2024-25
JOHN NEAR GRANT Recipient
Cinematic Frontiers: John Ford and Sergio Leone’s Influence on the Western Genre
Gabe Sachse
Cinematic Frontiers: John Ford and Sergio Leone’s Influence on the Western Genre
Gabe Sachse
2025 Near Scholar
Mentors: Mr. James Tate and Mrs. Meredith Cranston
April 14, 2025
American society and culture rests on a foundation of intertwining, carefully written myths. The great works entered into the country’s artistic canon create a roadmap through the soul of the nation itself. No art form lends itself more to this exploration of America than film, a medium conceived on domestic soil. Movies have captured the eyes of a restless, everdeveloping country, becoming a canvas to capture moments in history. Metacritical perspectives comment on its unique position as a primarily visual medium to accentuate the grandeur of the Western story, with one quoting scholar Will Wright: Myths must be transmitted to be perpetuated, and no medium is more appropriate for the transmission of the Western myth than motion pictures. Only on film are the “mythical dimensions” of the West fully captured: Although Western novels reach a large and faithful audience, it is through the movies that the myth has become part of the cultural language by which America understands itself.1
This proved especially useful in the time following the Second World War, when America began to recontextualize itself in a world order that now revolved around the nation’s own cultural hegemony. In the process, American audiences grew an appetite for films that depicted mythologized versions of historical moments, a trend inspired by the populace’s attempt to make sense of their past and present’s place on the fore of global culture. America was “a colony of settlement that sought to build a new political order through migration and conquest, and thus required its own distinct narrative.”2 For this narrative, the American people did what they always did: they looked westward.
1 Mike Yawn and Bob Beatty, "John Ford's Vision of the Closing West: From Optimism to Cynicism.," Film & History (03603695) 26, nos. 1-4 (1996): 6, Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text.
2 Hervé Mayer and David Roche, Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2022), 119.
Perhaps the most extensively explored period of American history on film is the latter portion of the Old West. In the postwar cultural landscape, Westerns became America’s new myth, a filtered historical narrative of the Old West made to fit a certain form, both in cinematic technique and thematic substance. As the film historian Robert B. Pippin describes, “America’s geography made it possible for Americans to keep reenacting the core element of the American myth– a new beginning. The West became for Americans what America had been for Europeans, a fresh start and freedom from the decadence of old Europe, or of the “Europeanized,” weak, clueless Easterners of many Westerns.”
3 In the overwhelming majority of these contemporary Westerns, the major conflicts and themes revolve around this idea. The form drew American audiences in by giving them a reliable source of national pride and identity as the gun-slinging lawman, ready to protect their values, ones that hinged on the classic idea of American individualism and the innocent, usually characterized by an entire town and its defenseless populace. In keeping with these core elements, the filmic language of the Western became nearly standardized, providing a blueprint that directors could only minutely tweak. These whitewashed historical depictions, and their generally false applications, left room for the Western to be utilized as a subversive genre, one that undermined the codified elements of the standard cinematic form and its major themes. The familiarity of the Old West to audiences served as a vehicle for auteurs to give pointed commentary on the nation’s past, present, and future: a new wave of works that evolved the general Western form, giving the genre a new sense of variety. The creators of these films encompassed many established and up-and-coming directors, including two of the most critically acclaimed Western filmmakers of all time: John Ford and Sergio Leone.
3 Robert B. Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012), 23.
As Ford, who began his career making stereotypical Westerns, aged, his personal background and troubles seeped into his work, forming an unintentionally sharper and more critical idea of the classic Western story. The child of Irish immigrants, idealistic nature lent itself to penetrating views of American society, among other things. Thus, the timelessness of Westerns suited him like no other genre could; as the biographer Scott Eyman puts it: “He had a vision of family, a vision of America, but the Western gave him a central metaphor with which to say it.”
4 Through this vision, Ford took a critical, yet sympathetic look at the complicated history of the Old West. He believed that America should represent the fearless idealism of the American Dream, and incorporated much of the callous masculinity and simplistic historical depictions of the typical Western film. Yet, driven by his own experiences with the American Dream, he acknowledged the flaws of the actors that built the country into a global superpower. With his painterly shot compositions and tender, often family-related storylines, he reflected the oftentimes lonely struggle of defining and pursuing the ideas of America that he himself experienced, shaping the genre into a more reflective version of itself.
Leone, influenced by his native Italian tradition of neorealist cinema and ancient Roman drama, melded together the foreign flavors of cold, realistic characterization and maximalist cinematic language that turned what audiences perceived as a thrill-ride through the Old West into commentary on the profiteering machine that fueled the American Dream, as well as the individual actors that built America. Commenting on Leone’s modus operandi as a filmmaker, the scholar Carmen Siu notes: “Leone was an aficionado of the Hollywood western. At the same time, his works consistently deflate the transparent myth-making and nation-building of these
4 Scott Eyman, Print the Legend : the Life and Times of John Ford (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2015), 107.
films.”5 Much like Ford’s respect for America as a concept, Leone held a healthy appreciation for the traditional Western form. He made changes based on his Italian cinematic heritage, deriving thematic elements from both the genre pictures of his father and the neorealist works of the postwar period, in an attempt to innovate cinematically. While his boisterous, singularminded vision of the West did not appeal to some critics initially, he eventually wormed into the iconography of the genre, in tandem entrenching his ideas in the larger discussion of the Western as a representation of America.
