and it becomes something much, much deeper in all of us 'cause that’s the brother and the son there, we can see. Okay, if I just want to, if you’ll forgive me, got a couple of minutes, and if we can go to the last clip please. I was going to play the Clint Eastwood, this one here where they’re spread out, we just hold this here. They’re spread out in this extraordinary image surrounded by cemeteries in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” where, nevermind the long story, how they’ve ended up in this very, very isolated part of the West. And you have a Clint Eastwood character and the other two, the sort of semi trickster clown character and then the baddie. And what happens here in the shootout happens, you know, in this big circle of rock, and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” the other great western of of Leone. And if we can go onto the next clip, please. The great music done by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra six years ago. This is the music of Ennio Morricone done by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” To show you how brilliant the classmate of Leone who was Ennio Morricone, how brilliant he was with the music. And if we can hold it there please. Thank you. Okay, I’m going to hold it there. And just to give you a little taste of what for me are some of the great films ever made, not only the westerns of Leone’s, John Ford and some of the others, as a bit of a taste of the remarkable adventures of the cowboy movie. Okay. All right, thanks very much. We can go into questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Monty, hi. Nobody ever mentions Clifford Odets. Yeah, I agree with you. Wonderful, wonderful playwright. Clifford Odets.
William, Cowboys an Indians, Lone Ranger. The Tonto, absolutely. Thanks, William.
Q: Lawrence, does that count the American Indians killed?
A: No, that would be, that’s a very important part of the story as you’re saying, Lawrence, but that’s another whole, I guess, set of talks to bring in that side of the cowboy movie.
Dennis, when we were nine and 10 growing up in South Africa in the 30s, brother was besotted by Buck Jones. Well, Tom Mix was my guy. Oh, great. That’s lovely. I was besotted with with Sergio Leone, and the some of the John Ford.
Monty, Clint Eastwood made his film, yeah, in the TV Western series “Rawhide.” Absolutely. And in “Rawhide” became very, I guess it’s globally that he became so known through the spaghetti westerns of Leone.
Myrna, Roy Rogers. Jean, Audrey and Lone Ray, absolutely.
Paula, old American TV shows “Have Gun Will Travel,” “Wanted Dead or Alive,” Young Steve McQueen. Yeah, the loner wanting to do something good and help and then leave. Exactly the classic story structure, Paula of of the classic Cowboy Western movie.
Rita, “High Noon,” a Gary Cooper. Sorry, I say Cary Grant. Okay, it’s Gary Cooper, of course. Thanks, Rita.
Ron, great to hear you, Ron. The Rough Riders, volunteers from Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico. Roosevelt was a high ranking officer, made the famous Spanish Civil War. Remember the Maine, the battles, exactly.
William Randolph Hearst, great. Thanks so much for that, Ron. Appreciate, hope you’re well.
Q: Lawrence, how much does the western and the romantic myth of the cowboy serve to rewrite history, genocide of Native American people, theft of their land?
A: Yeah, absolutely. I mean on, which is another whole part of the story. I’m just focusing here on the movies, and how the image of the cowboy, the invented myth has changed through the movies. I mean, that was the focus here, but absolutely the genocide or the killing, whatever word we want to use of so many of the Native American peoples. The stealing of the land, of course, because ultimately it was about the land being conquered, but that’s a little bit less of the direct cowboy image in the movies. That’s the slight shift.
Beverly, cowboys still attract attention. In Israel, we have a cowboy posse from Arkansas. Yeah, Trudy sent me that image the other day. It was just a little bit too late to get it onto this PowerPoint, but you can find it. I have it. And anybody can find if they want, of some young guys from Arkansas, and I forget one or two other states at the airport who had arrived in Israel to help work on the farms in Israel. Absolutely. I mean they’re dressed in contemporary, you know, Levi jeans, a Jewish American invention of course. Levi jeans and the cowboy hat and all that. You know, basically helping to work on the farms, guys helping to work on the farms, dressed in the cowboy image. Yeah, it’s a really, really lovely image, Beverly. Thank you.
