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Rounding up the Old West

May 15, 2025
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The foundational mythology of the United States belongs to the cowboy. An argument can be made for the Founding Fathers, but they are understood more as history than as myth. And by myth I don’t merely mean something that isn’t “true,” but as a mental model that we have absorbed as the definition of what makes us American. We are more John Wayne than we are John Adams. 

Like many of us, I grew up on Westerns, although because I am in my 70s, my foundational Westerns were those from the 1930s recycled in the 1950s on television. I grew up knowing who Ken Maynard was, or Buck Jones. Back then, TV stations were starving for content to broadcast, and the pile of old Westerns filled the Saturday morning hunger. Those younger than me likely didn’t have such a cinematic indoctrination. Later TV Westerns became their version. 

But, since I wrote a blog piece about TV’s Gunsmoke, (link here) I have been thinking about Westerns and their role as our national psychic subconscious, and about how the fictional version differed from the historical. And what is more, what that shift means, culturally. 

It has not always meant the same thing, and the evolution over time describes the changes in America’s perception of itself. 

I believe there were distinct eras of Westerns, that have evolved over the past two centuries. These versions of the West overlap, and all of them have been present from the beginning, or near enough. But the preponderance of each defines each era. 

The West began in upstate New York with Natty Bumppo, or Hawkeye, as he was known in The Last of the Mohicans, and gave us the prototype of the rugged individualist. He morphed into Jim Bridger, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and various mountain men living in the wilderness. 

Jim Bridger; Joseph Walker; Jim Baker; Jim Beckwourth

These heroes played out the myth of how we conquered a vast wilderness with rugged individualism and tenacity. It grew into the myth of Manifest Destiny.  

After the Civil War, when economic exploitation of the West began in earnest, with mining and cattle industries, the cowboy took over, with adventurous exploits popularized in a thousand dime novels. Certain names begin showing up with regularity, including Buffalo Bill, Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, Belle Starr. These elided into the early Western movies, including The Great Train Robbery (1903) and Across the Plains (1911), which starred Broncho Billy Anderson, the first cowboy movie star. 

And a split in the myth. On one hand, you had William S. Hart, who attempted a level or realism in costume and plot (matched with a high level of sentimentality), and on the other hand, you had Tom Mix, the show-biz cowboy all duded out with fancy kit. 

The difference was between movies made for general audiences and those aimed at children, mainly young boys. Mix brought glamour to the Western, with fancy cowboy duds and sparkling saddlery to his horse, Tony. 

That split continued into the sound era with hour-long Saturday matinees  with Hoot Gibson, Bob Steele and dozens of others, including John Wayne, who made scores of cheap oaters and even took to trying out as one of the singing cowboys that were briefly popular. 

Through the 1940s, the cowboy movie became stereotyped with stars such as Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy. There was little attempt at realism. Sometimes they actually fought Nazis. 

These were the cowboys wearing shirts with crescent pockets and shoulder fringe, and often sported a six-gun on each hip. 

All that carried over into the television era, with a skein of popular Westerns mostly aimed at kids: The Lone Ranger; The Cisco Kid; renewed popularity of Hopalong Cassidy.

Meanwhile, there were always Westerns made for grown-ups, too. From John Ford’s Stagecoach and Howard Hawks’ Red River, through the Budd Boetticher films with Randolph Scott. There was Shane, and High Noon, and Winchester ’73. 

Initially, the lone hero version carried over into the TV era, also, when  The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, with Hugh O’Brien, kicked off a decade of evening programing with cowboy heroes, such as Cheyenne, Maverick, Have Gun — Will Travel, Bat Masterson, and The Rifleman. And, of course, Gunsmoke. You can name a dozen others. The market became glutted and then, suddenly, it seems, Westerns were shot dead. 

There came a cultural shift. Maybe it was the Vietnam War, maybe it was fatigue with the cowboy cliches, but when Westerns eventually did return to the silver screen, they took a dark turn. There had been revisionist Westerns before. Indians weren’t always the bad guys. But starting in the 1960s, with films such as Ride the High Country (1962), A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and the subsequent Spaghetti Westerns, Hang’em High (1968) and ultimately, The Wild Bunch (1969), the new Western was brutal, filled with low-lifes and lots, and lots of grime. 

“McCabe & Mrs. Miller”

The trend continued through McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) to Unforgiven (1992). Even the more positive films like those from Larry McMurtry novels or with Tom Selleck attempt a more naturalistic view of the times in which they were set. 

Of course, there’s a good deal of overlap in the eras. It’s a question of what predominates in what decade. There have been revisionist Westerns from the earliest years, but this view of the overall shape of the Western in American consciousness over time is, I believe, basically accurate. 

What is not accurate, though, are the Westerns themselves. Admittedly, they were never really intended as realism: They are myth and they are national epic. Our equivalent of the Iliad or the Kalevala. Even those attempting fidelity to historical fact ultimately underline the myth more than the fact. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” 

 

Actual cowboys

As a kid, I loved the cowboy movies, but as an adult, I am bothered by them. I try to remember they are not meant to be documentaries, but crystallizations of myth, and you don’t expect myth to be realistic. You don’t ask Hercules if he has a mortgage. 

Yet, there are sore thumbs that stick out for me in almost all filmed Westerns; four of them — aspects that scream out: “No, this isn’t the way it was.” And perhaps that shouldn’t matter, but these things make it difficult for me to appreciate Westerns the way I did when I was a kid. 