When examining the impact of these directors and their theories on the purposes of the Western, and within it, the American Dream, the most daunting task presents itself in the selection of works to study. Due to budgetary and logistical restraints imposed on the two auteurs over the courses of their career, the most logical place to examine the crux of each director’s philosophy is at the height of their powers: for Ford, that comes in 1956’s The Searchers, and for Leone, 1966’s The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. As time has passed, the two directors have proved to be more than just artistic chroniclers of a bygone era. With their works, they became lasting sages of the American experience, envisioning America’s evolution, its peaks and pitfalls, and lifting the curtain on its psyche. Their mastery achieved what many of their contemporaries failed to do with the typical Western story, peering into the soul of the nation (see fig. 1), and forcing the viewers to look back at their own reflection.
Through their respective magnum opuses, Ford and Leone established lasting critical perspectives on the nature of America’s place in the postwar world. These pointed takes on the standard genre film came after the pre-established Western formula’s widespread success, which came with a set of unofficial rules followed by the genre’s films in depicting the chief elements
5 Carmen Siu, "C'era Una Volta La Storia: Credit Sequences and Storytelling, Leone-style.," Film International (16516826) 5, no. 1 (2007): 13, Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text.
of the Old West and the heroes that represent it in the American myth, all of which presents as a narrative manifestation of the American Dream in its most heightened form. Despite the myth’s chokehold on the genre, both auteurs took critical stances on its central idea through their work, with Ford’s assertion hinging on the idea of the American Dream as the product of flawed actors with well-intentioned purposes, and Leone’s idea of the concept as a front for capital-creating expansionism. Despite these criticisms rising as a result of their distinct directorial styles and personal beliefs, their films served to incisively criticize the American Dream in its postwar state, recontextualizing their legacies into continual historical reckonings for audiences and critics alike and shining a light on the classic Western story as an American imperialist myth.
The Fabric of the Nation:
Westerns’ Origin and Interweaving with the American Dream Westerns originated on film as a niche endeavor, one that depicted actual cowboys going about their daily business.6 These portrayals of everyday life manifested as a more anthropological pursuit than anything, allowing many viewers a lens into parts of America that remained unknown. However, fascination with the life of the cowboy took hold; so much so, in fact, that an influx of Hollywood hopefuls dressed like them forced the actual ranch hands to unionize, excluding those who sought to take advantage of the lifestyle to claim fame in movies.7 Soon, cowboys began to emerge as popular feature film subjects, and by “the 1920s [the Western] had become congealed into a genre of its own, a genre whose composition could easily be reduced into a set of rules.”8 While technically depicting the same on-screen characters that Western genre would one day rise to prominence with, these films do not possess the same standardization or thematic utility that the Western genre formula, as referenced by historians and critics, one day would. By the time World War II came around, though, the framework of the Western remained, at least according to most observers, relatively simple: A hero, usually a lawman or do-gooder citizen, journeys around town, vanquishing evil. Said hero protects women and children, drinks, and smokes in moderation, and is even kind to the caricatures of Mexicans and Natives portrayed in the films.9 When addressing why this archetype presented itself, it is important to note what audiences felt to be accurate and appropriate. Patterns that limited the realistic depiction of animals in the wild such as snakes and horses, indigenous inhabitants of the
6 Kevin Brownlow, The War, the West, and the Wilderness (New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1979), 5821.
7 Brownlow, 5836.
8 Mody C. Boatright, "The Formula in Cowboy Fiction and Drama," Western Folklore 28, no. 2 (1969): 136, JSTOR.
9 Boatright, 137.
land, and the violence of the Wild West were considered as part of displaying an “authentic,” or more accurately, watered-down version of the Old West by early film critics like Robert T. Pound.10 These consistencies made Westerns palatable to general audiences, replacing any real authenticity with a synthetic, definition of the “real” Old West, one that could appeal to America’s larger anxieties as well as its smaller content-based concerns.
The Western took center stage in Hollywood after the Allied victory in World War II, one that placed America at the top of the world’s power dynamic. For American society at large, this nigh-complete cultural dominance (especially considering the relative isolationism of the Soviet Union) gave way to a certain uneasiness about the fragility of the postwar order. After all, World War I, once called “The Great War” for its seemingly irreplicable scale, happened only three decades or so before the even more destructive conflict to follow. The Western, in effect, became an “expression of a great anxiety about what this particular founded society will be like, whether it can hold together, whether it can really leave behind what it was.”11 Thus, the frontier of the Old West gave way to the might and bravado of the cowboys and their supporters, blazing a path toward a more just future, and giving the everyday American a blueprint by which a nationbuilding mentality could be built. The quintessential cowboy figure, in each and every film “had to be the soul of honor and courage… [and] could never act for personal gain.”12 This hypothetical cowboy, whether played by John Wayne, Henry Fonda, or anyone in between, became the face of the postwar American Dream, one that took the values of Manifest Destiny into a more global era.