Julian, “The Magnificent Seven.” Cowboy Samurai, absolutely. And it’s again, “The Magnificent Seven,” Yul Brynner and the others, you know, who ride into town knowing they will probably all die, but the outsider come to help that you can rely on, you know, free and independent choice. They come, they’re going to help the town survive, and they do, most of them will die. And then go off. And that’s the classic, “The Magnificent Seven,” wonderful adventure story of the Cowboy samurai, but contrasted with “High Noon” where he is trying to help the town, but they’re all too cowardly back off. So he’s got to do it on his own.
Rita, can’t think of cowboy western movies without Mel Brooks. I know. That should be another one. I could just spend a whole talk just on Mel Brooks’s “Blazing Saddles.” Absolutely, where he satirises it all fantastically.
Elliot, Sam Peckinpah “The Wild Bunch.” Yep, elderly riders facing in the future as the car comes to the Western. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. That’s one of the great movies of the western genre.
Monty, Shane with “Alan Ladd,” yeah, there’s so many that we can mention. I’m just trying to squeeze even into an hour. Can’t even get, you know, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” clips. You’re right.
Ron, hope you’re well. “High Noon” was also about McCarthyism, yes. Certainly that links to what he’s trying to do in the movie. Absolutely. Which I think Scorsese alludes to in that interview. I know he is talking about “The Searchers,” but he alludes to the poets of hate. And then how that, you know, there’s also this in “High Noon.”
Celine the Bonanza, ever learned how to cook. Yeah, who cooked, who cleaned, who washed, of course. Hannah, Roy Rogers and Trigger, yep.
Rona, I read that “High Noon” was a parable for McCarthy. Yeah, it was an absolute parable for the McCarthy era. And the link there is I think pretty clear, pretty important.
Ron, long before Ford, Eastwood, Tarantino and Leone, there were wildly popular westerns with William Hart, Tom Mix, absolutely. I just didn’t have time to go into those as well, so I focused on the later ones. But you’re absolutely spot on, Ron, thanks. Hillo, “High Noon” was written McCarthy. Yeah, Carl Foreman was one of the Hollywood 10, and the Gary Cooper character was standing up against the fear of it, exactly. John Wayne called it un-American. Yep, absolutely. Thanks for that, Hillo.
Q: Lorna, is the Cowboy versus Indian conflict just a myth?
A: No it’s not, but it’s, I think less the cowboy. It’s more, you know, the Union Army and many, many others. We can go on and on and on. You know, it’s a conquest of the land. It’s pushing, you know, colonisation, conquest. Spot on, Lorna. It’s, remember cowboys are 1865 to 1895 really. And they really originate, as I said, from Mexico to bring the cows up after the Civil War. And so it’s a whole different function and world they’re living in compared to the huge attacks on, you know, inverted commas Indians or the indigenous people and all the ethnic groups there.
Jason Robards, yeah, Jerry, thanks.
Ron, there are great many spoofs of the cowboy story. “Some like it Hot,” exactly, the last line of Billy Wilder’s great film. Played a number, yeah, exactly, great.
Rita, today is Veterans Day in the US and in the UK. In Canada to honour all the fallen. Exactly, and there’s been the huge, the big march in London as well. There’ve been enormous, quite a lot of political tensions and clashes around those two marches today. On Armistices Day as it’s called in the UK, which we can get into whole discussion on 'cause I think it’s actually a really important moment today. In terms of what’s going on with Remembrance Day and what should be going on. Perhaps Kissinger was influenced by Karl May’s books which were popular. Maybe It’s a great point. But it’s fascinating to me that a person like Kissinger would identify himself with a cowboy coming in, the ultimate outside of the outside. Kissinger, the German Jewish guy who escapes, and, you know, gets to the new world. And, you know, that he makes that link to the cowboy, Rita, the Morricone music gives chills. It’s so haunting. It’s absolutely haunting and stunning. I agree entirely. It’s brilliant. And the way that Danish orchestra do it with this, with the voice and the sounds, I think it’s so beautiful. And you can imagine those prairie images, the cowboy film images, you can imagine it all, you know, his combination, his creation of that sound is fantastic.
