I have noticed that those who have been writing about B western movies do not appreciate them the way they should. Most of the gurus seem to have written off the B westerns as insignificant. The rest of this genre’s writers do not discount the significance of these films, but they do not sufficiently grasp their significance. I want to declare that such films were highly significant and had a serious cultural impact, and here is why.
First, here is some background about B films, particularly B western films.
In general, studios created “B” films to be tacked onto the bottom of playbills, under “A” or feature films, as an enticement to moviegoers in the Great Depression era to come back to movie theaters. The B add-ons gave moviegoers more to see for the same money. From 1930 to 1955, B westerns made up a huge chunk of B films, and they became very popular with kids and adults during those 25 years, producing hugely popular B western idols such as Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, the Durango Kid, and many others.
Most B western films tended to be formulaic and predictable. Nevertheless, kids and adults, particularly kids, adored them. For example, casts were so familiar to moviegoers as stock good guys and bad guys that any kid could tell the plot from seeing particular actors on screen. Similarly, sets varied little from film to film. The quality of the movies, however, did vary greatly, from studio to studio, from script to script, and budget to budget. Even actors’ performances tended to vary from film to film, particularly among the really cheap productions of "poverty row."
In sum, B westerns were inexpensive, rapidly made, shorter movies (about an hour each), with formulaic plots and scripts, directing, and even acting. However, many B westerns were terrifically good in all respects. Regardless of quality, kids loved them. Why was this? Is the explanation that those who liked these films were simpletons, easy to please? No, it is not.
Many western film analysts and documentarians have devalued B westerns as being filler, like cartoons and serials, as providing “escape from reality,” and as superficial, and cheap entertainment. Happily, other analysts, men and women my age and older, have written about these films and casts with great affection, but seem never to address fully enough the real significance of the B westerns. Why is this? What are the analysts missing? Simply stated, they are not seeing the power of art.
Almost all writers "get" correctly that B westerns were "morality plays.” Good (moral) people righted wrongs perpetrated by bad (immoral) people. At the next level of abstraction, good always trumped evil. That is only a beginning, however.
Ignorance about the power of art and its importance to humans commonly shows up in certain types of comments. Recently, an acquaintance noted that, in the very popular Fox television, counter-terrorism, hyper-adventure series, 24, the principals never seemed to pause to urinate, etc. Similarly, a well-known writer of commentary articles noted that the chief protagonist of 24 had a cell phone that did everything and never needed recharging, unlike his own. In real life, people get full urinary bladders and always need to power up their cell phones, which are very limited compared to those in 24.
From childhood on, I heard many, many comments like these directed to B westerns. Some of these comments were malicious attempts to belittle our emerging values, including hero-worship, by people incapable in any way of ever being heroic. The rest of these comments reflected abysmal ignorance about art, as expressed in film.
Sometimes as 8 and 9 year olds, or so, we kids occasionally wondered why these movie cowboys never went to the bathroom, etc. She answered with the statement, "It's not important."
Not important? What did she mean, “not important”? Mom, it took me a long time to learn what you meant philosophically, but you were “spot on.”
She meant that it was not valuable enough to the art form for the artists to include such details. Such details did not contribute to the story in any way, its goal or its meaning, nor the theme of the story. In fact, including such details would have had monumental meaning, all of the wrong kind. That dear old mother of mine grasped enough of the idea of what is meant by “art,” which put her light years ahead of most “art experts,” few of whom can even properly define art.
“Art” is the selective re-creation of reality, according to the artist’s metaphysical values, in a specific medium. While that definition may seem alien if not abstruse, it is precise down to the last detail. (See Ayn Rand’s book, The Romantic Manifesto, for the critical elements, definitions, details, and integrations).
The B western movie, like all fiction-based movies, fiction literature, painting, sculpture, and music, is an art form. In the case of the movie, it is the scriptwriter who is the primary artist, the creator of the story and characters. He or she wants to select something of value to him or her, something important, to communicate to the viewer. As an artist, he does not lecture; he shows. For example, the script creator does not “explain” justice, for example; he shows, by having the story and characters demonstrate justice, injustice, and closely related ideas. The artist communicates his values through dramatization.
The power of art comes in part from what the artist selects to re-create. The terms “select” and “re-create” are crucial; in art, reality is NOT copied. The artist must choose a theme and illustrate it first by selection, then re-create it on paper, on canvas, or in 3-dimensional materials. He cannot take everything to use for his theme. He must carefully select that which addresses his theme best, and that choice is determined by his deepest values about life and people. To put it another way, the artist stylizes reality.
What aspect of reality the artist chooses to use is of monumental importance. That is why choosing to present movie characters urinating says so much about what the artist considers to be fundamentally important about life and people. Leaving urination out tells us that such is not fundamentally important.
Depending on what the artist’s deepest, most fundamental values are, he or she projects a sense of life that affirms that life is encouraging and benevolent, that people can pursue values successfully, and expect to achieve their strivings. OR, on the other hand, the artist can portray life as discouraging and malevolent, with failure, frustration, and tragedy as the highest expectations for people. Most artists’ sense of life admix both, usually tilting toward the malevolent.
