Shane, Come Back!

As this hard-fought, high-stakes presidential campaign reaches its closing crescendo, one question insistently nags: What does today's scarcity of cowboy movies tell us about the nation that, 50 years ago, could not get enough of them?

The question is prompted by the hoof beats of the new movie "Appaloosa," which is welcome evidence that the Western genre is not facedown in the dusty streets of Laredo, wrapped in white linen and cold as the clay. But "Appaloosa," although semi-boffo at the box office, is being trounced by a movie about a Chihuahua, which is an honest-to-Randolph Scott outrage. (For whippersnappers too young to remember, Scott—strong jaw; a crooked smile but straight teeth; crow's-feet from squinting into sunsets—starred in many horse operas, back in pre-"Brokeback Mountain" days, when it was rumored that he was a gay cowboy.)

The Western as a literary genre was invented in 1902 by Owen Wister, a well-born Philadelphian and Harvard graduate whose friend and hero was the Manhattan-born and Harvard-educated cowboy—Teddy Roosevelt had ranched in Dakota territory—then in the White House. Wister's novel "The Virginian," about a Wyoming cattleman, was a best seller for six years and put into American parlance a sentence—"When you call me that, smile!"—that someone has said should be on the Great Seal of the United States.

Hollywood, born at about that time, saddled up and galloped off in pursuit of Wister's readers. Imitation being, as Fred Allen said, the sincerest form of television, in 1958, 11 of the 18 top-rated television shows were "Gunsmoke" (1), "Wagon Train"(2), "Have Gun Will Travel" (3), "The Rifleman" (4), "Maverick" (6), "Tales of Wells Fargo" (7), "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp" (10), "Zane Grey Theater" (13), "The Texan" (15), "Wanted: Dead or Alive" (16) and "Cheyenne" (18).

In the new movie, Virgil Cole, a rent-a-marshal, and his sidekick, Everett Hitch, are hired by the Appaloosa town fathers to bring to heel or send to Hell a lawless rancher named Randall Bragg. Although Cole reads Emerson, he rarely rises from reticence and then only to taciturnity:

Bragg: You a drinking man?
Cole: Not so much.
Bragg: Hard to like a man who doesn't drink a little.
Cole: But not impossible.
Bragg: Well, we'll see. You shot three of my men.
Cole: Matter of fact, I only shot two. Hitch shot the other one.
Bragg: Point is, I can't have my hands coming in here and you boys shooting them.
Cole: I can see how you'd feel that way.
Cole tells Hitch he would be a better gunslinger if he did not have feelings:
Hitch: Hell, Virgil, everybody got feelings.
Cole: Feelings get you killed.