10 Boatright, 138.
11 Pippin, Hollywood Westerns, 315.
12 Boatright, "The Formula," 137.
Reflecting upon the incredible popularity of the Western at this time, one critic said that the Western “suited America as long as the country believed in itself and its manifest destiny. It procured for this nation of immigrants and settlers a myth of origin.”13 By depicting the formulation of a new society through a decidedly modern set of ideas, the Western allowed the American viewer to recontextualize all of American history, and, by proxy, American ideals, through the morality of its hero. In fact, the most striking aspect of the myth as a whole was the impetus placed on the cowboys as individual actors driven not by the nation or state they came from but rather by their own ideas of morality and responsibility to protect those around them. One film historian expressed that “one surprising aspect of many Westerns … is a profound doubt about the ability of modern societies (supposedly committed to peace and law) to [sustain themselves].”14 One can see this doubt manifest in many the Western of the postwar era.15 Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, for instance, revolves around a heroic sheriff, aided only by his lover (the classic Western heroine whose passivity gives way to a moment of supposedly shocking agency), saving a town from bandits who dominate due to citizens’ own lack of courage.
16 Will Kane, the heroic sheriff played by the classic Hollywood star Gary Cooper, ends the film by throwing down his star in disgust, rejecting the larger label of society for the ubiquitous morality of the American Dream, one that places his personal ideals above the purportedly weak-willed ones that permeate the townspeople’s minds.17 His heroism remains singular, special the marking of the kind of benevolent yet assertive actor that Westerns suggested America to be.
13 Ignacio Ramonet, "Italian Westerns as Political Parables," Cinéaste 15, no. 1 (1986): 31, JSTOR.
14 Pippin, Hollywood Westerns, 322.
15 Pippin, 322.
16 High Noon, directed by Fred Zinnemann, Stanley Kramer Productions, 1952.
17 High Noon.
Figure 2. The shadow of Will Kane looms large over his newly rejected badge in High Noon (1952), dir. Fred Zinnemann.
From the inception of criticism regarding the Western, the notion of its existence as a stand-in for an American foundational myth (particularly that of the American Dream) featured prominently in the work of critics. Per scholarly consensus, the origin of the Western as an endeavor grounded in the consciousness of film critics came with the publishing of two articles in the 1950s, despite the official first fictional film depicting the Old West (The Great Train Robbery) being made in 1903.18 André Bazin, the well-known critic behind one of these formative articles, seemed to read into the Western in a much more profound way than the average observer. As Pippin summarized in his recounting of the history of Hollywood’s most prominent Westerns and the criticism associated with them, Bazin believed that “the Western 18 Pippin, Hollywood Westerns, 244.
embodies the ‘essence of cinema,’ and he suggested that that essence was its incorporation of myth and mythic consciousness of the world.”19 This distillation of the Western down into its barest parts, echoing the larger thematic revelations that Ford and Leone would approach and examine in their masterworks.
One scholar in particular found the typical cowboy narrative to reflect strict religious ideals centering around predestination, with the affectations of the environment and conflict itself falling to the wayside in favor of a more intrinsic view of morality one that placed the cowboy as inherently good, and the villain of the story (bandit, corrupt sheriff, or otherwise) as evil by way of their own soul, already cursed to damnation.20 The equating of the Western to a biblical principle reflects Bazin’s observation of its foundation in mythmaking. Additionally, the typical narrative ending’s inevitability both reflects the intentional stylistic and characterization similarities between Western films and the public imagination of the Western’s function. Beyond the occasional statement considering the lone hero’s role as either an executor of his weaker fellows’ will or as a destroyer of immoral submissiveness to the forces of evil (e.g. the final scene in High Noon), most Westerns maintained this thematic consistency, where no matter the odds, the hero wins, aided both by his own skill but also by a certain strand of luck, one that could imply a greater meaning behind his individual struggle. As an extended metaphor for America, this theological idea functions well, arguing alongside the shared traits of Manifest Destiny and the American Dream, that America had not just a land-assuming prerogative but also a moral imperative to spread their ideals. One can conclude that audiences in fact wanted to believe in the divine right of America to answer the uncertainties of the future. Writing about the interplay between history and myth in contemporary American exceptionalist ideology, one
19 Pippin, 244.
20 Boatright, “The Formula,” 143.
scholar said that a vision of the country as “‘the most consequential nation,’ undoubtedly exemplifies a self-fulfilling prophecy. … Perhaps no nation has assumed its extra-territorial obligation with a greater sense of moral purpose.”21 This basic fact of the American myth coupled with the audience’s affinity for it, create an implied imperative for the American onscreen representation (the cowboy figure) to execute its mission, one which, at least according to the standard narrative of the American Dream, aimed to bring justice to all corners of the world, a vision reflected onto the filmed version of the Western frontier.
