Elmore Leonard: Criminal Pleasures and Great T-Shirts

Elmore Leonard’s voice arrives like curling smoke. It seems to drift down the phone line from Detroit and float around me in Sydney for quite a while. “I was in Australia a few years ago,” Leonard says then his story begins to unwind. Something about a book festival in Adelaide and landing in New Zealand first and “a journey around the coast” and what I think may have been confusion as to whether he and his then wife were ever in Australia at all.

By the end of it I am wondering if this vague gentleman is the same Elmore Leonard whose genre-buckling crime novels paved the way for filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and programs like The Sopranos?

Leonard sure doesn’t come at you a literary superstar. But that’s what he is: the acknowledged living master of the crime writing genre, as everyone from Tarantino to fellow authors like Martin Amis and George Pelecanos have acclaimed.

Apart from their popularity on the lending lists of American prison libraries (and best seller lists generally), Leonard’s books were selected for a 2006 ‘Hip Hop Literacy’ campaign to help encourage reading in high schools and colleges across the USA: all of which indicates he’s still pretty switched to the street on for an old white guy.

I’m expecting him to be a little more mouthy and ‘hard boiled’. Instead he just rolls along, exhibiting a generous propensity for conversation of almost any kind – if with a distinctly laconic aftertaste of a trademark humour in his writing that is equal parts underdog and deadpan bulls-eye.

Not counting his screenplays and short stories, Leonard has produced 43 novels in 54 years, rarely letting the quality slip below entertaining. Among them he has turned in at least ten crime genre classics, notably Swag (1976), City Primeval (1980), Stick (1983) La Brava (1983), Glitz (1985), Freaky Deaky (1988), Killshot (1989), Get Shorty (1990), Maximum Bob (1991), Pagan Babies (2000) and Tishimingo Blues (2002). Actually that’s eleven, with other books jostling for inclusion. His latest crime novel, Up in Honey’s Room came out late last year to mixed reviews. Leonard isn’t feeling battered. He’s half way into writing a new one.

82 years of age and still trucking on?

“Listen, I can’t believe it,” he drawls. “And still I think old people are older than me!”

Did he get any good books for his last birthday? “Nah, I mostly get t-shirts.” Besides, Leonard moans, “I must get five crime books a week sent to me, people asking me for blurbs.” He rarely reads them. He’s too busy writing his own. “I don’t know why,” he adds mournfully.

The truth is Leonard doesn’t read crime books much. “They’re all the same,” he says. He’d rather talk t-shirts. “I get some good ones from a journalist friend in New York every year for my birthday. Mike Lupica, he’s a [sports] columnist. He gets me ones with stuff on it like ‘The Dickens of Detroit’,” Leonard laughs. “Which means nothing!”

The way Leonard says ‘nothing’ is emphatic. As if any display of ego would be fatal to his literary M.O. Last October he released Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, most of which revolved around the axiom “If it sounds like writing, I cut it out”.

That’s why he gets uncomfortable when people call him the heir to Raymond Chandler. “I was never interested in Raymond Chandler. I like him, but I was never influenced by his writing. I didn’t care for all the similes and metaphors he used that I thought interrupted the story.”

Along with the sparseness of Ernest Hemingway – “all that white space on the page” – he cites Richard Bissell as more important. “In his books nobody was trying to be funny,” Leonard says, “but they were all funny because of the way they talked.”

It’s a distinction that balances Leonard’s work on the line between menace and comedy, something Tarantino took cues from in developing his film dialogue. If Leonard has ever attracted much criticism, it’s for always putting a bunch of interesting people together, seeing how they talk, and killing anyone who bores him. “I’m not known for my plotting,” he says, though the gear shifts in a Leonard story accelerate as smoothly as the Chevrolets he once wrote advertising copy about when he was a struggling writer in the 1950s. “I was always better at writing about their trucks then their sedans,” he responds drolly.