What were the moral values of the B westerns? Their “sense of life” was benevolent. Life might be hard, but good could be expected from people and life, as NORMAL. Good always trumped evil, even if it took the whole movie to do it. Justice prevailed. Certainly, the world was a good place to be in.
The first thing a child grasped in these films, and repeatedly, was their benevolent sense of life. Normal life on-screen consisted of many individual and cooperative actions by men, women, and children in their sundry "communities.” These people and their communities did not necessarily portray the Old West "as it really was," but that was not important. The movies were not history lessons or archeology. After all, they were ART! In B westerns, life consisted of people subduing nature to their needs individually and cooperatively, with government (other than the local lawman) rarely in sight. People did for themselves; they expected to be and enjoyed being productive and responsible for their lives; they enjoyed the fruits of their labors, and they exchanged the fruits of their labors with others. Although their codes were almost never spelled out or referred to explicitly, they lived morally. Profound respect among those people was the norm. Striving and earning happiness were the norm. Life was clearly good, and humans could expect success in proportion to their efforts and abilities. None of this was Pollyannaish either--people got along in degrees, just as we do, but good prevailed.
A kid experienced what life as an adult should be from these films, and he experienced it as something desirable because values were important, good, and achievable. He and she could expect to earn success, to be able to earn happiness. What they picked up from these films was a benevolent sense of life, a
benevolent universe. “Benevolent universe” as a term refers not to some heaven-like place, devoid of effort, but a universe where they could expect to take themselves as far as their abilities and efforts could go without alien, malevolent influences turning their world into failure, despair, and misery. B westerns dramatized an American sense of life.
By contrast, the bad guys always came from and acted out a malevolent sense of life. Baddies were always abnormal, always deviants from the norm, but never the norm. Good was normal. Morally, bad guys were bad in character as well as behavior. However, what made them morally reprehensible was their use of physical force to take values from good people. They coveted something someone or some ones had, and they set out to take it by fraud, raw force, or both. Every variation of bad (and good) was dramatized in B westerns. The principle remained constant: Bad came from the initiation of physical force to take what the bad guys never earned. (Fraud is the intellectual equivalent of initiated physical force and not a special case.)
The hero and his cadre followed just one course: To right the wrong, to return the world back to normal. They did so, but not without struggle against all sorts of odds and obstacles. Success had to be earned here as well, and a successful outcome might be presumed but could not be guaranteed, particularly in the better films. Success came easier to the heroes, but not every step was successful. With undiminished effort, directed by a clear moral code, they eventually righted wrong.
In righting the wrong, the chief protagonist became a hero—a hero, because he was a moral man. To those kids, heroes were people who could not tolerate wrong and who were willing to do whatever was required to restore right. Down to the last hero, these were moral people. The film artists showed viewers what moral people are like, and they communicated this perfectly to very receptive latency age kids.
The cowboy heroes worked from an implicit moral code, one commonly accepted by those on the good side. It was traditionally a very American moral code, of course, as well as a very American sense of life. That code generally and implicitly represented the pursuit of the cardinal values of reason, purpose, and self-esteem, with the implicit principal virtues of rationality, productivity, pride, honesty, integrity, and judgment. That was what was dramatized by screen action. Some toxic contradictions were mixed in, such as sappy concessions to religion, but these were truly minimal.
The (implicit) moral code of B westerns derived from the founding principle of America
B western films presented a good sense of life to kids, as well as moral struggle and the use of the mind to solve problems. They reinforced the Rights of Man and the need to protect, preserve, and restore them. These were concretized in the western hero--an adult, almost always male, keen of thought and profoundly committed to the moral life. All of these became a part of that benevolent sense of life.
What each kid saw in movie and after movie in those Saturday matinees was an abstract picture of life, as it might be. Often, his real life did not match such a picture, but no kid thought his life would be a carbon copy of what he saw on screen. In a few minutes in a film, he has to experience the kind of person he should emulate and grow into. Kids grasped what was important, and each kid had a bottomless cup requiring frequent refillings with the all-important “sense of life.”
Kids between 1930 and 1955 had an opportunity to view over 2600 western movies. B westerns made up a big percentage of that number. They, not the A films, carried most of the moral/esthetic/sense-of-life load, while big budget A westerns usually paled by philosophical comparison.
Alas, what was so good about B westerns was changing in American culture. The new cultural sense of life was their polar opposite. When B westerns died out in 1955, their final echoes survived in television at least for a little while. Movie westerns devolved malevolently, and television westerns began resembling Masterpiece Theater. We who thrived on B western movies were the lucky ones. “Baby boomers" were not; they got the full dose of the cultural change.
One can witness the entire cultural switch in the films of the transition period, from the dour A westerns of the late 1950s and 60s, to the pathognomonic western heralding the new era, The Misfits, in early 1961. If there was anything good that survived from westerns by the late 1960s, The Wild Bunch killed it in 1969 and set the tone for the three and more decades that followed. After 1969, westerns began withering away rapidly as a genre. They languish in a pathetic state to this day.