I have four primary gripes. They are: economy; geography; ethnic diversity; and language. Let’s take them in order. 

Two movies, same location

Towns exist in Western mainly to stand in for civilization. It’s where the people are — the people largely left undefined. They stand in front of general stores or the saloon while the heroes and villains play out the ritual of the gunfight. The same set can be used and reused in many pictures, even as diverse as Westworld and Blazing Saddles. The Western movie town is just the stage set for the plot.

But actual towns are built for economic reasons. There was some industry that needed workers and the workers needed services, and so, towns grew. But in most Western movies, there doesn’t seem to be any functioning economy. There are references to cattle and ranches, but aside from giving rustlers something to do, they barely show up as economic factors.  

While the standard movie Western town has its saloons, its general store, its hotel and restaurant, its stable and blacksmith, there is never a thought to where its residents get the money to pay for their drinks, meals, gingham or horseshoes. A town doesn’t grow for just no reason. 

Even Dodge City, in the 1870s, when Gunsmoke is supposedly set, had a mayor and council and a police force. There would also likely have been an elected sheriff for Ford County and a judge, to say nothing of at least two lawyers, advertising on the front page of the Dodge City Times in 1878. 

Sometimes it is downright preposterous. Consider Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter. Its town is built on Mono Lake in California with no economic base at all — just a hodgepodge of buildings erected near a salty lake that cannot even provide drinking water for the residents.

“High Plains Drifter”

Or, one of my favorites, the supposed farm built in Monument Valley in Arizona, in The Searchers. The idea of such a farm is ludicrous — not made better because the landscape is supposed to stand in for Texas. 

“The Searchers”

 Again, there is a reason towns were built where they were. On rivers for shipping; near mines to provide supplies and provisions; along railroads to ship cattle; near army forts to unload soldiers of their pay.  

As seen in the movies

 My second beef with Westerns is its geography. Most of the Western tales we have historically took place in the most boring landscapes imaginable, in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Texas. 

What the actual working West looked like

But such places are not very photogenic. And so, we move them lock, stock and barrel to the Rocky Mountains, the Desert Southwest or California’s Alabama Hills with the Sierra Nevada in the background. 

“Gunsmoke”

Even Gunsmoke, set in Kansas, sometimes shows a mountain range off in the distance sighted down the main street. (I’ll discuss Dodge City in more detail in Part 2 of this essay, to follow). Matt Dillon is sometimes shown accompanying a prisoner, for instance, across the Rocky Mountains or into the desert, hundreds of miles from his jurisdiction. To say nothing of the months it would take to ride there on the back of a horse. 

In the 1950 film Broken Arrow, Jimmy Stewart rush back from Lordsburg, N.M., to Tucson, Ariz., and somehow manages to pass through Sedona, Ariz., on the way — a detour of several hundred miles. Clearly Sedona was more photogenic than the Wilcox Playa or Benson. 

Wilcox Playa (left); Sedona, Ariz. (right)

As in so many Westerns, the West is just a mental landscape, where any buttes and saguaro cactus will do as a setting. 

As a sidenote, related to the geography: Cowboys stranded in the desert reach for their canteen and take a slug of water, or else hold it upside down so we can see it’s empty. I lived in the desert for 25 years and can tell you water is a big deal. Driving through Death Valley one July, I became so dehydrated I developed a headache and was beginning to become disoriented. I had to drink a full gallon of water to recover. A few swigs from a canteen is basically meaningless. 

The third and fourth distortions are perhaps less important, but they nevertheless stick out for me when I’m watching an old Western. There is the lack of ethnic diversity and the matter of speech.

Cowboys: Vanilla, Native American; African American

It’s been documented that about a quarter of all cowboys were African-American. They don’t much show up in the movies (John Ford had his Woody Stroud and at least that was a nod to the fact). And another 20 percent were Mexican and many were Native American. In the towns, segregation was normal, even if the working cowboys out on the plains were mixed. Virtually all the laundries and restaurants in the Old West were run by Asians, mostly Chinese. Other ethnicities were notable factors in various troubles, as the Irish clashed with the English. 

Finally, there is the language spoken in 19th century America, which was much more formal than we take for normal now. In the Western movies, the actors tend to speak in the manner current when the films were made, and that changes over time, just the way the hats went from 10 gallons to three pints, and the brassieres just kept getting pointier. 

The evidence from letters and from novels written during the period tell us that people spoke in longer sentences with fewer contractions. At home, you might relax when talking to your spouse or children, but in public, you attempted to be correct. Even the illiterate miners and farmers spoke more formally. 

This last bothers me less, because if Randolph Scott or John Wayne spoke as they would have in the Old West, the audience might laugh, or at least yawn. How often have you heard parodies of Ken Burns’ Civil War, when they read letters soldiers wrote home? What was normal speech in the 1870s sounds utterly archaic, even stilted, to our ears. 

Next: Part 2 — A look at the historical Dodge City

Revisiting “Gunsmoke”

January 23, 2024
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When I was a wee lad, in the 1950s and television was about the same age, I watched the images on the screen flash by with no critical eye. It was all the same: old movies, kiddie shows, talk shows, variety shows, sitcoms — it all wiggled on the toob and that was enough. 