Along with the nick-name ‘Dutch’, ‘The Dickens of Detroit’ line has hung about because of his ability to conjure up so many memorable low-life characters from that city. He has also written a few books based in Miami and Oklahoma, and in the case of Get Shorty moved the action to Los Angeles with ‘Chili Palmer’, the loan shark character that John Travolta made famous.



Leonard has frequently discussed his mystification at the way Hollywood would buy up his books “and take everything out of them that was any good”. Things took a turn for the better with Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty (1995), QuentinTarantino’s Jackie Brown (released in 1997 and based on Rum Punch) and Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (1998). Get Shorty capitalized on Leonard’s encounters with Hollywood, mixing criminals with filmmakers. It was during the 1995 Adelaide trip Leonard tried telling me about that he received a phone call from an unhappy Dustin Hoffman (with whom Leonard had unsatisfactory dealings). Hoffman had heard he was ‘in’ Get Shorty and that it was not a favorable caricature. Leonard reputedly shot him down with the riposte, “What! You think you’re the only short actor in Hollywood?”

The author is generally disdainful of Hollywood’s “need to have the star redeem himself”. Leonard’s characters tend to be made of shadier materials like self interest, bad habits and bad luck. “I try to make them human,” he says. “Real – but with something appealing. I like the ones who have been into crime but are now honest, but you don’t know if they might revert. I like homicide cops too, not that there are that many in my books. I just like their deadpan humour.”

Lately Leonard’s early career as the pulp author of cowboy tales throughout the 1950s has also been getting a workout with the release of a compendium called The Complete Western Stories (“thick enough to stop a bullet from a Sharps rifle at ten metres,” the U.K.’s Times Literary Supplement reckoned) and a critically praised film version of his 1953 short story ‘3.10 to Yuma’ which stars Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. “It’s a good looking picture,” Leonard says. “But of course I did not understand the [changed] ending.”

In the meanwhile Killshot, one of Leonard’s best crime books, has been turned into a feature executive produced by Tarantino and directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love). It is due out any day now and stars – Leonard says with some satisfaction – “Mickey Rourke”.



Born in 1925, Leonard moved frequently around the American southwest before his family settled in Detroit, where he has pretty much stayed ever since. As a teenager the appeals of cars, sport and the gangster exploits (and demise) of figures like Bonnie and Clyde all had their influence. Educated at Jesuit high school, Leonard would sign up with the Navy in World War Two, but he never saw serious action. Instead he worked with a construction crew in the Admiralty Islands, “handing out beer” from the kitchen. He’d return to the University of Detroit and graduate in 1950 with a degree in English and Philosophy before moving into copy writing. It’s an eclectic starting resume.

He turned to writing cowboys stories because he liked Western movies and there was an obvious pulp magazine market. Talking about his career can sometimes veer into an accounting report on what he was paid per word per story since 1953. He has always been commercially driven, as well as fascinated by the nexus between books and movies. Unfortunately just as Hombre (1961) was coming out – now regarded as one of the greatest Western novels ever written – and Hollywood was purchasing the rights for a later Paul Newman film, the bottom was falling out of the genre as a glut of television shows flooded the market.

Leonard wouldn’t start on crime till the late 1960s. But it’s possible to see his nascent style emerging in the cowboy tales of The Complete Western Stories. His sense of wronged Indians and Mexicans also points to a little commented on but strongly anti-racist subtext in all his work. Leonard admits he hadn’t read of any of the stories in the 50 years since he’d written most of them. “I went through the galleys [for The Complete Western Stories] and I thought, ‘Jesus, these are not as bad as I thought they would be!’”

“I had studied Hemingway in order to learn how to write,” he says. “But I had a stiff and righteous sound, I hadn’t loosened up. I still had to develop my own voice. The humour had to get into it.”



Essentially that’s the trajectory The Complete Western Stories maps in Leonard’s mastering of character and dialogue, foundations that would set the tonal ground for modern crime writing. For all Leonard’s modesty, his westerns would similarly pave the way for film directors Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah in the ‘60s, whose wild mix of violence, humour and moral ambiguity was set free by Leonard’s earlier, if somewhat more muted vision in print.