Thematically, the Western as a parable for the American Dream can be analyzed from any number of angles, including the aforementioned critical perspectives. On the practical level, though, Western filmmakers realized these lofty ideas of destiny manifest into cinematic language by depicting the Old West in all its glory. Toeing the line between civilization and wilderness, the land invites the worthy to take it to task, vacillating between reflective emptiness and dangerous, bandit-filled anarchy. Referring to the general trend to emphasize the bounds between the Old West and Eastern “civilization,” one writer said: “The awesome visual imagery of the West has provided not only the setting for drama, but also a place for the enactment of oppositions traditionally found in the genre.”22 As such, skilled filmmakers who took on projects within the genre tended to use the land as a symbol for the central struggle as a whole, as exemplified in the renowned 1953 film Shane, which prominently features beautiful shots of the hero and his supporting cast engulfed by the landscape surrounding them.23
21 Diane M. Borden and Eric P. Essman, "Manifest Landscape/Latent Ideology: Afterimages of Empire in the Western and 'Post-Western' Film," California History 79, no. 1 (2000): 32, JSTOR.
22 Leonard Engel, "Mythic Space and Monument Valley: Another Look at John Ford's Stagecoach.," Literature Film Quarterly 22, no. 3 (1994): 174, Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text.
23 Shane, directed by George Stevens, Paramount Pictures, 1953.
Figure 3. The titular hero rides off into the distance at the end of Shane (1953), dir. George Stevens.
Pointedly enough, Shane ends with the film’s namesake riding off into the distant, unconquered skyline, having spent the better part of the movie being retaught the values of civilization after years of gunfighting, and in turn engaging in the requisite violence against the bad actors that seek to undermine said civilization. Considering this pseudocultural exchange dynamic between the roamers of the great unknown and settlers, the writer Ralph Brauer remarked: “The garden is something civilization brings to the West, making the harsh environment bloom. A garden is created by people, a place of neat rows of cultivated plants, a place for things that could not have existed without civilization.”24 The metaphorical “garden” Brauer describes serves as a stand-in for all of the American settlers’ (and their twentieth century successors’) promises primarily, economic and social stability. The balance of civilization and
24 Ralph Brauer, "The Fractured Eye: Myth and History in the Westerns of John Ford and Sam Peckinpah.," Film & History (03603695) 7, no. 4 (1977): 75, Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text.
freedom becomes paramount in the plots of many a Western, including Shane, but it also reverberates through the general idea of the Old West in the American consciousness. Under the theory of the American Dream, the metaphorical garden, or civilized society, the West could not develop, like the world at large without the exceptional ideologies and will of America itself. Similarly, though, the bareness and challenges of the terrain, as well as its supposed endlessness, accentuated the importance and necessity of the garden itself.25 By the essence of the mythic structure, American exceptionalism could not exist without its opposition, or at least a problem to solve it would be like a cowboy with no place to roam. Shane can stay to fix the problems of the townspeople he encounters, but he must then reengage the landscape and venture off to find a new enemy, leaving his life, like the ideal American one, brimming with constant purpose.
The genre conventions even offer an answer to those who criticize this view of the West as too simplistic, with two film critics, Diane M. Borden and Eric P. Essman, denoting the film’s “representation of a species of individualism equating freedom with lawlessness and the spectacle of space as an object of wonder with territory to be conquered.”26 In effect, the combination of popular critical perspective and audience engagement with the films forces the cinematic language to incorporate itself into the main narrative portrayed, with the beating-back of nature correlating with American individualism and its contributions to the country’s newfound hegemony on a global scale.
Nature does not stand alone as an unwitting plot device in the construction of America’s most famous myth, though. The generally simplistic Western formula made it possible for filmmakers to create caricatures of Natives as extensions of nature: faceless legions of obstacles that pepper the road along the rugged path toward the supposed fruits of Manifest Destiny.
25 Brauer, “The Fractured Eye,” 75-76.
26 Borden and Essman, "Manifest Landscape/Latent," 31.
Describing the connection between the characterized land and generalized native population, Borden and Essman bridged the gap between the two aspects of Western films, writing that “the ideology of the great open spaces, and more specifically, the narrative of the typical Western, provided cover for the oppression perpetrated on Native Americans.”27 Their stories became simple plot points, and relations between the Natives and their would-be colonizers seldom explored. Instead, filmmakers used Natives as landscape-like obstacles, depicting them as savages with unrecognizable motivations. When confronted with this trend, scholars typically point to the Western’s narrow focus, the mythic chute through which the American Dream was formed, with one article arguing that the myth’s appeal to ideological and cultural structure “by itself could not satisfy the emotional requirements involved in the construction of a national identity.”