If there were any difference in production quality, or acting ability, it made no difference. I just watched the story, or listened to the music. The very idea that there were people behind the camera never occurred. I didn’t really even think about there being a camera. Things just appeared. I suspect this is true for most kids. It may be true for quite a few grown-ups, too. 

There were certainly programs I liked more than others, but I could not have given any reason why one and not the other. Mostly, in the daytime, I watched cowboy movies and cartoons, and in the evening, I watched whatever the rest of the family was watching. 

In all that, there were a good number of Westerns. There were those for the kids, such as The Lone Ranger or The Cisco Kid, and later, those in the after-dinner hours aimed at the grown-ups — Gunsmoke or Death Valley Days. There were also the daytime screenings of old Western movies with such stars as Buck Jones, Hoot Gibson, Bob Steele or Johnny Mack Brown. 

I mention all this because I have recently begun watching a series of reruns of old TV Westerns on various high-number cable channels, seeing them in Hi-Def for the first time. I have now seen scores of original Gunsmoke episodes and my take on them is entirely different from when I was in grammar school. I can now watch them critically.

It’s been 70 years since I was that little kid, and since then I’ve seen thousands of movies and TV shows, served a stint as a film critic, written about movies, and introduced films in theaters. I have a different eye, and understand things I couldn’t know then. 

And so, a number of random thoughts have come to me, in no particular order:

1. 

Old TVs were fuzzy; new TVs are sharp. In the old days of cathode-ray tubes, TV pictures were made up of roughly 480 lines, running from top to bottom of the screen, refreshing themselves every 60th of a second. Broadcast TV was governed by what is called NTSC standards (altered slightly over time). Such images were of surprisingly low definition (by modern standards). 

The sharpness of those early TV pictures was not of major importance because most people then really thought of television as radio with pictures, and story lines were carried almost entirely by dialog. The visual aspect of them was of minor concern (nor, given the resolution of the TVs at the time, should it have been.)

Of course, now, we watch those old Gunsmoke episodes on HD screens. And two things become apparent. 

First, is that shows such as Gunsmoke were made better than they needed to be. They were made mainly by people trained in the old Hollywood studio system, where such things as lighting, blocking, focus, camera angles, and the such were all worked out and professionally understood. They were skilled craftsmen. 

However, second, some things were designed for analog screens, and so, often, painted backdrops used, especially for “outdoor” scenes shot in the studio, have become embarrassingly obvious, when, originally, they would have passed unnoticed on the fuzzy screen. 

Outdoor scenes were often shot in studios. Dodge City, during some seasons, was built indoors and the end of the main street in town was a backdrop. Again, on the old TVs you would not notice, but today, it’s embarrassing how crude that cheat was. 

You can see it in the opening shootout during the credits. In early seasons, Dillon faces the bad guy outdoors. In later seasons, he’s in the studio. 

2. 

Because Gunsmoke is now seen on a widescreen HD screen, but were originally shot for the squarer 4-by-5 aspect ratio, the image has to be rejiggered for the new screen. There are three ways of doing this, and as they show up on current screens, they are either shown with black bars on either side of the picture, to retain the original aspect ratio, or they are cropped and spread out across the wider 16:9 space. And if so, there are two ways this happens. 

If the transfer is done quickly and cheaply, the cropping is done by just chopping off a bit of the top and bottom of the picture, leaving the middle unchanged. The problem is this often leaves the picture awkwardly framed, with, in close ups, the bottoms of characters’ faces left out. 

However, in some of the newly broadcast Gunsmokes, someone has taken care to reframe the shots — moving the frame up or down — so as to include the chins and mouths of the characters. To do this, the technician has to pay attention shot by shot as he reframes the image. 

And so, it seems as if the Gunsmoke syndications have been accomplished either by separate companies, or at different times for different series packages. You can see, for instance, on the INSP cable network, examples of all three strategies. (My preference, by far, is for the uncropped original squarer picture.)

3. 

Gunsmoke changed over its 20-year TV run. There are three main versions: Black and white half-hour episodes (1955-1961); black and white hour-long episodes (1961-1966); and hour-long color episodes (1966-1975). The shorter run times coincided with the period when Dennis Weaver played Matt Dillon’s gimpy-legged sidekick Chester Goode. Chester continued for a season into the hour-longs, but was replaced by Ken Curtis as Festus Haggen, the illiterate countrified comic relief. 

Technically, the black and white seasons were generally better made than the color ones. When the series began, TV crews had been those previously at work in cinema, and brought over what they learned about lighting, framing, editing, blocking, use of close-ups. The black and white film stock allowed them to use lighting creatively, using shadows to effect, and lighting faces, especially in night scenes, with expressive shadows. Looking at the older episodes, I often admire the artistry of the lighting. 

But when color came in, the film stock was rather less sensitive than the black and white, and so the sets had to be flooded with light generally for details to be rendered. This led to really crass generic lighting. Often — and you can really spot it in night scenes — a character will throw two or three shadows behind him from lights blasting in different directions. Practicality drowns artistry. 

Gunsmoke wasn’t alone in this: This bland lighting affected all TV shows when color became normal. It took decades — and better film stock — before color lighting caught up. (One of the hallmarks of our current “golden age” of TV is the cinematic style of lighting that is now fashionable. Color has finally caught up with black and white.) 

4. 

One of the pleasures of watching these reruns is now noticing (I didn’t when I was a little boy) the repertory company of actors who showed up over and over again, playing different characters each time. 