Although we’re supposed to be talking about his collection of cowboy stories it’s a measure of Leonard’s focus on the next thing he is doing that he keeps rhapsodizing over his current manuscript (provisionally entitled Road Dogs) and forgets to promote Up in Honey’s Room at all.

“I’m bringing back Jack Foley from Out of Sight in the next one,” he tells me. “George Clooney liked his character in that book and did a good job of playing him in the movie, so I’m hoping he will like him in this one too. I’m also bringing back Dan Navarra from Riding the Rap, she’s a psychic. And Cundo Ray from La Brava! He danced go-go, stole a car, got shot… I had to get it [La Brava] off the shelf to see if he was still alive. He was shot three times in the chest and belly but no one said he was dead so I’ve revived him. They’re all there in the books, hell I might as well use them! And I like them!”

Whenever writing is the focus of our conversation something in Leonard’s voice accelerates and becomes boyish. In his more generally bemused and under-stated manner you meanwhile sense the survivor. Leonard’s first marriage ended in the mid ‘70s, around the same time he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and started hitting his stride as a great writer. His second wife Joan Shepard was a major influence on this renaissance, suggesting book titles, encouraging him to strengthen female characters and making editing suggestions. Her death from cancer in 1993 must have been a blow but Leonard happily remarried within a year to Christine Kent, a master gardener and French teacher twenty three years his junior.

He still writes his stories long hand, same as always. Will still use a typewriter to see how they look before someone (often one of his daughters) gets them on to a computer. He nonetheless worries he is slowing down. Back when he was trying to support a family of five children in the 1950s Leonard would be up at 5am to work on his cowboy stories before heading off to the advertising agency. Later as a full time writer he developed a 10 till 6 habit, Monday to Saturday.

“Yeah, a lot of those cowboy stories were written in the early morning. I can’t stick to that anymore,” he says. “Sometimes I don’t sit down till noon! It gets harder too to please myself too and keep rewriting. Sometimes I get a bit stiff. It’s important to keep the veins of humour flowing... I don’t want to repeat myself,” he says with surprising urgency. “But I do want to maintain a sound in my voice.”


- Mark Mordue

* This story has been published in The Weekend Australian Review, April 5-6, 2008 and Stop Smiling Online (USA) April 21, 2008. Image of Elmore Leonard at top of story sourced from http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2007/10/links-for-day-october-9th-2007.html

Modern Times

This record came in a wooden box. When I opened it the hinges creaked. Inside there was an old phonograph and a dusty ’78, cracked. The label said “Modern Times”. Next to it was a cowboy hat with a snakeskin band. And a green Bible with a passage marked, dealing with the Nazarene in the garden before he was kissed. A pin-up of the singer Alicia Keyes lay curling and grimy. On the back someone had written ‘Tennessee’. Beside it was a small drum of the kind a boy might have once played as he marched into war. There were stranger things I found it hard to credence: the sound of an old man’s rasp floating in the air like wet sugar or sand. From whence this sound came I could not determine. An old film reel whirred when I touched it and in my mind I saw couples in a well-lit barn moving to a country waltz. I withdrew my hand but for a moment only. There were love letters too, but like most collected love letters they were confusing and without date: one minute loving, another lusting, another hating (“some young lazy slut has charmed away my brains”). It was not clear if they were to the same woman, or if such a woman existed at all. There was also a drawing of a man, his face thin yet jowly, his moustache thin, eyes slitty and radioactive, something like a smile playing on his face. Underneath it were the words ‘Song and Dance Man, Duluth Minnesota, 24 May 1941.’ A New Orleans newspaper lay there too, badly yellowed and stained. It showed a picture of a black man with an electric guitar. As I leant into the wooden box to read the story below it I saw water marks had washed the print into a fog of dark type. I also began to hear, as of my ear was pressed to some kind of shell, the sound of a bar band playing far off down a street of laughter and partying. At this point my bones left my body and began to dance on their ownsome. I continued to climb into the box and lay down and eventually those bones rejoined me as the song subsided. I closed the lid and even though it was dark closed my eyes as well.

