Chad Taylor

Cowboys


By way of civilised conversation with Paul Litterick, Stephen Stratford mentions that Wittgenstein was a fan of westerns. Who isn't? Simone de Beauvoir, writing in The Prime of Life:
I have mentioned elsewhere how Sartre steered me away from 'art films' and initiated me into the world of galloping cowboys and whodunits.
Sartre: always cool. She continues:
One day he took me to Studio 28 to see William Boyd in a classic Hollywood-type feature, the story of an honest, big-hearted cop who finds out that his brother in law is a crook. Big moral decision.
Simone de Beauvoir is probably being sarcastic here. Anyway:
It turned out that the curtain raiser to this effort was a film called Un Chien andalou, by two men whose names, Bunuel and Dali, meant nothing to us. The opening sequences took our breath away, and afterwards we were hard put to it to take any interest in William Boyd's problems.
The Prime of Life begins in September 1929. This is is early in the memoir and she is discussing films she saw over a two-year period. Although the synopses vary I think she's either talking about The Cop (1928) or Officer O'Brien (1930).

Boyd is most famous for playing Hopalong Cassidy, a character created in 1904 by author Clarence E. Mulford, a municipal clerk in New York. Originally written as a hard-drinking tough guy, Cassidy was cleaned up for later appearances in over sixty films and at least one TV series.
Boyd pic c/- Classic Images

Everything that walked or crawled at one time or another

Schickel: You had a long apprenticeship: all those years on Rawhide and then working in the spaghetti westerns. Think that was good for you?

Eastwood: Overnight stardom can be harmful to your mental health. Yeah. It has ruined a lot of people. Like Orson Welles. He comes right out of the box with a project that everybody's knocked out by, and then all of a sudden it's like... What do I do to follow that?

Schickel: There's a notion that Clint Eastwood, the great American icon, has somehow disappointed a significant portion of his constituency with this movie.

Eastwood: Well, I got a big laugh out of that. These people are always bitching about 'Hollyweird,' and then they start bitching about this film... Extremism is so easy. You've got your position, and that's it. It doesn't take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots coming around from the left.
Clint interviewed by Richard Shickel, Time, 2005.

The Horse is dead

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid is on now. Impossible to estimate how much I love a Western. I was raised on them by dint of the timeline: there was nothing else on. Five Card Stud was the first movie I ever left feeling depressed, and I wasn't even that old when I saw it. Since then that bad, sad-in-the-belly feeling has been my benchmark for all manner of art. If it's the Five Card Stud feeling then what I saw may not have been bad or good, but it moved me.

Westerns, like jazz and sci-fi, have become absorbed into the mainstream. I never enjoyed western novels, with the begrudging exception of Pete Dexter's Deadwood -- which is no relation to the TV series. But I refer to Westerns again and again, in Electric, in several short stories ('Running Hot & Cold' and 'Oilskin').

I grew up in the age of the counter western: El Topo, the Sergio Leone westerns (which we watched as the real thing and never considered ironic), John Wayne as the old guard -- gunfights as martial arts epic, a genre which my generation also understood. Prose was the stuff in between: the moody contemplation. I'm less certain now. But I still love the pics: the stretch of vistas, the changing climate, the rules.