NOUS AMERICAN

Morality in the Old Western Movies I

In the 25 years from 1930 to 1955, the Western movie raised a lot of kids.  If you were 10 years old in 1930, you faced World War II in 1941.  If you were born at the end of the 1930s, you were 10 or more years of age near the end of the positive Western movie era, and you were the last to experience the thrill of the matinee Westerns before the era flickered and died.  If you were a "baby boomer," you missed the matinee Western era all together, but you grew up with what filled the vacuum.  You got the dark, inverted, and morally perverted Westerns that filled the vacuum left by the vanished positive Westerns.

Let us be very clear that fiction-based movies are an art form, and art is "the selective recreation of reality, according to the artist's metaphysical values."  [For an outstanding and proper treatment about the meaning of art and its importance to every human, read Ayn Rand's Romantic Manifesto.]

We have to dig into that definition just a little.  "Metaphysics" refers to the very foundations of reality, its nature, including human nature, and each person has his own version of metaphysics, including artists.  There is just one real version of reality and a proper metaphysics, but people are capable of trying to make work all sorts of unworkable contradictions, which is why the definition of art refers to what the artist accepts (usually always implicitly) as his own view of reality.  "Values" refers to that which people act to gain or keep, and "virtues" are those actions.  Art ties ethics or morality (the realm of values) to reality (metaphysics), as the artist conceives it.

A movie, for example, presents how the writer(s), director(s), and actor(s) view life's most important values.  You, the viewer or art consumer, experience this view as a whole as you watch the movie and contemplate it afterward.  The "metaphysical values" of the movie interact with you own.  Thus, you and others experience enormously similar or enormously varied responses to the movie, based on your views of life and reality and what of these you value.  This phenomenon  accounts for why two people viewing the same movie may have widely differing reactions to it and responses to it.

All of the foregoing pertains to every single fictional movie, whether black and white or in color, whether with sound or without, whether short or long.  Westerns were an absolute laboratory for studying morality on an individual and cultural level.

Let's go there next...

Yet More About Westerns

Any number of people who write about these matinee Western movies gets around to mentioning that they were morality plays, for the most part.  That they were, and as such, they were cultural snapshots.

Others have written, for example, about the cultural esprit before my time, specifically around the time of the arrival of the 20th century.  There was a cultural happiness and optimism that completely changed with World War I.  One can sample that spirit in the dime novels of that era.

Although it did in no way concern Western movies, I got a real sample of a by-gone era a couple of months ago.  Turner Classic Movies ran a 1926 short filmed feature which introduced the first sound to motion pictures and to the viewing public.  The Vitaphone Corporation was the first out with sound on disk recordings, which coordinated with the action on the screen.  This short selection was to run with Don Juan, starring John Barrymore, the first full length feature to have a sound track.  That sound track was symphonic music, not dialogue.  The short feature, however, did have talking, singing, and music.

What was astonishing about this short feature was what was considered important to present to movie goers.  There were operatic selections, popular music, dance, instrument solos, and symphonic compositions.  These were de rigeuer for the day.  None of the musical crap that assaults one today.  None of the singing banalities.  None of the poorly talented demonstrating their inabilities as we seem unable to escape today.

Similarly, the "B Westerns" of the 1930s and 1940s reflected a cultural morality that has long gone.

More on that next.

Continuing, Relaxing with Old Westerns

What amazes me about viewing these old westerns on Encore Westerns is how they hold my attention.  Yes, yes, yes, there is much sameness in locales, plots, sidekickery, etc.  Yet, there is a quality of freshness (more on this later on).

Many of these films fall into the "B Westerns" genre.  In my ignorance, I always thought "B" referred to inferior quality.  It just might, but that is not where the name came from.

"B" movies came from the days of the Great Depression.  Funds were tight, and people were not spending any discretionary funds on movies as they had when money was plentiful.  The moguls of the film industry hit upon giving the movie viewer more "bang for their buck."  Ah, the endless blessings of capitalism.

Along with the "A" film, i.e., the feature film, they began running a less expensive and shorter "B" film for the same ticket price.  Westerns dominated the "B" film genre.

As for quality, they were very variable, depending on the quality of scripts, quality of actors, and the quality of directors.  Looking back now, what is seen is not how bad they were, but how good they were.  I have had to bail out of just one so far because of poor quality.

Theaters were owned in the main by the studios, so the studios could insist that theatres take their "B" features, and that kept the genre very much alive until after WWII.  Here came that King Killjoy, the Supreme Court, enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, busting up the studio-theater monopolies.  [Maybe we'll get into why the anti-trust laws have always been evil one of these days].

This was a big kick in the wallets of the studios, and it spelled the beginning of the end of the "B Westerns."  That wasn't all, of course.  Probably these films had run their course, like we see these days with television series (Seinfeld, MASH, Frasier, etc.).  A third factor guaranteed their demise, and that was television.

Nevertheless, the so-called "greatest generation" and their progeny grew up on "B Westerns," and that was highly significant, as we shall get into soon.  The cross-over years were 1950-1955 when the "B Westerns" vanished.  What replaced them reflected colossal change in the dominant cultural ideas of America.  The "Western noir" movie appeared, with anti-heroes, anti-values, and nihilism.  The Baby-Boomer generation grew up on these.

To be continued...

Relaxing with Old Westerns

Yes, blogging here has been sparse.  But, as we indicated, we cannot do it all during the summer.  Out here, the eternal rains cease in July and come back in October.  In that hiatus, we have to push to get the upkeep and furtherance of our place advanced.  There's not a lot of mental gas left over at the end of these days.  Nevertheless, this year, we have found a terrific way to relax.

That way comes courtesy of the Encore Westerns channel on our DirecTV setup.

We indicated that western movies became pretty important to us at a critical time growing up.  Then, those westerns went out of production.  Western movie noir came in, and we moved on, never thinking that we would ever see any of these movies again or any like them.  Then we saw once more some of those Durango Kid movies that lit up our Saturdays.  From there, we started watching B westerns of the 1930s and 1940s, many with people we had only heard of but never seen on the screen.

Now, we actively "mine" the schedule for the older, black and white films between about 1930 and 1950.  These include the early John Wayne, Buck Jones, Three Mesquiteers, Charles Starrett, Ken Maynard, Bob Steele, Eddie Dean, William Elliott, Gene Autry and a growing list.  Probably we never saw showings of films made earlier than about 1947, and the genre vanished in the early 1950s.  That means that we are seeing what the kids of the 1930s and earlier 1940s saw, but it is fresh to us.

Well, work outside calls, so we will stop for the moment.  We have a lot to write about all of this, so we will return to this subject fairly soon and continue...

One Picture ...

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To Anyone Who Just Might Be Reading This

This is our fun site.  We want to put stuff here that just won't fit into any other of our blogs or websites.  It vents our personal side.  Right now, it ain't venting much because we have to 'fess up that this is summer.  Where we live, summer is the only time to get a lot of "honey=dos" done on the outside, so we are playing a lot of hooky from the computer right now.  Our thoughts spin out blogs faster than Kofi Annan can spout excuses, but chainsaws, siding, brush clearing, descending into the crawl space, etc., are sapping our energies.  We live in an area where the rains start back in October, and the world turns dark, when it is not gray, with gloom and little daylight.  It just so happens that blog and website work picks up then.  Wonder why?