- Mark Mordue

* First published in The Big Issue (Australia) #263, 25th September 2006. After it was published an incoming editor let me know it was not the kind of thing they would be looking for in future. "I wouldn't say it was your best work."

Waiting on a Friend

"A smile relieves a heart that grieves
Remember what I said..."





I'm knocking on the door of an old friend who won't be happy to see me. He won't be happy because we're not really friends anymore.

It's a sour story to do with money never paid back. But it goes deeper than that, into bad words and bad faith, the way broken trust drops like a cracked stone into the pool of life and sends out dark circles to the edges of memory: that time when..., the moment he said..., a girl, an attitude, a hurt here and there that starts to look like a scheme.

So here I am today at his door.

I want to surprise him. And I know he will be nervous when he sees me.

I'm not sure how I'm feeling. I couldn't say I'm relaxed, but I do feel an unusual, detached calm. A quality in me that doesn't sit right with what I know is ahead of me.

I usually put a lot of energy into avoiding confrontations. I fear them. Yet when the moment comes, rather like stepping off an imaginary cliff, it's strange to find myself just as likely to float as fall. Maybe it's the thought of release from the rage I've been feeling that gives me some premonition of the cruel lightness that will carry me through today.

It's a sunny winter's day. The elements have not aligned themselves ominously.

As I knock, a typically tuneful rhythm, I start when I realize how automatic that rhythm is, how much of a jokey signature it's become for me. He's shared houses with me on and off for over ten years. So I worry he will recognize the knock and stay inside. Then I hear a voice, gravelly with sleep and disorganization somewhere down the hall. Despite the lack of shape in the voice, I know its him.

The next minute he's poking his head round the corner like a rabbit out of a hole. He's wearing a sloppy Joe and clutching a towel to his waist. As soon as he sees me I sense the adrenaline surge in him and my own drop into complete calm. I'll control the situation.

But how to begin?

I don't need to speak much at all as it turns out. He expresses himself in a jumpy dither, c'mon in, I was going to call you, come through, take a seat...

I mention the year old bills that haven't been paid, that he was meant to pay, and the debt collectors out after me, all of it in a reasonably gentle manner. Ask him about the receipts, where they might be?

He fires a round of questions that are coming off the top of his head. They're not questions that are looking for answers, more the rat-a-tat-tat machine gun fire of his nerves and a need to crowd the air.

I suggest we go for a coffee, ask him about a mutual friend, keep the tone bland and lazy. He says sure, runs off to his room to get dressed, stabilize himself. I imagine him shaking inside himself somewhere behind his bedroom door - and I feel a pang of sadness that this is where our friendship has led.

We walk outside to my girlfriend's car. Hop in. I brace myself for a sarcastic comment about the car, a beautiful old Peugeot. I've become used to his light jabs of sarcasm over the years, that undercutting way he has of making me or anyone else feel bad a bout a possession, a sign of progress of any kind.

But he says nothing. Just asks me how I've been.

I talk about work, overcommitments. He mocks the tone in my voice, a tone I did not think was there, says "me oh my" with a whiney laugh.

I feel vindicated. See him. Negative as ever. Correct him bluntly, turn the 'overcommitments' comment into a rally of superiority over him. Don't ask how he is.

We find a nearby coffee shop and park. Make some unbearable small talk while we wait to order coffees. Then it begins.

I quiz him about the bills. Has he really paid them? The debt collectors say they're not paid and it's me who has my name on all of them. He insists he has paid them, but will have to find the receipts. They're at his old girlfriend's, his brother's, his mother's, all the places he slept at and ran to over the past year I've been away.

I ask him if he's surprised that I might not believe him? This is the core matter really - a complete loss of trust. And quietly beneath that, unspoken, my contempt for him.