I’m not just talking about the regular actors playing recurring roles, such as Glenn Strange as Sam the barkeep or Howard Culver, who was hotel clerk Howard Uzzell in 44 episodes, but those coming back over and over in different roles. Victor French was seen 18 times, Roy Barcroft (longtime B-Western baddie) 16 times; Denver Pyle 14 times, Royal Dano 13 times, John Dehner, John Anderson and Harry Carey Jr. a dozen times each.

Other regulars with familiar faces include Strother Martin, Warren Oates, Claude Akins, Gene Evans, Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Elam. Some were established movie actors: George Kennedy, Dub Taylor, Pat Hingle, Forrest Tucker, Slim Pickens, Elisha Cook Jr., James Whitmore. Bette Davis, too. 

William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan

And a few surprises. Who knew that Leonard Nimoy was in Gunsmoke (four times), or  Mayberry’s George Lindsay (six times — usually playing heavies and you realize that the goofy Goober Pyle was an act — Lindsay was an actor, not an idiot), Mayberry’s barber Howard McNear showed up 6 times. Jon Voight, Carroll O’Connor, Ed Asner, Harrison Ford, Kurt Russell, Suzanne Pleshette, Jean Arthur, DeForest Kelley, Werner Klemperer (Colonel Klink), Angie Dickenson, Dennis Hopper, Leslie Nielsen, Dyan Cannon, Adam West, and even William Shatner — all show up. 

It becomes an actor-spotting game. John Dehner, in particular, was so very different each time he showed up, once a grizzled old miner, another a town drunk, a third as an East-coast dandy, another as a hired gunslinger — almost never looking or sounding the same. “There he is, Dehner again!” 

And it makes you realize that these were all working actors, needing to string together gigs to make a living, and the reliable actors would get many call-backs. It is now a pleasure to see how good so many of these old character actors were. 

5. 

I have now watched not only Gunsmoke, but other old TV Westerns, and the quality difference between the best Gunsmoke episodes and the general run of shows is distinct. While I have come to recognize the quality that went into the production of Gunsmoke, most of the other shows, such as Bonanza, simply do not hold up. They are so much more formulaic, cheaply produced, and flat. Stock characters and recycled plots. 

Gunsmoke was designed to be an “adult Western” when it was first broadcast, in 1952, as a radio show, with stocky actor William Conrad as Matt Dillon. In contrast to the kiddie Westerns of the time, it aimed to bring realism to the genre. 

William Conrad as Marshal Dillon

It ran on radio from ’52 to 1961, and on TV from 1955 to 1975, and then continued for five made-for-TV movies following Dillon in his later years. There were comic books and novelizations. Dillon became a household name.

Originally, Matt Dillon was a hard-edged, lonely man in a hard Western landscape. As imagined by writer and co-creator of the series John Meston, the series would overturn the cliches of sentimental Westerns and expose how brutal the Old West was in reality. Many episodes were based on man’s cruelty to both men and women. Meston wrote, “Dillon was almost as scarred as the homicidal psychopaths to drifted into Dodge from all directions.” 

On TV, the series mellowed quite a bit, and James Arness was more solid hero than the radio Dillon. But there was still an edge to the show, compared with other TV Westerns. After all, according to True West magazine, Matt Dillon killed 407 people over the course of the TV series and movie sequels. He was also shot at least 56 times, knocked unconscious 29 times, stabbed three times and poisoned once. 

And the TV show could be surprisingly frank about the prairie woman’s life and the painful treatment of women as chattels. 

In Season 3 of the TV series, an episode titled “The Cabin,” two brutal men (Claude Akins and Harry Dean Stanton) kill a woman’s father and then serially beat and rape her over the course of 35 days, when Dillon accidentally comes upon the cabin to escape a snowstorm. The thugs plan to kill the marshal, but he winds up getting them first. When Dillon suggests that the woman can now go back to living her life, the shame she feels will not let her. No one has to know what has happened here, he tells her, but, she says, she will know. And so she tells Dillon she will go to Hayes City, “buy some pretty clothes” and become a prostitute. “It won’t be too hard, not after all this,” she says. 

“Don’t let all this make you bitter,” Dillon says. “There are a lot of good men in this world.”

“So they say” she says. 

This is pretty strong stuff for network TV in 1958. There were other episodes about racism, and especially in the early years, not always happy endings. 

Dodge City, 1872

6. 

According to Gunsmoke producer John Mantley, the series was set arbitrarily in 1873 and in Dodge City, Kansas, on the banks of the Arkansas River, although the river plays scant role in the series. In 1873, the railroad had just arrived, although in only a few episodes of the TV series is the train even mentioned. 

The Dodge City of the series is really just a standard Hollywood Western town, with the usual single dusty street with wooden false-front buildings along either side. 

In reality (not that it matters much for a TV show, although Gunsmoke did try to be more realistic than the standard Western), Dodge was built, like most Southern and Western towns, with its buildings all on one side of the street (called Front Street in Dodge) and the railroad tracks on the other. Beyond that, the river. 

Dodge City, Kansas 1888

And in general, the geography of Gunsmoke’s Kansas would come as a surprise to anyone visiting the actual city. The state is famously flat, while the scenery around Matt Dillon often has snow-capped mountains, and at other times, mesas and buttes of the desert Southwest. 

Hollywood’s sense of geography is often peculiar. So, I don’t think it is fair to hold it against the TV series that its sense of the landscape has more to do with California (where the series was generally shot) than with the Midwest prairies. 

