Eastwood’s Mike Milo is a bit of a soft touch, kind to both animals and children. Wayne’s JB Books is still celebrated, a tough guy to be admired and a little feared. The difference between Cry Macho and, say, The Shootist, is that the very notion of the cowboy has changed. Since then we have had several superb subversions of the genre – the gay love story Brokeback Mountain (2005), the all-female Meek’s Cutoff (2010), and last year’s Cry Macho, the ultimate yelp of male existential angst with Clint Eastwood essentially reflecting on the hollowness of past glories. The last basic cowboy romp was Costner’s Open Range back in 2004, and even that felt like a throwback. Westerns today, however, when they are made, go out of their way to chastise any man in a stetson who might have a faint whiff of toxic masculinity. I remember being very excited about seeing The Searchers, John Ford’s 1963 epic, but actually being pretty demoralised by its bleak brutality. Shane (1953) sees Alan Ladd’s hero slope despondently into the sunset (“There’s no living with a killing”), while John Wayne’s swansong, The Shootist (1976), is all about hanging up your spurs, about the need to live a moral life. From the beginning, film-makers often tried to add psychological levels to the trigger-happy plots.
It’s not that Westerns didn’t have depth. Attempts to revive the genre – The Hi-Lo Country, Appaloosa – felt out of step with the times and failed to capture a new audience. In the early 1990s, films such as Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves and Eastwood’s Unforgiven were a sort of last hurrah for the Western as the unenlightened, unreconstructed male gave way to a more touchy-feely kind of hero. Stars were made – Clint Eastwood, John Wayne and Gary Cooper – and the archetype of the cowboy (strong, and silent, the sort of guy who shaved with a blowtorch) proved resilient.Īt some point, however, the cowboy fell out of favour. For 40 years, they were a crucial part of the Hollywood machine, box office gold with a commercial and cultural reach that was global. This was innocent soft play, inspired by watching basic shoot ’em ups and ignorant of the difficult history of the Wild West.īut cowboys were not just for children.
School lunch breaks would often involve chasing hapless classmates who had been designated the role of “Indian” (different times, as they say). For my birthday I received a cowboy outfit – which made me look more Village People than Michael Landon – and a paper-tape cap gun which smelled gloriously dangerous. I wanted to be the Milky Bar Kid (though I wasn’t blond enough). At some point in the early 1980s, I became obsessed with Westerns.