He looks at me as if he might cry. His eyes seem unduly large in his now shaven head, shaven to compensate for his premature balding, shaven and vulnerable as an eggshell. He says again that he has paid the bills. Talks about what passed between us after he moved in to my house for a few months, the breakup of his seven-year relationship with his girlfriend, how he was "off the rails all last year. I thought you'd understand."

There's barely a moment's silence before he adds that he's "better now".

It all fades away from me, a bunch of air. I go to say he wasn't honest with me. That he wasn't...

"I wasn't myself."

He says 'myself' victoriously. But the word comes out of his mouth all brittle. And when I hear it, my silence, my eyes - even as I feel his hurt, his guilt, his half apology, half attempt to justify himself - are all hard enough to crack the word to pieces.

The rest of the conversation is a spaghetti of details. I let him know about my loss of respect for him, his friends' loss of respect, and implicitly, his ex-girlfriend's loss of respect too. I indicate he has preyed on her trust and mine.

He tries to get angry but he doesn't have the power or the will. He mostly acknowledges my position. Tries again to appeal for understanding. And though I try to give him understanding, it's not soft. Instead I replace understanding with advice.

The conversation is over quickly; the rest is just details. Eventually he wants to leave, but I won't let him go straight away. I go back over the details he has brought up and slice them open with a surgeon's particularity. I have to resist turning hard facts into vicious trivia. And I try again in some qualified way to signal at least some care for his state of mind, for where he might be headed in this world.

Eventually we are out on the sunny street again. He looks shaken, gutted. Trying to act relaxed. We say our banal good-byes in the cool breeze in an old familiar spot where we have stood a hundred times before, and then I turn away in a manner that's not nearly as kindhearted as I wish it could be.

Out of the corner of my eye I catch him walking off alone like someone I know, carrying hurt. I wonder if I should call out to him. But there are no words, so I just stand for a moment, waiting. Then I cross the road and drive away.

- Mark Mordue

Dead Men Walking - The Return of the Cowboy

I was made aware that the Western was dead when I visited a junk shop recently. Looking down at a collection of cowboys and Indians just like the ones I had played with as a boy, I began talking to the shop owner about the fort they came with. She smiled at me and said, “Not many kids these days have an interest in a set like that. They hardly even know what cowboys and Indians are. It’s just not part of their world.”

Standing there in my Levi jeans and blue flannelette shirt, I too had to wonder if I would soon be headed for the ‘antiques’ store? A little more seriously I began to consider the saturating cultural force of the Western in everything from film, radio and literature to art, music and fashion throughout most of the 20th Century.

Though its residual influence remains today in everything from a pair of boots to a Ryan Adams song – not to mention the cowboy poses middle-aged Neil Young fans like me attempt to strike - the truth was obvious: the Western had all but faded from our cinema and television screens, and now seemed as archaic as the history it once so vitally envisioned.

And yet riding in over the horizon has come three major films which fall under a ‘New Western’ star. First there was the Australian director Andrew Dominik’s haunting epic, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a contemplation of notoriety and mortality in which Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck feature as the mutually hypnotized outlaw and his Judas. Almost right beside it was James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma, a clockwork tight, violent entertainment with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe, respectively, as a good man trying to get a very bad one on the train to jail.

Then the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men came shooting its way into the Oscars, a ‘contemporary Western’ with Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin dogging each others’ tracks across the Texas-Mexico borderlands as a drug deal goes wrong and the body count rises.

All three are affected by classic Western tropes: the use of mirror opposites to personify good and evil in conflict as well as affinity; a journeying atmosphere of drifting and propulsion; the solemn moral philosophy and feelings of loss that underline most Westerns, as if something (the past, the frontier, the loner) is being overtaken (the future, civilization, the community); and the significance of an all-embracing landscape, within which lies the absolutes of sacrifice and death, and the almost mystical power of the horse and the gun.