28 The bevy of historical knowledge available to audiences would betray the singular idea at the heart of the Western, the destination that every aspect of the Old West turned in service of thus, the cowboy could never encounter a nuanced Native American. If there were kind or even slightly changed relations between the cowboy and his associated secondary characters and Natives, the former group, headed by their moralizing hero, would maintain a sense of respect, or even kindness, towards the latter group.29 Every director of the genre adopted these character boundaries, including Ford himself especially in his prewar works. Driven by a personal respect for Native culture, the director maintained good relationships with the Natives he cast as part of Westerns in his signature location, Monument Valley, including in his opening movie shot in said location, Stagecoach (1938).30 The plot of the film centered around a group of wildly disparate future settlers on a coach. It features John
27 Borden and Essman, "Manifest Landscape/Latent," 32.
28 Borden and Essman.
29 Boatright, “The Formula,” 137.
30 Eyman, Print The Legend, 189.
Wayne in his Ford film debut, portraying a gunslinger out for revenge after the murder of his family.31 As the travelers venture forward in their journey, they encounter a number of issues, particularly while traveling through Apache territory. At different points in the film, the protagonists must confront and kill Natives who are portrayed as bloodthirsty and immoral.32
Figure 4. Rows of unnamed, identity less Natives accent the Monument Valley skyline in John Ford’s early Western directorial effort, Stagecoach (1938).
The Native cultural scholar Angela Aleiss argued that this film “epitomized Hollywood’s depiction of Indians as a menace to white civilization, attacking wagon trains and burning homes,” a severe indictment of Ford’s claimed reverence for Native culture. Further, the Natives that Ford enlisted to play the faceless characters in Stagecoach were, in fact, Navajo, not Apache, and continued to play tribes outside their own in Ford’s movies while rarely changing any signifying costuming or identifying features.33 Considering the general care associated with
31 Stagecoach, directed by John Ford, United Artists, 1939.
32 Stagecoach.
33 Eyman, Print The Legend, 189.
Ford’s filmmaking, the low standard of respect for a true depiction of Native culture is both externally and internally shown through the making of Stagecoach. Additionally, the film and the context Ford made it within highlight the ironic interplay between the Natives and the land they occupy. The land almost produces the Natives in Stagecoach, with the narrative featuring them as a natural occurrence of traveling the terrain instead of actual people. It is then predictable that Ford spent his career linking his go-to Native actors with his common shooting location in Monument Valley, a reflection of his common characterization of the parts they would play in some of his films.34
Ford’s early work serves as a striking, but not unique, example of the way in which Western genre cinema evolved in the years leading up to and after World War II, creating the framework through which a new, dominant American myth arose. Through a multitude of analytic lenses, including historiographical, filmic, and theological aspects, the American Dream as it is depicted in the Western holds true as a marker of postwar American anxieties, hopes, and beliefs in the past and for the future of a nation. Like in all art forms, though, the public desire for Western films only bred more innovation, leading to work that one could use to view the American Dream in all its glory and folly. Incidentally, it happened to be Ford, whose initial, more formulaic work boasts many of the stereotypes associated with the accepted Western form, that aided in pushing the boundary of the American audience, critic, and director away from the Western formula. As one can observe, through Ford’s myriad personal and professional influences and beliefs, he rather unintentionally joined directors like Leone in an ideological dissent to the American Dream, moving Western genre film towards an ideological wandering of sorts, one that is on full display in The Searchers.
34 Ford, Stagecoach.
Reflecting Upon America:
John Ford and The Searchers’ Inward Meditation on the Old West
While John Ford’s film career and first foray into the Western genre took place long before America entered the throes of World War II, his professional standing was nonetheless moved by that earthshaking conflict. Shortly before the war’s inception, he spearheaded the creation of the Field Photographic Branch (colloquially known as Field Photo), enlisting the help of top filmmakers from across the nation in a new Naval operation that, at first, aimed to strategically aid the Navy by photographing key terrain.35 The unit also created work for public consumption, including photos of the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy.36 As Field Photo became a subdivision of the Office of Strategic Services, Ford’s only superior became Colonel William J. Donovan, the renowned intelligence officer, who himself reported only to President Franklin Roosevelt.37 Ford was even named a lieutenant commander in the Navy for the duration of the war.38
Eventually, Ford’s filmic background began to blend with his Naval work. Occasionally abandoning his duties as the commanding officer of Field Photo, he frequently scrambled to the location of new conflicts without allowing time for official commands to be issued.39 In doing so, though, he captured stunning footage of the Battle of Midway, a major achievement for the young operative unit. One commentator noted that Ford “was lucky that he … captured spectacular battle footage of the first major US victory in World War II, and that he was
35 Lea Jacobs, "December 7th, the Battle of Midway, and John Ford's Career in the OSS.," Film History 32, no. 1 (2020): 3-5, Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text.
36 Jacobs, 6-7.
37 Eyman, Print the Legend, 234.
38 Eyman, 233.
39 Jacobs, “December 7th,” 9.
wounded in the process of getting it. He came back a hero, making reprimands difficult.”40 Ford’s reputation as an ace filmmaker eventually affected the war documentaries that his unit produced. News of the famed auteur’s presence at the battle spread through the media, convincing President Roosevelt of the film’s merits for public consumption, despite the fact that an internal propaganda unit (whose filmic portion was headed by the equally famous Frank Capra) already existed.41
.
