American Westerns
(Maverick, The Searchers, Unforgiven)
The Civil War has ended, leaving more than 600,000 American soldiers dead. In a single decade, from 1860 to 1870, the South's wealth declined 60 percent and that of the North had a 50 percent increase. One president has been assassinated and another impeached. The foundation for the women's suffrage movement was laid when women were introduced into new fielRAB like nursing and teaching. In the late nineteenth century, the United States went through many changes. Blacks were organizing union leagues, while the Ku Klux Klan was forming. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed, establishing the full emancipation of slaves, assuring all citizens equality before the law, and allowing all male American citizens the right to vote, regardless their race. What was happening out west during this time or reconstruction? Many Hollywood producers, during the twentieth century, have tried to recreate an old west on the big screen.
One of these attempts was the television show, "Maverick". The show first aired in Septeraber of 1957, staring an unconventional hero who rather play tricks and win card games than fight with a brother who shared the same characteristics. All the men walked around in suites and lived on showboats or in big houses. Men were propositioned to murder for a fair price. When there is talk of traveling through Indian Territory, one man exclaims, "They get mean this time of year." According to "Maverick's" Creator-A Cynical Approach", an article written by John P. Shanley, Roy Huggins, the show's producer, was convinced that Westerns would last as long as there is television.2 He stated, "Westerns will have their cycles just as they have had their cycles in the movies. I think the Western will last because it corabines two of the most deep and persistent desires of mankind-freedom and security."2 Huggins then continued by saying, "The Western gives the audience a sense of well-being , an escape from reality."2 Huggins tried to push the envelope in some of Maverick's episodes. Most of the time the audience caught on and did not like it. Except for one time, Huggins was surprised when no meraber of his audience complained about Bret Maverick's father telling him, "You're shifty, self-centered and you know the value of a dollar. You'll die wealthy and honored."
In 1955, popular western director, John Ford teamed up with longtime friend John Wayne to make "The Searchers", based on the novel by Alan LeMay. It tells a story of Comanche Indians, whom are seen as "lions", whom burn down a home of white residents and kidnap the two young daughters leaving the rest of the family dead. Two men, who were the girls' close relatives, spend five years searching for them. During which they find one of the girls was dead and land themselves in several compromising situations. They end up buying an Indian woman as a wife, by accident, and killing a man who gave them valuable information. When they finally do find the missing daughter, they storm through the Indian campground and kill everyone and thing in sight. John Milius, one of the actors, stated," If you're an Indian, you want to be like Scar, you'd want to blow that horn, slaughter white settlers relentlessly, take many scalps and have young wives, you'd want to look like scar."7 Scar was the chief of the Comanche Indians, and the one who held the young girl captive. During the movie, Ethan, John Wayne's character, displayed some stereotypical behavior of a white male at the time. When they came across some white women who were held captive by Scar and seemed mentally disabled, Ethan said, "They ain't white anymore, they're Comanche. Living with Comanche ain't being alive."7 He also showed his pride from his country when he stated, "You speak good American" after hearing a man speak English.7
In 1992, Clint Eastwood, the John Wayne of the nineties, directed and stared in "Unforgiven". Portraying the less popular side of the west, it began with the vicious beating of a prostitute who lived in a whorehouse in Wyoming, 1880. The ladies did not think the two men got enough punishment, so they put their money together and offered a one thousand-dollar reward for the two men dead. William Munny, Clint Eastwood's character, a recovered alcoholic and cold blooded assassin overlooks his new found life in need of the reward money to help raise his two kiRAB since his wife passed away from smallpox a few years back. Although a cold blooded killer, Munny is cheered on by the audience all the way through his vicious murder of almost a dozen men which he gets away with, scot-free. One stereotype mentioned during the movie was by a man, on a train with English Bob (a known killer from England), who said, "the French are known to be assassins." Vincent Canby, a film critic for the New York Times stated 'Unforgiven' as, "A most entertaining western that pays homage to the great tradition of movie westerns while surreptitiously expressing a certain amount of skepticism."4 Mr. Eastwood did consciously make some adjustments from the typical western. "I purposely cast the sheriff's deputies as guys somewhat in shock, who find his violence distasteful," said Mr. Eastwood in an interview with Bernard Weinraub shortly after the film's release.6 "It's kind of like what it must have been like for a rookie cop to be involved in the Rodney King thing. How does a rookie cop feel when his superiors are condoning that kind of behavior?"6 Another factor in 'Unforgiven' is that one of the main characters is black when, in 1880, blacks had just gotten the right to vote but are far from being seen equal to white males. Weinraub states this as typical of Eastwood.
Women have evolved in westerns. In the book, The American West in Film, Budd Boetticher remarked that, "What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents.1 She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does.1 In herself the woman has not the slightest importance." From the extras and nobodies they played in the fifties to the hookers with voices, attitude, and grudges that need to be resolved in the ninety's westerns. As a director, Eastwood stated, "Every time I would approach the subject I would say to myself I've seen this before, and I want to keep to scenes I haven't seen before. Maybe it's just hipper this way."6 Maybe the "hipper" way is what the ninety's movie audience wants to see, but by adjusting to the audience historical facts are being lost.

1. Tuska, Jon. The American West In Film: Critical Approaches to the Western (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985),224.

2. "Maverick", available from http://www.nick-at-nite.com/searcho/show.tin?ixShow=3068, Internet, accessed 10 April 2000.

1. Shanley, John P. "'Maverick's' Creator-A Cynical Approach," The New York Times, 5 April 1959, 15:1.

2. Canby, Vincent. "A Western Without Good Guys," The New York Times, 7 August 1992, C, 1:5.

3. Engel, Joel. "Forgiving the Sin, Loving the Sinner," The New York Times, 9 August 1992, 13:1.

4. Weinraub, Bernard. "Eastwood in Another Change Of Pace," The New York Times, 6 August 1992, C, 13:1.

5. The Searchers, director John Ford, 120 min., 1955, videocassette.

6. Unforgiven, director Clint Eastwood, 130 min, 1992, videocassette.