The American ‘West’ has always been a violent place - in myth as much as fact. It remains the necessary imaginative territory America turns to whenever it needs to puzzle out its own identity as a nation, most particularly in the ways that force can lead to honorable ends (if not always honorable means).

Everybody is always trying to kill a cowboy, of course. The same thing might be said of the Western and its cinematic reputation. As a genre it suffers more than most for being judged on its’ worst, and most wooden qualities. As a result the Western has seen a few spells in the graveyard on Hollywood’s Boot Hill before reviving itself and walking back into the commercial maelstrom of Dodge City again.

Three films now do not constitute a movement. Reviving a seemingly dead genre takes a lot more heat than that. But it’s possible to see renewed vigor behind the Western when you also take into account the critically lauded HBO television series, Deadwood (2004-06) - a prosaically brutal take on how the chaos of a gold mining town is civilized – and Brokeback Mountain (2005), author E. Annie Proulx and director Ang Lee’s gay re-visioning of a cowboy romance up in them ‘thar’ hills.

In A Personal Journey with Martin Scorcese through American Movies (1997), Scorcese said that “the most interesting of the classic movie genres for me are the indigenous ones: the Western, which was born on the frontier, the Gangster Film, which originated in East Coast cities, and the Musical, which was spawned by Broadway. They remind me of jazz: they allowed for endless, increasingly complex, sometimes perverse variations. When these variations were played by masters, they reflected the changing times; they gave you fascinating insights into American culture and the American psyche.”

His point about the indigenous nature of these genres is a powerful one. To understand America, one must understand its Western Dreaming. And ask why, now, of all times, the genre has staged a return? Recognizing the way that the Western frontier moved on into Vietnam and the shock of defeat, and how that same sense of the frontier and some final moment of historical trauma continues to this day in Afghanistan and Iraq, might well a the reason.

What is strange about the Western as a genre is that it was dreaming itself into life right from when the American frontier was first opening up, until the West was more or less ‘won’ with the final massacre of Lakota Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in 1890.

The dime novels of the nineteenth century and sensational news reports had already made the likes of Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill and Kit Carson legends in their own lifetimes. Kit Carson’s observation on what the dime novels said about him pretty much summed the whole thing up – “It may be true, but I ain’t got no recollection of it.”

By the 1890’s ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild West’ was touring internationally, a vaudeville circus show that featured the man himself alongside Annie Oakley and Chief Sitting Bull re-enacting moments in the history of the West.

As ‘the reality’ of the 19th century receded the Western would go on to reflect the age in which it found itself: almost purely entertaining in the ‘30s and ‘40s when ‘singing cowboys’ like Gene Autry and later Roy Rogers rode the range; even more heroic and ennobling in World War Two when the Western began to take epic shape in the hands of such fine directors as John Ford and Howard Hawks; then shadowy and edgier in the 50s during the Cold War as Ford’s own palate darkened in films like The Searchers (1956), in which John Wayne played a vengeful and psychologically damaged Civil War veteran twisted up with hatred for Comanche Indians.



Perhaps most remarkable of all in the 1950s were a series of noir Westerns by director Anthony Mann, featuring Jimmy Stuart across eight films as a murderous and damaged figure trying to regain his moral composure and peace of mind. Stuart had once been the Tom Hanks of his age thanks to directors like Frank Capra, and the twisting of his image was almost unbearably bold.

In a renowned essay from 1954 entitled ‘The Westerner’, the film critic Robert Warshow argued that the cowboy “at his best exhibits a moral ambiguity which darkens his image and saves him from absurdity; this ambiguity arises from the fact that, whatever his justification, he is a killer of men.”

Warshow emphasized how the moral centre of the Western universe was defined by the gun. The significance of this cannot be underestimated in a country where democracy and the “right to bear arms” are somehow conflated, an equation born out of the historical violence - that is ‘Western’ violence, ‘frontier’ violence - that first made America a nation in the nineteenth century and later confirmed its place globally as a superpower.