I agree, Richard, completely. Gillard, my grandfather’s, my grandmother’s uncle James Stern, a Jewish immigrant from Germany, worked as a cowboy in the West. That’d be fascinating to hear about Gillard. That’s really interesting, in the early 1900s. Rita, thank you.
Ron, Great American songwriters used cowboys. Gershwin, yep, Rogers and Hart, Cole Porter. I know. It’s so deep. James Stewart. Yeah, I mean it’s so deep. You know, for me it’s like the Oedipus myth maybe in ancient Greece. You know, the story of Oedipus in, or the story of not Oedipus, sorry, the story of Ulysses. It’s so deep. It’s Ulysses, it’s Achilles. It’s, you know, in the Romans, you know, there is so much that is so deep because it’s a small guy standing up for something that he believes in, not just for money or payback or fame or glory even, just doing something. And the belief the small guy can make something of his life, and the outsider who ultimately rides into town to help. And, you know, you can rely whether you turn your back and are cowardly like in “High Noon” or not, you know? It’s the ultimate outsider who will come and help. You know, it’s such a deep, deep archetype I think in many cultures. But it’s got all the cultural clothing in the American image in that ultra individualist context, which I think is amazing. To make it such a contemporary, iconic image for us.
Lee, while not a film, me and my uncle, the Grateful Dead version, oh yeah. evokes the cowboy West Wildridge image. Absolutely. Beth, the Bronson character reminds me of the Japanese that, yeah, learn samurai. I mean there’s a huge influence also of Kurosawa and exactly and the samurai. It’s very similar. Save the townspeople from the baddies and then move on. That’s “The Magnificent Seven.” They come in, they save the baddies and move out. It’s in “The Dirty Dozen.” They come, they don’t save the goodies, but they get rid of the baddies, and then they have to try and transform and, you know, maybe move on some of them. It’s that classic story, you know, and it’s, yeah, it’s just, it’s a mythical archetype.
“McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” Lieb, Lee, yeah, absolutely. “Rawhide,” “Maverick,” “Bonanza,” yeah. They’re all Maverick of Tom Cruise, Bonanza. They all feed absolutely off this iconic myth, I think. And so powerfully. That’s why I think it is so rooted, obviously in American culture, American literature and film, in the American imagination. But in the world, the global popular imagination. I think it’s so powerful for these reasons. And there’s that hint of danger and the outlaw, hint of criminality also, Billy the Kid, you know, straddles of moral ambiguity, as I said.
You know, is it the Robin Hood, the saintly Robin Hood? Or is it, you know, the just the Baddy killer or maybe both? Susan, thank you.
“Hopalong Cassidy” and the Lone Ranger.
Sandra, “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” by Altman, yeah. And I love Robert Altman’s films. Absolutely, thanks, Sandra.
Hillary, you don’t mention how sexist they are and racist in terms of Native Americans. There’s so much that we can go into of the treatment of the female characters, the Native American characters. I know, you know, the baddie landowners who put up the barbed wire, the rail road owners and so on. There are so many others, which would take another couple of talks, but they’re absolutely part of that very big, big story. All I can do in an hour is just choose one focus, you know, and to tell that story. But I agree with you, you know, Hillary.
Rita, yeah, and Black history, et cetera. Yeah, fully aware. I mean, you know, you could just do it on “Django Unchained,” you know, just, or the Bass Reeves movie, you know, just on one or two black cowboy characters. Absolutely, and many others. “Blazing Saddles.” You could do it on the satire. Absolutely, Erica.
Sharon, thank you. The hanging scenes, you realise things do not change. No, and we also realise, as you say, Sharon, is not only things do not change, but, you know, movies influence art. Art influences, sorry, art influences reality. Reality influences art. How they constantly take and feed off each other. You know, without a doubt. You know, it’s not by chance that the extraordinary amount of propaganda coming out at the moment with the obvious, you know, of what’s going on. The extraordinary amount of propaganda from so many, so-called reputable, you know, TV programmes is fascinating to watch and extraordinary in how effective they are in propagating images. Cause of course, you know, as in the old cliche, an image is worth more than a thousand words. But how they propagate endlessly. And you can shape the narrative in the contemporary jargon through that, you know, and hell of a lot of it’s propaganda one way, you know, whichever. And the same with this, you know, one can use the cowboy image or the hanging scene, as you say.
