A River Runs Through It

If we allow that Cervantes kicked off the novel with "Don Quixote" in 1605, then prose fiction took the bit in its teeth and rode unchecked for nearly 300 years before some sourpusses began to insist that the novel was dead. Western films had nothing like that long a grace period. Within a year or two after the release of Edwin S. Porter's "The Great Train Robbery" in 1903 (not the first Western, but surely the first milestone in that elastic and irreplaceable genre), critics claimed that the Western was dead, killed while still in the delivery room by bitter Eastern winters and the quickly exhausted scenic possibilities of New Jersey and its environs. Fortunately, D. W. Griffith, Carl Laemmle, William Fox and a roving band of proto-moguls took a liking to a southern California village that had been established as a temperance community. The village was called Hollywood, and temperance was not what it would come to be known for.

At first, Westerns were produced anywhere an actor could mount a horse: many couldn't, but the infant studios made do. Around 1914, William S. Hart teamed up with Thomas Ince to make a swarm of Westerns. The desert town of Victorville, Calif., proved to be a near-ideal location, the anti-New Jersey of cheap moviemaking. For years, Victorville proudly housed the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum. I have seen a few silent Westerns, but the one I'd most like to see is a 1911 release about Billy the Kid. Why? Because for a time after he killed his first man, Billy hung out in Mesilla, N.M., a village on the Rio Grande not far from where the river becomes not merely a life-giving waterway to poor Anglos and Hispanics who live along its banks, but also—on its long sweep southward to the gulf—an international border. And borders, as we are witnessing today, mean trouble.

North of El Paso, to the river's origins in Colorado, the Rio Grande produces plenty of water politics. But south of El Paso, as it flows through one of the emptiest regions of America, the Rio Grande is a war zone, and long has been. Crossing it from the north, smugglers bring bulldozers and other heavy equipment; crossing it from the south are parrots, macaws, other exotic pets—and dope.

To this bleakly beautiful country, also for a long time, have trekked filmmakers. I'd bet that a careful scholar (or a decent computer) could locate a hundred movies that use the Rio Grande or the lands that border it as a location. I'll probably never see the 1911 "Billy the Kid," but I have seen "Viva Villa!" (1934), the border movie that has everything: Wallace Beery, Fay Wray, a Ben Hecht script and the brilliant cinematographer James Wong Howe.

In the course of 30 seconds, one could make a personal-favorites list: "Touch of Evil," "Rio Grande," "Rio Bravo," "The Border," "Bandolero!," "Lone Star," "The Wild Bunch," "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean," "The Professionals." Howard Hawks's Western masterpiece may have been called "Red River," but the cattle John Wayne and Montgomery Clift plan to take to Missouri were gathered near the Rio Grande. I myself, with the help of legions, have created and seen filmed my "Lonesome Dove" tetralogy, the last segment of which, "Comanche Moon," debuts this December on CBS. All four segments use the Great River as background, and took a mere 23 years to film. Who said Westerns can't be made? They can, but patience helps.

The novelist Cormac McCarthy has been, for some time, the literary master of the border country. He took possession of it in 1985 with his somber "Blood Meridian," perhaps as violent a masterpiece as we have. He extended his reach with his "Border Trilogy," the first volume of which—"All the Pretty Horses"—brought him long-deserved acclaim. I don't think McCarthy's prose is overpraised, but I do think it's been weirdly praised: McCarthy is a realist. His prose exalts the particular, precisely and effectively. His larger concerns seem to be ethical, not oracular, and it would not be unfair to call him a soliloquist. His characters are seldom happy, but they survive—if they survive—largely by talking to themselves. What comes to them from the outside is trouble.