Virginian (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (58 page)

In the 1956 Giant, director George Stevens attempts to place the western in the context of American history. The story spans two generations, allowing the audience to watch as a cowboy grows into an oil tycoon. Giant stars Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean (in his last film). Nominated for ten Academy Awards, the film won an Oscar for direction.

In the 1960s a new kind of western called into question the stock-in-trade themes of earlier films. In particular, two films released in 1969—
The Wild Bunch
and
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—
exploded the genre’s conventions. Sam Peckinpah, after directing such beloved westerns as
Ride the High Country
(1962), found his signature in the brutally violent film
The Wild Bunch.
It opens with a gang of outlaws led by Pike (William Holden) and Dutch (Ernest Borgnine) holding up a railroad office and mowing down in the ensuing crossfire a parade of elderly women and pious men—the town’s temperance parade—dressed in their Sunday best. The massacre foreshadows a gruesome finale in which Pike’s gang engages in a dialogue of bullets with the drunken and despotic Pancho Villa and his legion of Mexican soldiers.
The Wild Bunch
introduced a technique Arthur Penn employed brilliantly in
Bonnie and Clyde
(1967)—the use of beautiful, slow-motion cinematography for horrifying scenes of violence.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
written by William Goldman, stars Paul Newman and Robert Redford as bank robbers who cannot seem to adapt to the new century. They keep running from the law, each other, and themselves, with Butch, supposedly the thinker of the two, famously declaring, “Let’s go to Bolivia!” The film, directed by George Roy Hill, is a more intimate character study than any western preceding it; both heroes ponder the seeming emptiness that surrounds them. These “new westerns” led to such later “anti-westerns” as Robert Altman’s
McCabe
Mrs. Miller
(1971) and Michael Cimino’s
Heaven’s Gate
(1980); both films excel at turning classic western escapism in on itself.

One of the most gifted reinventors of the western is Clint Eastwood, who began his acting career as Rowdy Yates in the long-running TV series
Rawhide;
he went on to cement his fame starring as the quintessential cowboy vigilante in the “spaghetti westerns” of Sergio Leone, most notably
A Fistful of Dollars
( 1964). A spate of sequels and imitations quickly followed, but Eastwood had grander ambitions. In the 1970s he began to direct exemplary films that offer trenchant commentary about revenge, mercenary justice, and the nature of violence. After the well-received
High Plains Drifter
(1973) and
The Outlaw Josey Wales
(1976), Eastwood directed
Unforgiven
(1992), a film in which he plays a grizzled pig farmer and reformed outlaw who once held an unequalled reputation for bloodlust and is reluctantly recruited on one last mission. A slow-paced reflection on violence and its consequences.
Unforgiven
won Oscars in the best picture, best director, best supporting actor, and film editing categories.

John Sturges’s classic
The Magnificent Seven
(1960)—the story of seven gunfighters hired by a group of Mexican farmers to protect them from bandits—was inspired by
The Seven Samurai
(1954), directed by Akira Kurosawa, who was himself mightily influenced by American westerns. A half century later, Quentin Tarantino again made the connection between the samurai and western traditions in his
Kill Bill
films (2003, 2004). The second volume, Tarantino has acknowledged, is largely a tribute to the films of John Ford.

The western has indeed become a cherished American film tradition. Of the American Film Institute’s list of the top 100 films of all time, ten are westerns:
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, High Noon, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Stagecoach, Shane, The Wild Bunch, Giant, The Searchers, Unforgiven, and Dances with Wolves (1990).

Owen Wister has come pretty near to writing the American novel. He has come as near to it as any man can well come, and at the same time has beautifully demonstrated the futility of the expectation that the typical novel of American life will ever be written. Mr. Wister has set forth a phase of life which is to be found only in the United States, and he has pictured it with graphic delineative force, with picturesqueness, and with brilliant narrative power. “The Virginian” ought to live as an artistic embodiment of a species of man fast passing into a remembrance. The Western cowboy has generally been depicted chiefly in the comic papers, where he has been caricatured to make fun for those utterly ignorant of his real nature. Mr. Wister pleads for him that he is a man, and a pretty good man at that. He makes his plea by going out into the cowboy country, living with the cowboy, studying him at close range, getting under the thickness of his suspicion of the Eastern “dude,” becoming his friend, and then summing up the results of his observation in a tale which deftly combines realism with fancy. “The Virginian” is, therefore, in the broad sense, a historical novel. It is a study of men and times. It rings true, and we believe it to be a faithful study.

Certainly the book is absorbingly interesting. It contains humor, pathos, poetic description, introspective thought, sentiment, and even tragedy. Its level is admirably sustained, and the development of the characters is masterly. Perhaps there never was just such a cowboy as this transplanted Virginian, whose name is never told in the story. Perhaps there was. The great West is a good deal like the ocean. All sorts of things and persons happen there, and no one has a right to say that any creation of the novelist’s fancy exceeds possibility. It will probably be conceded that this particular cowboy is not exactly typical. Yet he possesses traits which one instinctively feels are real. The quick, penetrative wit, the readiness of tongue, the self-control—these are qualities which cannot be rare among the strenuous, venturesome, hardy spirits of the West.