Karen, a significant other family in the 1880s lived a hundred miles from robbers. Oh, okay. A significant other’s family. Oh, okay, great. Thank you, Karen.
Jill, the built guy in the parody of “Blazing Saddles.” Absolutely. Myrna, the ultimate Canadian cowboy was Lorne Greene. Who can forget? I mean, it’s even the Dallas series, you know, with, you know, the. You remember the Dallas series of oil and in Texas and, you know, JR Ewing, who killed JR Ewing and all of that. It’s all built on the Cowboy rancher mythology.
Q: Anna, would you say something about the East German genre which flipped the conventional narrative?
A: Now that’s really interesting. Yeah, Anna, that’s really interesting because there’s also the, for me, the brilliant Wim Wenders film, the West German filmmaker who at the time West German, called “The American Friend,” which uses the, the American Cowboy. Everything I said about the Cowboy today, the independent free spirit, but puts it into a West German context on the train and all the rest of it. What he does. It’s also played with there, you know, all these ideas about the, you know, the individual, the Cowboy image. In “The American Friend,” which I think is one of the great movies, very underrated by Wim Wenders, which is a very contemporary version of everything we said today about the Cowboy. Jill, thank you. Okay, thanks.
John, “Gunsmoke.” Of course. I agree.
Lee, any comments or links between, yeah, there are so many links between the great westerns and the Great Samurai, because I think the Samurai, and I’m going to be very, very reductionist here, but actually the Samurai have a similar function in a lot of Japanese mythology. And I say mythology, not only history, but it’s the mythology that comes from the history that the Samurai films are based on. Absolutely, you know, the small group who will save, you know, the small village, the town from the baddies, and they don’t do it for money or even for reward. They do it because of something inside them. And it may be a societal belief or a code of conduct amongst the Samurai. And what I think Leone and some of the others do is make it very individual psychology. That’s the reason they do it. The Samurai films, it’s usually a code amongst the Samurai. And so they are driven out of honour to do it. And their belief in honour being a primary virtue, which is a group belief in the Samurai films.
Please compare these heroes with Don Quixote. This is a fantastic question. These are brilliant questions. I’m going to have to pass that, Linda, because it’s a fantastic idea of yours, but that’s another whole talk.
Jill, Cleavon Little, costar cowboy in “Blazing Saddles,” yeah, Devon. Devon, yeah.
Jean, “Hopalong Cassidy,” Cisco kid, yeah, great. Barbara, thank you.
Betty, perhaps a couple of cowboy genres. Yeah, the singing cowboy, Roy Rogers and so on. Yeah, absolutely. I think, because for me, and the reason why I suggested it originally to Trudy and others was because I think it is so iconic in American culture and through and as I said during the talk, getting away from a whole lot of constraints and strictures and restrictions in Europe that it could open up for a whole different interpretation of another kind of archetype to emerge, which speaks to us so powerfully today, I think. And in these times, of course, that’s why these movies keep being made. Jack was the archetype of Jung. Yeah, absolutely. And they are, because they go back thousands of years when you read ancient literature from whether it’s the Greeks, the Romans, the Italians, or you know, whoever, Shakespeare, even.
Helen, Spencer Tracy. Yep. Sandy, Tom Selleck quickly. Yeah, exactly. Hillary, difference is that the Samurai were from nobility. Most were, and the other point that I mentioned is that they were part of a group who had a code of beliefs or values. So and honour and loyalty being absolutely crucial. Whereas what I’ve tried to show with Leone being different to the others and even Gary Cooper in “High Noon” begins it is it’s for an internal reason. No other reason that the character does what the character ends up doing in the film.
Okay, and with the haunting sounds of Ennio Morricone in my mind right now that I can never forget, hope everybody takes care and has a great rest of the weekend. And all thoughts again to friends, families of all of ours in Israel and everywhere. And Hannah, thank you so much. Cheers.