I remember one movie where James Stewart travels from Lordsburg, N.M., to Tucson, Ariz., and somehow manages to pass through the red rocks or Sedona on the way. Sedona is certainly more picturesque than Wilcox, Ariz., but rather misplaced.

Or John Ford’s The Searchers, where the Jorgensen and Edwards families are farming in Monument Valley, Ariz., which has no water, little rain, sandy soil and no towns within a hundred miles. It is ludicrous place to attempt to farm. Of course, it is said, in the movie, to be set in Texas, but Texas doesn’t look like the Colorado Plateau at all. 

We forgive such gaffes because the scenery is so gorgeous, and because we’ve been trained by decades of cowboy movies to have a picture of “The West” as it is seen in Shane rather than how most of it actually was: flat, grassy, and boring. And often, it is not even the West, as we think of it. Jesse James and his gang robbed banks in Missouri. The Dalton Gang was finished off in Minnesota. The “hanging judge” Parker presided in Arkansas. Some of the quintessential Western myths are really Midwestern or Southern. 

So, many of the tropes of Hollywood Westerns still show up in Gunsmoke, despite its attempt at being “more realistic” than the standard-issue cowboy show. 

“Gunsmoke” studio set

Two things, however, that are hardly ever mentioned that seems germane to the question of realism on film. The first is the pristine nature of the streets. Historians have shown that, with all the horses, not only in Westerns, but even in 19th-century Manhattan, the streets were paved with horseshit. Cities even hired sanitation workers to collect the dung in wheeled bins, so as not to be buried in the stuff. 

OK, I get that perhaps on TV shows broadcast into our homes, we might not want to see that much horse manure. In reality, the dirt dumped in the studio set of Dodge City had to be cleaned out, like kitty litter, each day, or under the hot lights, the whole set would stink of horse urine. 

But the second issue relates to the very title of the show: Gunsmoke. Strangely, smoke never appears from the many guns being fired in the course of 20 years of episodes. But the series is set in an era at least a decade before the invention of a practical smokeless powder (and 30 years before its widespread usage). And so Matt Dillon’s gun should be spouting a haze of nasty smoke each time he fires at a miscreant. 

Me firing a black powder rifle

We know, from records of the time, that Civil War battlefields, and before that, Napoleonic battlefields, were obscured by clouds of impenetrable smoke, blocking the views of soldiers aiming at each other. And I know from my own experience firing black powder weapons, that each show spews a cloud of smoke from the barrel. So, why no gun smoke on Gunsmoke?

Click on any image to enlarge

The passing of the West

January 25, 2021
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Recently on Turner Classics, I caught the 1968 Clint Eastwood film, Hang ’Em High. And in the opening scene where a posse of miscreants attempt to lynch Clint, there were a passel of familiar character actors, including Ed Begley, Bruce Dern, Alan Hale Jr., Ned Romero and Bert Freed. And the oldest of them — the only one to hesitate about hanging a man — was a face that burned familiar and at first, I couldn’t place. Then it hit me, this grizzled old rancher was Bob Steele. The movie suddenly interested me more and I stayed to watch it through. 

When I was a wee bairn, in the early 1950s, TV was rife with old Westerns. Television was new and stations were starving for content. Libraries of old movies were packaged and sent to local outlets and afternoon programming included piles of old Westerns, mainly from the Golden Age of the 1930s. As a five-year old, maybe seven, I clearly had my favorite cowboy stars. Hoot Gibson, Tim McCoy, Ken Maynard, Buck Jones. And Bob Steele. All of them stars before the advent of Gene Autry or Roy Rogers. 

They each had their shtick. Hoot Gibson tended not to carry a gun; McCoy brought a historic sense of the real West. Maynard was a trick rider. And Steele was the king of the fistfight. 

I must have watched hundreds of these Westerns. Later, when half-hour Western series took over the evening, I watched Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid. But it was the movies that really spoke to me. 

It wasn’t just that they were cowboy movies — although that was their primary attraction (I had a cowboy hat, a cap pistol, and when I was four years old, an imaginary horse I rode around the living room, which I named Whitey.) It was also my introduction to movies. I am not going to claim any great sophistication in my appreciation. I wasn’t particularly paying attention to the editing or lighting, but I did notice the music and I did notice, even at that tender age, that there were scenes that must have been shot silent, with no dialog and with Foley sound added later, like the coconut clop of horse hooves. The sound and visuals didn’t quite match up, making it clear they were done separately. And I was aware of the various wipes and dissolves. They loved their wipes. In that sense, I had some early appreciation that these were artifacts, creations of a filmmaker. 

As an adult, when I occasionally watch an old Western, I am kind of embarrassed that I loved them so much as a boy. On the whole, they were clunky, cheaply made, and ridiculously repetitive. The same plots over and over, this time with Tex Ritter, that time with Bob Livingston, another with Johnny Mack Brown. Every banker and lawyer wore a string bow tie — that’s how we knew who the villain was. 

And every one of them had a gang of brutes led by Harry Woods, Charlie King or Roy Barcroft. The string bow ties tried to cut off water to the ranchers, or tried to cheat them out of their land, or schemed to steal the deeds to the gold mine. And they all seemed to end with a mass shootout in the distinctive rock formations of the Alabama Hills of California.

