Authors and After Words

By rough count, some 75 westerns were produced in the 1950s and in that decade, the genre was epitomized in the work of Howard Hawks and John Ford. John Wayne attained the status of an icon playing the quintessential western hero. In that same decade, the popularity of the western was reflected in black and white television with weekly series such as Have Gun, Will Travel, Maverick, Gunsmoke, and The Rifleman. By 1959, there were some 34 of these serials and a new one called Rawhide was added to that number. (Jane Tompkins, West of Everything.) Rawhide featured a young actor named Clint Eastwood in the role of Rowdy Yates. Eastwood later described his character as "the idiot of the plains."

In the 1960s, the number of western films produced in the United States fell by half and would continue to fall steadily. In Europe, however, the western had become incredibly popular and foreign filmmakers were eager to meet the demands of their own audiences. In Eastern Europe, westerns were being produced for consumption behind the Iron Curtain. In Western Europe, Italian producers developed the so-called "spaghetti" western, filming often in Spain where they found much more suitable landscapes. These films put forth a wild west that was quite different from that which had been mythologized for American audiences. Consciously or unconsciously, European westerns projected a much more existential, ironic, violent, and often symbolic worldview than Americans shared. Seeing our own myth reflected – some would say distorted – through a foreign lens produced shock waves that would significantly change the genre in America as described below.

Whatever else it did, the "spaghetti" western provided the young Clint Eastwood with the opportunity to develop his movie cowboy career. His films, (A Fistfull of Dollars in 1964, For a Few Dollars More in 1965, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in 1966) are only three of the many "spaghetti" westerns produced, but they shaped Eastwood’s career in fundamental ways just as they helped to pave the way for what would become the "revisionist" western sub-genre. In this sub-genre, all of the givens of the classical western films would be examined and reshaped, often in darker, more pessimistic and violent ways but also in more positive and dynamic ways as in The Scalp Hunters (1968), Little Big Man (1970), Dances With Wolves (1990). Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1991) would be one of the most important of these films. In fact, Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns laid the foundation for a future that would see him eclipse John Wayne as America’s quintessential cowboy for his time.

From the mid-sixties on, the production of westerns in America continued to dwindle. The classical western seemed to be out of sync with the Vietnam war, the peace movement, the fight for racial equality, the feminism of the period, the Watergate experience, the Cold War, the death of the Shah, and subsequently the ongoing American Hostage Crisis in Iran. With our engagement in Vietnam and all that followed, it is safe to say that the latter part of the 20th century left us with deep questions about who we are as Americans, about our role in the world and, these days, about our future in a new, diverse, yet border-less and uncharted world culture. Eastwood spoke to this dilemma early on in Bronco Billy (1980), his take on the traveling Wild West shows that went from town to town with other circus attractions.

Eastwood directed Bronco Billy and played the title character opposite Sondra Locke. The film is a kind of lasso thrown back into the mythic past, in an effort to subtly and gently retrieve some of the values that would continue to serve us well into an uncertain future. "Bronco Billy’s Wild West Show" travels an endless road across the western landscape. That landscape is much changed from the big sky horizon of Red River. Nevertheless, Bronco Billy’s tent-show steadfastly recalls these values through the wonderful performances of a truly allegorical cast of stock racial and cultural types. As they trudge from town to town, rain or shine, reminding their audiences, especially the kids, how good buckaroos behave, they seem like immigrants in their own land, searching for a future that will uphold and nurture the values that used to sustain us. In this way, Eastwood reaches directly into the heart of the American dream.

Two themes are especially clear in Bronco Billy: "the American family" and "American Individualism." In this film, the performing troupe, a group of non-conforming individuals, becomes a family as they search for justice, the meaning of manhood, the need for compassion and the hope of redemption. In the hands of a lesser film maker, all of that might fall heavily into jingoistic mumbo-jumbo, but Eastwood displays a light handed mastery of his material that shows how the American dream is alive and well and may be found in unexpected places. Most of all, Bronco Billy celebrates the idea that if we abandon the comfortable banalities of modern life we will find our true selves. In so doing, we can become whatever we want to be, regardless of when or where we start. When Eastwood was asked which of his films speaks most directly to his own life view, he responded "Bronco Billy."

Bronco Billy was one of Eastwood’s earlier directing efforts. All in all, he has produced and/or directed some twenty-seven films. These days, he has pretty much left acting for good, but he qualifies that absence with the caveat that "if a good western script comes along, you never know…"