The Books of My Life: Westerns (French)

 

Philip French's little book Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre (New York: Oxford University Press, Cinema One series, second edition, 1977) first appeared in the Cinema One series in 1973. A revised version with an "Afterword" appeared in 197. A further edition, with an added section entitled "Westerns Revisited" and published by Carcanet, appeared in 2005. The additions and republication of the monograph over the years suggests that French's little book is an important and seminal work on the Hollywood Western and it is.

French's monograph on the Western was one of the earliest scholarly works on the Western. Seminal books, particularly in French, had appeared before French's monograph on the Western but French's was one of the first book length treatments of the genre in English. 

 After an introduction French, in five interrelated chapters, explores various aspects of the post-World War II Hollywood Western. In chapter one French sets out the historical sociology of the post-World War II Western delineating, after briefly exploring the artistic and literary influences on the post-World War II Hollywood Western, the ideological forms the post-WWII Western too. According to French the the post-WWII Western came in the following forms: the Goldwater Western (for instance, Rio Bravo and The Alamo), which focuses on old Western frontiers and little on landscape, the Kennedy Western (for example, High Noon), which explores new frontiers and is characterised by landscapes that dwarf its characters, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Western containing Kennedy content and the Goldwater style (for instance, Two Rode Together), the William F. Buckley Western, which is characterised by the Kennedy style and Goldwater content (for example, the Budd Boetticher Westerns), and, if tentatively, the Nixon Western (for instance, Chisum). In chapters two through four French explores the characters and character types one finds in post-World War II Hollywood films, its heroes, villains, women, and children, the Western's representation of Indians and Blacks, the Western landscapes, Western violence, and the Western representation of poker, which, with its bluffs, poker faces, and incipient violence French sees as a microcosm of the Hollywood Western. In chapter five French explores the post-Western of the 1950s through early 1970s with their greater degree of psychologisation and the mudding of the Western hero and villain. An "Afterword" takes the story of the Western and the influence of the Western on contemporary vigilante films like Death Wish and Dirty Harry from 1972 to the mid-1970s.

While finding French's ideological typology of the post-World War II Western interesting, I think Peter Biskind's smilar delineation (was he influenced by French?) in his book on Hollywood films of the Fifties, Seeing is Believing (1983), of liberal, conservative, radical left-wing, and radical right-wing Hollywood films, ideologies he links to characterisation, is more useful and fruitful, if not without its problems as Jonathan Rosenbaum noted in his review of Seeing is Believing, than French's because it is more generalisable. While I agree with French that films have a socialisation and resocialisation function, I wish he had explored this aspect of the Hollywood cinema more, something that Jeanine Basinger's books do more extensively, because, as French notes, the West and the frontier became central symbols of America's myth about itself and Americans' myth about themselves. This, of course, that may not have been possible in a monograph of two hundred pages. Despite these criticisms, I really enjoyed re-reading French's work on the post-World War II Hollywood Western. I got a lot more out of it this time around. It remains a book that anyone interested in Hollywood films and the Western must read.