Ford’s work became de facto propaganda, giving the filmmaker much more room to work semi-fictionally within the documentary space. He utilized this in work like December 7th, a 1943 documentary that aimed to summarize Pearl Harbor, and was eventually given a wide, public release. In this film, voiceovers present a “conflict between Uncle Sam and his Conscience [which] gives them presence and identities as characters and calls more attention to
40 Jacobs, 9.
41 Jacobs, 4.
the use of their voices over the footage they narrate,” a fictionalized element of storytelling not previously seen in the work of Ford or his underlings in the Field Photo unit.42 Similarly, Ford blended the chief narratives of the American military with the narratives of his immediate postwar films. Regarding Ford’s 1946 work, My Darling Clementine, the film critics Mike Yawn and Bob Beatty opined:
The contradictory elements in the American myth are contained in a system of disciplined freedom that characterizes civilized communities. … In this context, Ford asserts, like Americans did in World War II, that the rule of law will prevail over despotism, religion will prevail over barbarism, and individuality and unity can coexist.
43
Ford does merge the emotional driving force behind the American war effort and the form of the Western, a tactic that did not come without criticism, especially when considering the way in which Ford’s Field Photo work veered into dramatization. December 7th came under fire from a reviewing officer, who “opposed the film for its quasi-fictional treatment of the attack, while suggesting that the straight-forward reportage of the salvage operations was important and best distributed via the newsreels.”44 Clearly, the unstoppable wave of myth making that swept audiences and cinemas with the Western did not appeal to some of the Navy’s top commanders during the war itself, but after some editing, December 7th was released regardless, an omen of the American appetite for the idealization of their own history that would become the Western genre standard.
Some of Ford’s critics found his work outside the Navy to share the same trite nature and lack of believability as some of his more military-inclined critics did with his World War II
42 Jacobs, “December 7th,” 19.
43 Yawn and Beatty, "John Ford's," 8.
44 Jacobs, “December 7th,” 23.
work. Asserting the director’s place as a product of the Hollywood machine he worked within, one reviewer opined that Ford “turned the Western into an almost static pictorial genre, a devitalized, dehydrated form which is ‘enriched’ with pastoral beauty and evocative nostalgia for a simple, heroic way of life.”45 This criticism echoes that of Ford’s contemporaries and predecessors, and to some extent, retains validity. It is true that Ford, who was born in Maine and migrated west to make films, remained caught up in the essential myth of the Western. Despite being an Easterner by birth, “Ford’s identification [with the Western story] was so strong that it materially affected that history.”46 Additionally, as Ford’s films proudly present, he associated heavily with the armed forces and considered it fundamental to the American Dream, especially after his prominent work with the Field Photo unit.47 His involvement with the war gave him a sense of self-importance regarding the American story, with one Ford biographer, Joseph McBride, describing how “[Ford’s] identification with the military ethos and his growing sense of himself as a national poet made him turn his postwar filmmaking efforts largely to themes of American history.”48 As such, he allowed the thematic elements of American history room in his stories such as incorporating the struggle of Reconstruction into The Searchers through the main character Ethan’s former allegiance to the Confederacy.
While a noted patriot and believer in the American experiment, Ford’s faith in the American idea was not blind, though; rather, the tone of his work surrounding the Old West evolved to be twinged with acknowledgement of the nation’s moral failures and the men that perpetuated them. No film encompasses this crucial difference that lies under the surface of
45 Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns : Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, rev. pbk. ed ed. (London [England]: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2019), 39.
46 Brownlow, The War, 7416.
47 Peter Cowie, John Ford and the American West (New York: H.N. Abrams, 2004),112.
48 Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 416, digital file.
Ford’s filmography more than The Searchers (1956), Ford’s masterwork and a film that, in the eyes of the Civil War, Old West, and film historian Kevin Brownlow, “has come to be revered as one of the great American films.”49 The Searchers follows the former Confederate soldier Ethan Edwards (played, of course, by John Wayne), a man who finds himself at odds with his family and traditional morals after returning to his brother’s homestead following a successful postwar outlaw career. Seeking to fulfill his own twisted sense of justice, he attempts to find his kidnapped niece, Debbie, spending years simmering in his own hatred of Native Americans before finding her living among them and in a sexual relationship with their chief, Scar. Eventually, he succeeds in his mission, bringing Debbie home before riding off and away from what remains of his family.50 In The Searchers, Ford forms the strongest argument for what some scholars believe to be the main thesis of his Western work. As the writer Morgan Parr offers: “While Ford’s vision of America is intensely patriotic, it does not flinch from confronting the country’s tragic failures, the times when we did not live up to our ideals. … Ford’s natural allegiance is always with the spirit of the American common people.”51 At their core, Ford’s films contain an unwavering loyalty to the American citizenry themselves and their ability to actionize their dreams, an idea that incorporates one of the central appeals of the Western the quelling of nation-building anxiety while still leaving room to acknowledge the shortcomings of the American project. For Ford, characters like Ethan did not present as marred pieces of American history that necessitated burying, but rather examples of the forward movement that the country has and can make. In the words of one film historian: “Ford, like so many people of his generation, believed that progress and history were inseparable. It is this faith for it is in