According to Warshow, the Western “offers a serious orientation to the problem of violence such as can be found nowhere else in our culture. One of the well-known peculiarities of modern civilized opinion is its refusal to acknowledge the value of violence… These attitudes, however, have not reduced the element of violence in our culture but, if anything, have helped free it from moral control…”

Violence as an aesthetic, as a moral form, becomes an entirely necessary cultural act in Warshow’s eyes, something the civilized world needs to process. “Watch a child with his toy guns,” he writes, “and you will see: what interests him most is not (as we much fear) the fantasy of hurting others, but to work out how a man looks when he shoots or is shot. A hero is one who looks like a hero.”



George Stevens, the director of Shane (1953), arguably the greatest Western ever made, was considerably sanguine about this mythology. And yet his film Shane is perhaps the most pure ideal of the Western hero in existence, a fable that connects the gun slinger at his best with the knights of old. The director was nonetheless distressed to return from service in World War Two and see just how popular (and poorly made) Westerns had become: “People were using six guns like guitars.”

On the DVD to Shane the director’s son, George Stevens Jnr consults his father’s note books and interviews to reveal how “the film was really about deglamorizing the six-shooter that was becoming a graceful object in the fictional hands of illustrators [comics and advertising], and in particular film people. And it was a time when kids had gone very Western. There were Western chaps and hats and cap-guns everywhere. We wanted to put the six-gun in its place visually in a period as a dangerous weapon.”

You can roll out the statistics like tumbleweeds, but perhaps it’s enough to recall that up until the late 1950s a quarter of the films Hollywood had ever produced were Westerns. They would keep on rolling into day-time and late night television well into the next two decades, with the likes of John Wayne, Jimmy Stuart, Henry Fonda and Alan Ladd (Shane) sent to wander in some immortal loop in every boy’s mind.

It’s in the nature of television to blur historical epochs, repeating and recycling successful formulas till they drop. A list of television Westerns from the late ‘50s well into the ‘70s feels like an iconography of growing up through one unbroken era: among them The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid, Hopalong Cassidy, Maverick, Gunsmoke, Rawhide (which established Clint Eastwood as a star), Bonanza, High Chaparral, The Rifleman, The Texas Rangers, Shenandoah, Rin Tin Tin, Zorro, Casey Jones and Little House on the Prairie, as well as a comedy called F Troop and a martial arts Western known as Kung Fu. Even Star Trek fell under this dominating ethos, with creator Gene Rodenberry pitching it to the networks as “Wagon Train to the stars”.

1959 remains the high water mark for Westerns with twenty-six of them running in peak time on TV, eight of them ranking in the top ten most watched programs in America. Initially driven by the Cold War and an American need for moral comfort and heroic certainties, the cap gun age inculcated most of the young teenagers who would go on to fight in Vietnam into the values of sacrifice and bravery on the frontier, and what can be described as an archetypal style of violence.

To some extent television also tried to turn back the clock and deny the darkness of the cinema Western as the genre entered the 1960s. The ‘spaghetti Westerns’ of Sergio Leone, and a little later Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), exploded with violence and sardonically annihilated the lines between bad and good. Things on television were inevitably more defined and restrained, a kind of soporific propaganda. By the time news of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam was being put before the public in 1969, it was nonetheless difficult to view the mass slaughter of Indians as homogenous heroic entertainment anymore - or to accept a white hats and black hats view of the world.



Artists are not mere vehicles of sociology, however, and it’s easy to cite numerous films that contradict such neat historical positions. Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, for example, has been variously cited as a fable on the madness and horror of Vietnam War and a slow-motion celebration of bloody gun fighting that turned the ‘60s generation on to the thrills of violence. Like much great art it resists being simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ within the moral terms we might prefer to frame it.

It’s nonetheless possible to argue that the ‘60s counter-culture killed the Western along with sheer over-exposure on television. As people were watching Slim Pickens slowly bleeding to death to the tune if Bob Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ - under what looked like an equally bleeding twilight sky in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) - it felt like a generation was witnessing the end of an era: “Mama take this badge off me, I can’t use it anymore. It’s getting dark, too dark to see.”