These programmer Westerns went through a clear evolution. Later in life, I began to look at them more closely and saw that change over time. Beginning with the silents, there was Broncho Billy — really Maxwell Aronson, born to an immigrant Jewish family, who became the first cowboy star. He made hundreds of films, mostly one-reelers, all before 1920 and included titles such as Broncho Billy and the Indian Maid (1912), and Broncho Billy and the Land Grabber (1915). There was no attempt at realism. They were pure fantasy. 

That changed with William S. Hart, a one-time Shakespearean actor who took his duty to the West seriously in a series of popular melodramas. In almost every one, Hart was a tough hombre redeemed by the love of a good woman. Some of the films stand up, and I’ve watched Hell’s Hinges (1916) only recently and astounded at some of the visuals. Or Tumbleweeds (1925), with the great Oklahoma Land Rush sequence that is still a benchmark in such things. 

The other side of the movie Western world was Tom Mix, the fancy-dress cowboy, with crescent-pocket shirts, embroidered boots and Tony, the Wonder Horse. His 1925 Riders of the Purple Sage is one of his less show-bizzy films, based on the Zane Grey novel. I’ve seen it several times. 

  The two strands of Western continued through the genre’s history. Even recently, you can sense the ghost of Tom Mix in something like Will Smith’s Wild Wild West (1999) and the stern rectitude of Hart in Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992). (Or both together in the Coen Brothers anthology film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, with the Mix clone Buster Scruggs in the opening episode, and the heartbreaking Hart-like realism of the penultimate episode, “The Gal Who Got Rattled.”)

The early sound era was, for me, the high water mark for the Western. By the 1940s, the B-Western had worn itself out and by the 1950s, with godawful series like Whip Wilson, they were just embarrassing. 

There were, I posit, three types of Western actor. There were those who could actually act (the rarest of the breeds); those who had genuine screen presence even if they were no Oliviers; and finally, the wanna-bes who just went through the motions as if carved from balsa wood. 

In the first group were William Boyd (Hopalong Cassidy), Harry Carey, Johnny Mack Brown and Bill Elliott. They all had both acting chops and screen magic. In his earliest films John Wayne had all the magic needed, but only later did it ever occur to anyone that he might actually be able to act. When John Ford saw him in Red River, from 1948 (the year I was born), he was impressed and famously said, “I didn’t know the big son of a bitch could act!” He could, although he didn’t always need to. 

Others, such as Tex Ritter or Gene Autry had the gleam on the screen, but no one would accuse them of being able to recite dialog and sound like an actual human being at the same time. And at the bottom of the list comes Sunset Carson, possibly the worst actor ever to mount a horse. 

There were tons of these guys that I used to love, before I ever developed the critical faculty to judge their thespian talents. Among my favorite Saturday afternoon movies were the Three Mesquiteers films, with shifting casts that included, at different times, John Wayne, Crash Corrigan, Bob Steele, Max Terhune, Bob Livingston, and even, briefly, Duncan Rinaldo. Buster Crabbe left behind Flash Gordon and made a series of pretty good Westerns. But when the name Bob Steele came up in the opening credits, that was the best. Remember, I’m talking about being seven years old here. 

Steele had a long career. His first film, as a juvenile, was in 1920. His cowboy heyday came in the ’30s, but he kept working in Hollywood even after hanging up his spurs. Famously as Canino in Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946). He kept working until 1974, appearing in such films as Rio Bravo, The Longest Day, and even a comic role as Trooper Duffy in F Troop (1965-67). 

And so, I’m watching Hang ’Em High and I recognize, hidden in the crowd, that face, now leathery and wrinkled, with a stubbly beard, a flash of 60 years condensed. How could I have recognized it so unconsciously? It’s not as though I had thought of Bob Steele more recently than decades ago. But it tickled something in my memory and I twitched. “That’s Bob Steele.” 

In 1968, Steele was more than 10 years younger than I am now, and yet, he looked so old. What does that make me? 

Guilty pleasures

February 4, 2018
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As Stephen Colbert says, “I don’t know if these are actually sins, but I do feel bad about them.”

I have a seven-decade long reputation to maintain as a dour, serious-minded  stick-in-the-mud, with no time for trivialities. My theme song is Party Pooper. My favorite color is gray. My wife used to call me, “The man who can’t have fun.”

I argued back that I have lots of fun, but for me fun is reading Gilgamesh or Xenophon, listening to Beethoven piano sonatas while following along with the Schnabel edition of the score (including reading all the footnotes), listening to lectures on the Indus Valley Civilization or the Black Death from the Great Courses Plus, watching C-Span Booknotes and waiting with great anticipation for the C-Span bus to visit Sheboygan or Wilkes-Barre. These things give me great pleasure and fill my life with great joy.

Yet, that doesn’t mean I don’t have my guilty pleasures — bits of pop culture that I partake of on odd occasions. There are times I switch away from the PBS Newshour or online lectures from M.I.T. and let my hair down. You won’t tell anyone, will you?

Here, then, are five guilty pleasures that I recommend to you. (There are more, but my quotient for mortification is limited).

Drunk History — It would be hard to find anything sillier than Comedy Central’s Drunk History. Created by comic Derek Waters and Jeremy Konner, it asks various, mostly D-list entertainers to drink themselves goofy and attempt to tell the story of some historical figure, while various, mostly A-list actors and comedians lip-synch costumed re-enactments of the events.