49 Eyman, Print the Legend, 426.
50 The Searchers, directed by John Ford, Warner Bros., 1956.
51 Parr, 36.
Ford as much a religious faith as an objective belief that makes Ford such an evocative poet of sunrises.”52 The intertwining of progress as a common thread for historical achievement, and the driving force of said achievement being the common folk of the West, allowed Ford to recreate the appeal of the Western with much more nuance. These two ideas serve as Ford’s replacement for the American exceptionalist narrative paramount to the Western genre idea of the American Dream, asserting importance upon the actions of everyday Americans without connecting it to perfect morality.
Regardless of critical assertion, the idea of Ford’s work being tired and uninventive cinematically does not hold much weight even if Ford himself wanted it to. Over the course of his career, Ford insisted upon his films being less of an artistic pursuit and more of a mechanical one. His primary focus when speaking of his work was to take the mysterious sheen of the artist off of his job as director, focusing audiences more on his abilities as a content machine. In one of his uncommon interview appearances, he exclaimed, “Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it’s not an art.”53 To be fair, Ford did maintain the almost robotic ability to rapidly produce films of high quality, utilizing his nowrenowned “John Ford Stock Company,” which produced legendary actors like John Wayne, Henry Fonda, and James Stewart, all of whom served as regulars in the director’s films.54 However, Ford carried an intense appreciation for the artistry of direction as well, and his general stylistic innovation, which marked his films as distinct and allowed them to endure. Most famously, he turned the lumbering Western landscape into a more representational aspect, a
52 Ralph Brauer, "The Fractured Eye: Myth and History in the Westerns of John Ford and Sam Peckinpah.," Film & History 7, no. 4 (1977): 77, Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text.
53 Morgan Parr, "John Ford: The Technique of One of America's Greatest Directors.," Videomaker 36, no. 3 (2021): 33, Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text.
54“John Ford: The Technique,” 33.
prime example of his manipulation of the typical form of the Western shift that occurs in The Searchers: the characterizations and meaning of the average movie set in the Old West changed to a more personal, guilt-ridden idea of America.
Throughout the film, Ethan is a true husk of a man; he becomes lost in the darker part of himself that prioritizes his virulent racism over all else, causing him to almost kill Debbie when he finds her living among a Native tribe, the Comanches.55 Ford parallels the obfuscation of the self that Ethan experiences with literal overshadowing of characters by the landscape. Whether a character is lost with the rest of their search party in a wide shot or covered in shadow in the foreground, Monument Valley becomes more than an unwitting plot device. Rather, under Ford’s deft touch, it transforms into a living, breathing representation of the film’s tone, taking on the same qualities as the main character. The content of The Searchers is ripe with evocative sentiments, with a historian commenting that one particular monologue to Ethan from a member of his search party whose son had been killed by Comanches “[contains] an infinite regret for a virgin land tinged with fear of both Native Americans and the ruthless nature of the terrain.”56
55 The Searchers.
56 Cowie, John Ford and the American, 139.
Figure 6. The hateful eyes of Ethan Edwards turn towards a Comanche encampment in The Searchers (1956, dir. John Ford).
Ford’s shots engender awe towards the magnificent coloration and eye-popping scale of Monument Valley for a larger purpose: forcing the audience to consider his main character’s relatively minute place within the landscape. Of Ford’s Monument Valley, the film and classics scholar J.A. Place wrote that each film’s landscape “is rather like the sea in its changes, its colors, its moods. Like the sea and unlike lush plains or green mountains, it is resistant to human efforts to shape it, to make it serve them.”
57 Considering the direct interplay between the typical Western hero and their surroundings, Place additionally commented on Ford’s aptitude in harnessing his characters’ surroundings: “Ford uses [Monument Valley] as Homer used the sea.”
58 Such high praise also comes with a clear narrative parallel: the plot of The Searchers becomes an odyssey for Ethan, one that scholars have clearly identified in the past. One historian
57 Cowie, 166.
58 Cowie, 166.
noticed the similar overarching plot lines that fuel each work’s main character, observing “Like [Odysseus], Ford’s Ethan Edwards is a wanderer on a long and difficult quest to preserve the integrity of a woman and a heroic renegade who relies on his wits and often seeks his ends through questionable means.”59 Throughout the narrative, Ethan’s main qualm with the Native Americans comes from their violence against his family’s homestead: rejecting the encroachment on their land with extreme, repugnant acts that include murdering Ethan’s brother and raping and murdering his sister-in-law, who he secretly harbors a forbidden affection for.60
Yet, he himself perpetuates much violence, including almost killing Debbie and brazenly murdering and scalping the Comanche chief, Scar. His violence is a true mirror: his near-killing of Debbie stems from his horror at the idea of the fact that she and Scar had been together, despite the fact that he also desired a societally forbidden relationship with Debbie’s mother. As such, the audience can conclude that Ethan’s bigotry, general vitriol, and forsaken sense of purpose is his true driver not the typical Western hero ideals he cunningly espouses to justify his violent acts.