The failure of Michael Cimino’s epic Heaven’s Gate (1980), to even make it through to wide release confirmed that the Western was not only aesthetically exhausted – in Hollywood’s darkest terms it was bad for business, almost bringing down an entire studio in the process. Despite something of a renaissance at the turn of the ‘90s with the mini-series Lonesome Dove (1989) on television and both Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990) and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) netting Oscars for best films, all these works were eulogies to the genre in one way or another.

There’s something inherently regretful about most Westerns, which leads to the genre articulating its own demise through an ongoing obsession with mortality and time’s inevitable passing. The cowboy’s way of life is lonely and however noble or needed, it has to die. In fact the eulogy is almost the single common note struck by Westerns since the 1950s. As if at the very high point of American power there was something deeply embedded in the culture which sensed how things would ebb away.

This thread of regret often pivoted around a growing awareness that the ‘red skin’ was not simply a ‘savage’ but an abused and brutally displaced human being. It ran through films as varied as Anthony Mann’s Broken Arrow (1956) and John Ford’s last work, Cheyenne Autumn (1964), before reaching melting point in 1970 with the release of A Man Called Horse, Little Big Man and Soldier Blue, the same year Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, an elegiac history of ‘the Indian wars’ from a Native American perspective, became a publishing phenomenon.



A sense of indigenous wounds and lost causes was also filtering across into more contemporary American genres like the road movie. What, after all, is Easy Rider (1969) but a cowboy movie where the ‘horses’ are motorbikes. Dennis Hopper knew what he was doing wearing a fringed buckskin coat. The red-neck joke of the era was “Hippies are God’s proof that cowboys still fuck the buffalo”. This new generation was plugging into the spiritual ecology of the American landscape, and the result was they felt like Native Americans themselves.

Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1996) brilliantly twines American illusions about the frontier with these prescient Native American themes. As Johnny Depp heads further and further West by train, he is the very personification of Horace Greeley’s call to “Go West young man and grow up with the country”. This 1860s catch cry was caught up in notions of Manifest Destiny, a hodge podge of philosophies about racial superiority and religious duties to embrace “God’s providence” as set before settlers entering the landscape. That the flow Westward would also be the journey of America’s becoming as a nation, is oddly echoed in Native American ideas of the “vision quest”, where young man would go out into the landscape and receive visions (often drug induced) to confirm their manhood.

In many ways ‘Western’ cinema has been a continuation of this tension between a vision quest and American ideals of manifest destiny. It’s a dream that is played out in the crucial literary references that are made in both 3:10 to Yuma and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Principle characters in both films are seduced or fascinated the dime novels of the era as if they were true reports. In Jesse James this leads to obsession and disillusionment as the young Robert Ford sees that the real Jesse James is not the romantic hero he thought he was (and wanted to imitate). In 3:10 Yuma it’s actually the source of renewed idealization as a boy looks at a pencil sketch and realizes that it depicts his father just like the heroes on the covers of all the books he has been reading.

The echoes between the seductions of the dime novels and the seductions of these films today are not hard to miss. As visions of a renewed Western Dreaming they speak to rather conflicting enchantments: sometimes you get to play a hero; sometimes you land the villain’s role. By the end of 3:10 to Yuma, the boy’s father has nobly entered the mythology of the Old West before his son’s eyes. By the end of Jesse James, Robert Ford has killed his ‘hero’ and seen the charismatic world of violence for all its futility, only to be murdered himself: “The light going out of his eyes before he could find the right words.”


- Mark Mordue

* Edited versions of this story have appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum 'The Essay' pages, November 10-11, 2007 and in Frieze Magazine(U.K.), April, 2008. Quotes from Robert Warshow's essay 'The Westerner' were sourced from The Western Reader, Edited by Jim Kitses and Greg Rickman, Limelight Editions, New York, 1998.