The camera switches back and forth between the drunkard, in a home with an equally plastered Waters, and the beautifully photographed recreations, in which the actors perfectly mime the words of the storyteller, right down to the hiccups and incoherence. A fair number of the drinkers wind up finishing their tales while driving the porcelain bus; others pass out on the couch.

A few for-instances: Actor Eric Edelstein tells the story of Elvis and Nixon, while we see the re-enactment with Jack Black playing Elvis, Bob Odenkirk as Nixon and Jack McBrayer as H.R. Haldeman.

In another, Tiffany Haddish (they’re not all D-list) tells us about French Resistance fighter Rose Valland, who saved and helped retrieve hundreds of art treasures threatened or stolen by the Nazis, with Busy Philipps playing Valland in the dramatization.

For most of the half-hour shows, three stories are told, with the first two taking up 5 to seven minutes each, separated by annoying commercials, and the third filling two segments, with annoying commercials in between. (As usual, the best solution is to Tivo the show so you can fast-forward through the muck).

One of the best shows recently was when Lin-Manuel Miranda got himself pie-eyed and tried to summarize the life of Alexander Hamilton. He got the whole half-hour. Blind-casting adds extra confusion to the show: Hamilton was played by Alia Shawkat; Aaron Burr was Aubrey Plaza; Bokeem Woodbine was George Washington; and Tony Hale was James Monroe. I am astonished that Miranda would risk reputation, alcohol poisoning and brain damage to take part, but it was a scream.

And one can actually learn things from this show, although you will want to verify what you find out by actual reading and research. Sometimes the drunks get confused.

Climbing Mount Washington, N.H., in Stanley Steamers

Jay Leno’s Garage — I’m old enough to remember when Jay Leno was funny. Before the Tonight Show de-clawed him and turned him into a toothless shill for Hollywood celebrity backslapping, Leno was edgy, took chances and snookered the very thing he later became mouthpiece for. Now retired from the daily grind of pleasing his corporate masters, Leno, now 67, is still a workaholic, but it seems now he can put his energy into something he actually cares about: cars.

With Gabriel Iglesias and his 1966 VW bus

Reportedly, he owns 286 vehicles, both cars and motorcycles, and has a garage that could double as a museum. In his current show, on CNBC — a network that as far as I can tell, is watched by no one — Leno gets to play with his toys and his enthusiasm is infectious.

As someone who does not care about cars — I think of them as being appliances, like washing machines on wheels — I am surprised myself at how much I enjoy watching Leno enjoy driving Maseratis, Bugattis, Abrams tanks, fire engines, monster trucks, drag racers, and a 1939 Ford pickup truck loaded with the radial engine of a Cessna airplane.

He often has Hollywood friends show up with their own favorite autos and bikes. Keanu Reeves manufactures high-end motorbikes. Comic Adam Corolla has been collecting race cars once owned and driven by actor Paul Newman. Tim Allen plays “Stump the Car Nerd.” Arnold Schwarzenegger shows off his electric Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen conversion.

It is less the high-end muscle cars that interest me and more the peculiar vehicles he encounters, like the Mars Rover, the Ripsaw EV-2 civilian tank that can reach 60 mph, the two-story tall dump truck that carries borax from the mines, the wienermobile, a convertible filled with water and turned into a mobile hot tub. There are a lot of these.

But mostly, it is the obvious pleasure Leno takes in his toys that makes this series a joy to watch.

Young Sheldon — This never sounded like a good idea. A spin-off from The Big Bang Theory, this show follows the 9-year-old genius, Sheldon Cooper, as he negotiates life, neuroses and high school.

The parent show has long jumped the shark (although I continue to watch it because, even worn out, it has more energy — and more smarts — than most things on TV).

Many years ago, when the Colbert Report first broadcast, it was sharp and funny, but I was sure — and most people I knew were sure — there was no way to keep this up. But it kept up for nearly 10 years. In the same way, I don’t see how Young Sheldon can keep it up. But I was wrong once; maybe again.

Young Sheldon is quite different in tone from its predecessor. Big Bang is a three-camera, live-audience show and written to showcase gags and caricatures. (This is not a complaint: It has done that very well for many years). But Young Sheldon is a one-camera show, with no laugh track, which allows it to be more real.

Zoe Perry and Laurie Metcalf

And, while it is hard to actually care for the Big Bang characters — they are all there to be laughed at — Young Sheldon has so far given us warm, three-dimensional human characters. None more warm or more human than Sheldon’s mother, Mary Cooper, played by Zoe Perry, who happens to be the daughter of Laurie Metcalf, who has long played Sheldon’s mother on Big Bang Theory. The physical resemblance is striking, but more so, the personalities. There is a harried, confused wisdom in her character.

Just as good, 10-year-old Iain Armitage plays the 9-year-old Sheldon without ever being cute, without downplaying his atheism or his neuroses. Or his innocent bafflement at the complexities of the human condition.

The core of the show is Mary’s relationship with the gifted Sheldon and with her mother, the cantankerous Meemaw (Annie Potts). If there is a flaw, it is that the rest of the family, father George, sister Missy and older brother George Jr., are rather less developed, although Lance Barber brings warmth to a blustery father George, who we know from Big Bang, will die of a heart attack. That gives added resonance to the show.

Please excuse me if I sound like a critic writing a review. It’s what I am; I cannot shake it.

But, I recommend Young Sheldon. It really surprised me.

