Shane, Come Back!

But Cole develops feelings for a young widow whose mourning is well-leavened by lubriciousness. Among the reasons Cole fancies her is that "she chews her food nice." You get the drift.

It is, perhaps, impossible to make a cowboy movie that does not seem a bit camp, because without the clichés, it may be a movie about the West but is not a Western. And some movies that are Westerns in spirit—sort of honorary Westerns—are not about cowboys. With the closing of the frontier, the cowboy came to town and became a detective. But the solitary detectives in battered fedoras were descendants of James Fenimore Cooper's frontiersman, Leatherstocking. He was the cowboy in embryo, a Westerner—a strong, laconic, stoical loner—when the West was western New York.

Hollywood has been going downhill since "High Noon" (1952) and "Shane" (1953) were nominated for Best Picture but lost to "The Greatest Show on Earth" and "From Here to Eternity," respectively. Nowadays, Hollywood makes much of its money abroad, and foreigners, the poor benighted things, do not cotton to cowboys.

Americans, though, probably have a vestigial hankering for—here we come to America's monomania, presidential politics—a political cleanser. For a Gary Cooper in "High Noon," a sheriff who dispatches bad guys in job lots, then drops his tin star in the street and leaves town in a buggy with his fair-haired beauty, without looking back. Or for an Alan Ladd in "Shane," who, when bad guys provoke him, gives up his plan to give up gunfights, then rides away, indifferent to the cry "Shane, come back!"

But instead of looking for a savior wearing spurs, Americans should try to embody the virtues vivified in Westerns—self-reliance, acceptance of responsibility, insistence on accountability, distaste for verbosity and unwillingness to whine. Back in the 1930s, when Americans were in much more dire straits than they are now, they encountered such virtues downtown at the Rialto and Orpheum and Bijou theaters—at the movies, for which America's population of 127 million bought 78 million tickets a week.

So bang the drum slowly and play the fife lowly, pardner. Belly up to the bar, between the sodbuster married to the schoolmarm, and the tenderfoot just off the stagecoach from St. Louis. Ask the barkeep wearing sleeve garters to pour you a shot of amber rotgut so you can drink to "Appaloosa" and the survival, perhaps even the revival, of the Western.

© 2008