The morality and sense of life in the B westerns were implicit. The closest morality ever came to being expressed explicitly can be found in the famous Gene Autry theme song, "Back in the Saddle Again," in the phrase "...the only law is right.” Right was dramatized in screenplay action. Kids grasped the abstractions emotionally. That was both good and bad.
The good was not good enough, and the bad was fatal. Had these values been emphasized explicitly in the homes and schools of post World War II America, kids could have internalized these principles and would have been much better able to withstand the increasing cultural malevolence that filled the vacuum left by the B westerns. [Let me clear that I do not mean that the problems that followed the end of the B western era came as a result of the demise of that genre. Their demise did leave a vacuum, and unopposed bad, coming from significant philosophical sources and taking many forms, performed the equivalent of filling a vacuum. The westerns reflected changing values but did not cause the change.]
As the B westerns died out, A westerns were changing into psychoanalytically influenced character studies. Characters became dark, brooding, and motivated by conflicts and "unconscious demons" from the "id.” Good and bad irreversibly blurred. Then, in the 1960s, the western film really went to hell. The world of the good as triumphant was replaced by the malevolent universe premise as the norm. The chief protagonist of old was replaced by the chief antagonist. The hero was converted into the anti-hero, and value pursuit was replaced with nihilism. These disvalues reflected the cultural shift under the influence of post-modernism and its philosophical antecedents. The big A westerns of the 1960s, typified by The Misfits and The Wild Bunch, accurately portrayed the sense of life and the rejection of values that dominated the rest of the 20th century, without end into the 21st century.
Kids living on the implicit moral code of B westerns could not defend themselves against the post World War II, "Johnny Can't Read" era of collapsing values. The values they had absorbed were eroded by the dominant cultural influences, which assaulted their minds in music, drama including television and film, painting, and literature. Implicit values were only in an indistinct, "sort of know" state, so, little by little, they blurred, faded, and became replace with the new, strong influences. Some of us managed to hold into adulthood some of what we had absorbed. The rest did not, and we see these human philosophical wrecks running our institutions of government, our media, entertainment (performing arts), fine arts, the law, our universities, and schools.
As kids, what did we play? Call it "cowboys and indians" or “cops and robbers,” but its essence was good versus evil. Sometimes the Indians were bad guys, and at other times, they were good guys. Whoever they were, the focus was on the action, but that action was the application of values to situations in life as seen in those B westerns. Good guys were modeled after our celluloid heroes and the cadre of the good guys.
The things adults concerned themselves with, such as urination needs, never bothered us kids. Why? They were not important! It did not matter that:
- B westerns did not faithfully reproduce exactly the Old West
- They did not garb the actors in "authentic" western dress
- The Old West had few, if any, "singing cowboys"
- Fist fights produced few to no facial or hand injuries
- Almost all gunshot wounds were nearly instantly fatal
- "Six guns" often shot several dozen shots without reloading
- Heroes shot revolvers deftly from the hands of baddies
- Few people ever got dirty
- No one seemed to have bowel and bladder needs
- Stories never happened that way in the Old West
- Etc........etc........etc
None of these facts and fictions--and many, many more--were important to us kids, and they are not important now. Understanding the basic principles of art and the role of art in human life makes that foregoing list fundamentally unimportant.
Note that my emphasis has been on kids from latency age into very early adolescence. While it is true that many adults saw these films and enjoyed them, they were too far removed from the critical formative period to take in their full significance.
Even the "morality play" aspect of B westerns was not important a subject of study for us kids. Those were the obvious ways life was to be and to be lived. There was no question. We accepted the values whole cloth. We accepted them because VALUES per se were important.
These values carried more powerfully into my own adult life than I could ever have imagined. As we grew up and traversed adulthood, we made some mistakes, some errors of judgment. We had learned as kids that good things require effort, and, when older, while that there were no guaranteed outcomes, we retained the kernel of optimism that good ultimately prevailed. What I took away from B westerns, particularly from the real silver screen cowboy heroes, was all I had for a long time. What I took away turned out not to be enough to prevent all damage from a combination of my own mixed premises and the endless assault of cultural irrationality. Yet, it was enough to form a “mindset,” so that when I read Atlas Shrugged and began exploring Objectivism in 1965, I was able to begin reconstructing my own cognitive and moral infrastructure.
Rediscovering B westerns and my old heroes like Gene Autry in the summer of 2006, I once more got to re-experience some of the emotional benefits I found in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As I re-experienced them, I found that I brought to these viewings to give them understanding instead of taking from them as I had done as a kid. The wealth of knowledge and experience I had gleaned over my years made my own “B western revival” exhilarating by adding perspective and appreciation of their personal meaning to me. I had never wanted to grow up and be a cowboy, or a film star, or Superman, but, I had always wanted to grow up and do as people did in those films: I really wanted to do something important. This desire led me to seek to be value-oriented and to seek a life of value achievements. I am proud of that. Those B westerns gave me that. This is what they gave other kids like me, but they were not around to pass this on to the "baby boomers," who were the first wholesale victims of the post-modernists.
To all who do not appreciate what B westerns did for kids between 1930 and 1955, learn the real philosophical meaning of art. Then, rethink your conclusions.
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