The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson — Ferguson left the Late Late Show in 2014, after nine years behind the desk. But segments of the show are all over YouTube, uploaded by several perseverant chroniclers.

When the show was live, I often watched (via Tivo the next day, so I could fast-forward through those damned Shamwow and boner pill commercials) but even I have to admit there were bits of the show that proved tedious. I could never enjoy the e-mail and tweet segments, and the monolog was often rather shaggy. And when there was a musical guest, I just turned the thing off.

Sarah Paulson and Craigyferg

But Ferguson must be the best late night interviewer there has ever been. The purpose of late night TV is for celebrities to come on, pretend to be regular people and plug their latest project with the assiduity of a used-car salesman. The whole set-up is unashamedly artificial.

Ferguson, in contrast, didn’t interview his guests so much as have a conversation with them. It was not unusual for them never to get around to the current “project.” Oh, there were guests who were duds, who wanted to coerce the talk back to their sales pitch, guests who did not seem to understand the nature of Ferguson’s self-described deconstruction of the late night talk show.

But there were many guests who got it, and they often came back over and over. Kristen Bell appeared 28 times. William Shatner 25, Regis Philbin 25, Betty White 22.

Ariel Tweto, one of his regulars

I am old enough to remember Jack Paar. Paar had a stable of regulars who came back over and over and took part in witty conversation. Peter Ustinov, Robert Morley, Oscar Levant, Hermione Gingold, Genevieve, Jonathan Winters, Dick Gregory.

Ferguson had his crew, too. They were those who obviously adored Ferguson, and understood the subversive nature of the broadcast. They often showed up with nothing to promote. Just to be there and talk. Bell was prime among them, but so, too, were Rashida Jones, Michael Clark Duncan, Paula Poundstone, Larry King, Kathy Griffin, Carrie Fisher, Mila Kunis, Lauren Graham, Jeff Goldblum, Morgan Freeman, Marion Cotillard.

Ferguson in Scotland with Rashida Jones, Ariel Tweto and David Sederis

This was a fabulous stable of personalities, including several that had obviously been previous amours of the host, and they hinted furiously at it.

The advantage of the YouTube videos is that you can see the interviews, often strung together (the set of Kristen Bell interviews lasts 4 hours, 41 minutes). Among the most infectious: Rosie Perez’s 8 visits;

Ferguson is also obviously intelligent, although he did his best to downplay that. But he has had many authors on, spent an entire hour with Archbishop Desmond Tutu (for which he won a Peabody Award), and another hour with Stephen Fry — and once had as a guest a professor of moral philosophy (who happened to be Claire Danes’ father-in-law).

Bob Steele

Cowboy movies — I use this term instead of “Westerns” because I mean a specific type of film: the cheaply made series films from the late silent era through the 1930s with stars such as Buck Jones, Col. Tim McCoy, Hoot Gibson, Bob Steele, Ken Maynard, William Boyd and, of course John Wayne.

Buck Jones

I was born at roughly the same time as television, and in those early years, stations scrambled to find content to fill those broadcast hours, and reams of old cowboy films were re-released cheaply to the stations and ran constantly, especially on the independent channels. I saw a ton of them through my pre-school years and into grade school. I loved them.

So, it is with some nostalgia that I watch them again as a grown-up.

I am not talking here about the legitimate Westerns by John Ford or Howard Hawkes, but of those films pumped out week-by-week from tiny studios such as Monogram and Republic. They were “programmers,” with repetitive plots, recognizable landscapes and often acting just this side of organic when compared with a dead tree.

Hoot Gibson

Not that there weren’t some good actors. Boyd, as Hopalong Cassidy, had a natural screen presence and a comfortable way with dialog. And John Wayne was magic on the screen, even in those early films when he was saddled with playing Singing Sandy, the singing cowboy.

And the secondary actors and the villains were played by what was almost a stock company of real pros such as Earl Dwyer, Charles Middleton, Harry Woods, Charles King, and Roy Barcroft. Dependable, every one. It was mostly the heroes who were stiffs.

But what most impressed me in these movies was their settings, the imaginary West of the cowboy, kicking up dust galloping through the Alabama Hills of California, with the glorious Sierra Nevadas in the distance, or the Santa Clarita Valley. Those backgrounds show up over and over again. I almost memorized them.

In the Alabama Hills of California

Alas, such a golden age couldn’t continue. Singing cowboys invaded the screens, such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, in movies much slicker and emptier than the earlier ones. And worse, the rising need to include a boy sidekick. Cowboy movies gave up on adults and became pabulum for children. In the ’30s, even grown-ups watched Hoot Gibson. He was my late father-in-law’s favorite actor.

Some good B-Westerns continued to be made in the early 1940s, but by the time Eisenhower became president, we had descended to Lash LaRue and Whip Wilson and the most stolidly oaken of all of them, Tim Holt. The lighting flattened out, as it tended to do in the TV-influenced ’50s, and no one really seemed to believe in what they were doing.

The quality of many cable channel Westerns is atrocious, all grainy and contrasty, and at least one S.O.B. has added synthesized music to the originals. But a good print is as beautiful and professional as anything else the studios pumped out in that wonderful era of film. Luckily, one can still occasionally find a good print on Turner Classics, and the Hoppy movies are usually in good shape, thanks to the foresight of Boyd, who bought them all up in the late ’40s and curated them carefully.

So, there you have it, the pleasures I am embarrassed to admit to. I have no defense. But I know I share some of these sins with some of you.