—June 12, 1902

 

Where, suggests Mr. Wister, is the horseman, the cow-puncher, the last romantic figure upon our soil? In a measure he is gone; and yet he will be here among us always, invisible, waiting his chance to live and play as he would like. In the old days his ungoverned hours did not unman him. “If he gave his word, he kept it; Wall Street would have found him behind the times. Nor did he talk lewdly to women; Newport would have thought him old-fashioned.” In Mr. Wister’s eyes, the type seems to have been wholly admirable, heroic, splendidly barbaric, and it is thus that the author has endeavored to preserve him in
The Virginian.

Were
The Virginian
without any other qualities, the chapter called “Em’ly” alone would make it worth reading. Although in many respects they are as far apart as the poles, the story of “Em’ly” curiously recalls Guy de Maupassant’s story of the paralysed toper, whose shrewish wife forced him to play the humiliating part of a hen. “Em’ly” is a supreme type of yearning spinsterhood, and the description of her awkwardly and strenuously mothering the litter of rapidly growing setter puppies is delicious in its humour. Here and there in the book there are passages which are somewhat vague, and the relations between the different characters are not always clearly defined. But the lines between types are finely drawn, and Mr. Wister has caught and conveyed admirably the spirit and atmosphere of the era and scenes of which he writes.
The Virginian
is a strong and vigorous novel.

—from
The Bookman
(August 1902)

 

The transplanted Virginian and actual cowboy who is Mr. Wister’s hero is indubitably of heroic, if also of conventional, make. Whether roping a steer, making love to Molly Wood—spinster of Bennington, Vermont, and schoolma’am of Bear Creek, Wyoming—passing upon a modern poet, stringing up a “bunkie” unhappily caught in a horsestealing way, drawing a bead on a bad man, taming a mutinous “outfit,” or before the more dread ordeal of greeting Molly’s Eastern relatives, the Virginian is sure of his own mind and of his own deed. I hardly know a more engaging hero. Jack Hamlin grafted upon Jan Ridd and set down among vast plains, deep canyons, and solemn mountains, with a sense of multitudinous cattle and of patient, tireless horses filling a scene sparsely occupied by human kind—this is the larger impression that the book makes upon me. And, besides all this, it is a very humorous book, full of Homeric laughter and of the large jesting that of old time pleased the happy gods. It is also a poetical book, with a peculiar elation in the description of the long nuptial days of the Virginian and his bride on their island and with a very special horror where the hero and the author follow the fresh trail of a horse and two men and think fearfully of the two thieves they have left swinging in the cottonwoods. Here are many reasons for gratitude to Mr. Wister, and grounds enough for pronouncing his book a remarkable one.

When that perversity which prompts one to challenge any frank and spontaneous enjoyment wreaks itself upon “The Virginian,” it finds surprisingly little to take back from the first enthusiasm. Something there is, perhaps, on the score of art. The novel bears, in a certain episodic character and lack of unity, the marks of its composition from isolated sketches. Much that is entertaining in the mere pranks of the hero might have been sacrificed with advantage to the look as a whole. The story is told in a brave and direct fashion, as is fitting, without either affectation of fine writing or over-emphasis; yet it lacks that distinction of style which lends durability to the merely well-told story. But the doubt whether our grandchildren will be reading “The Virginian” is comparatively irrelevant and surely ungracious while so many of us are indebted to Mr. Wister for a keen and unusual enjoyment.

—from
The Forum
(October 1902)

 

“The Virginian” is the story of a nameless hero. Throughout the book he is called “the Virginian” and nothing else. But although nameless, as far as we are informed, he is one of the most distinct personalities that have appeared in American fiction. A Wyoming cow-boy, representing a phase of our civilization that has almost completely vanished—although it was real enough a quarter of a century ago,—uneducated and unskilled in the amenities of artificial society, he conquers our sympathies by his innate refinement of character and the clean manliness of his living. He represents an ideal that was probably never realized, yet the separate touches by which he is drawn for us bear the visible stamp of truth. His story is a series of episodes that may be enjoyed independently of one another, although they are held in a sort of unity by his relations with the New England girl who comes to Wyoming to teach school, and who promptly develops into as satisfactory a heroine as one could wish for. She gives him books to read, and his frank comments upon them are both humorous and refreshing. There are other humorous features, notably that which describes the mixing up of a dozen babies by changing their clothes—a prank not quite in keeping with the Virginian’s character, but nevertheless irresistibly amusing. In the course of his career he finds himself a member of a lynching party, and the author makes the usual sophistical defense of this wild form of justice. “The Virginian” is a man’s book, with not one touch of sickly sentiment, and must be regarded as a valuable human document because of the author’s intimate acquaintance with the scenes and types which it portrays.

-October 16, 1902

1.
The Virginian
is still a good read, and a good western is still a good movie. Just the same, there is no doubt that the western, novel or movie, has lost some of its appeal. It no longer seems as relevant, no longer seems to move large audiences on some mythic level as it once did. Why is that, do you think? Have the times changed so that the western story is no longer ours? Are there other genres whose themes more accurately capture our world today?

2.
The Virginian
and other westerns are sometimes read as repudiations of the cult of domesticity that dominated American culture in the nineteenth century, and therefore as an assertion of regenerate masculinity over women and femininity. Does
The Virginian
read that way to you?