Ethan’s flagrant lack of respect for the ideals that, at least externally, motivate his undying sense of revenge underwrite the character’s uniqueness, the film critic Arthur Eckstein noted: “Toward Indians he is motivated only by brutal racism; toward whites outside his immediate family he is cold, suspicious, and often gratuitously insulting. … Ethan is a grim, solitary, and forbidding figure for whom social constraints mean nothing.”61 This characterization directly conflicts with the typical Western hero, who, as explored earlier, never
59 Kirsten Day, "What Makes a Man to Wander?': 'The Searchers' as a Western 'Odyssey," Arethusa 41, no. 1 (2008): 12, JSTOR.
60 The Searchers, dir. John Ford.
61 Arthur M. Eckstein, "Darkening Ethan: John Ford's the Searchers (1956) from Novel to Screenplay to Screen.," Cinema Journal 38, no. 1 (1998): 5, Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text.
became corrupted into pure violence or cruelty of any kind to those around him, and, regardless of the overly simplistic and brutish manner Natives were portrayed in a film, never acted purely based on prejudice. Comparing the portrayal of Natives in The Searchers to that of purportedly uncivilized groups in The Odyssey, the same scholar argues that, by making both Odysseus and Ethan act similarly to their perceived behavior of an othered group, “the strategy [of separation that each character uses to delineate their superiority] fails when this ‘Other’ is revealed to be a manifestation of the self.”62 In effect, by depicting Ethan as committing the same kind of violent acts he despises the Natives for and engaging in their customs (certain means of killing, in particular), Ford levels the playing field regarding the Comanches. While still the “faceless” Natives that populate the Western genre, the Comanches’ motives for violence of reclaiming land are just as tangible and justifiable as Ethan’s search for and revenge towards the killers of his family, calling into question the true nature of the main character’s motives.
Through this moral paradox, Ford offers an admonition of the typical mode of Western storytelling and its connection to the American Dream, with the character of Ethan becoming both a representational figure and a canvas for Ford’s more grounded approach. Inspecting the intricacies of the character in the larger historical context, Pippin concluded that “[Ethan’s demeanor] clearly has something to do with the fragility of what makes up the content of a civilizational identity, the basis of a national or individual character.”63 Considering the standard Western hero’s place as an answer to the question of American identity, Ethan’s complication of this trope marks a stark departure from the image of John Wayne leading men that Ford and his contemporaries had put on screen in the past. Despite his often-inhumane actions and ideological dissonance, though, Ethan is still an incredibly compelling character because he, on the
62 Day, "What Makes a Man to Wander?, 14.
63 Pippin, Hollywood Westerns, 1326.
surface, presents the manifested anxieties of the American nation-building experiment; his actions and their consequences serve as a synecdoche for the potential instabilities of brazen imperialist action. In a similar vein, the character invites the audience to reflect on the reality behind the American Dream, and whether the idea of flawless, morally superior heroes holds up when examining the historical record. Ford specifically deviates from the novel that inspired the film to add this effect, making sure that Ethan did not follow the standard fighting morality of the Western cowboy by depicting him shooting enemies in the back.64 With that being said, Ford’s specific inclusion of such traits does not equate to a lapse of faith in the American Dream. Instead, Ethan’s eventual ostracization from society displays the director’s artistic vision of the lawless man losing his place in society. He stands at the fore of what made the Old West appealing for filmmakers the line between civilization and wilderness, and is forced to retreat back into the latter. The true odyssey of the film is not Ethan’s, but rather, America’s one that the main character of The Searchers cannot continue on.
Beyond The Odyssey, Ford’s films in general are rife with major inspiration from a number of artistic and literary works, with the director in particular basing many of his standard shot forms off of the work of the American Impressionist artist Frederic Remington. Ford himself, usually reclusive regarding the artistic quality of his films, touted his shots in relation to the artist’s work, saying “I tried to copy the Remington style you can’t copy him one hundred percent, but at least I tried to get in his color and movement, and I think I succeeded partly.”65 Remington’s work, which tackled the Old West, utilized bright, suggestive colors and shifting motion that emphasized the landscape’s interplay with his chosen figures, a direct parallel to Ford’s own exploration of the Monument Valley skyline in relation to his characters (see fig. 7).
64 Eckstein, “Darkening Ethan,” 8.
65 Cowie, John Ford and the American, 171.
Figure 7. Frederic Remington, Evening in the Desert, Navajoes. 1905-6. Oil on canvas, 20 x 26.″
The exact composition of Remington’s paintings mirrors that of Ford’s shots, where he made each motion of each scene deliberate and characterizing a stark departure from the basic, unlayered depictions of Western heroes that had come to plague the genre and anger its critics. The plethora of influences Ford allowed room for in his work helped establish his stylistic separation from the Western form, one that mirrors his additional thematic and characterization differences from the genre standard. In The Searchers, the nuanced moral gaze of the film thematically is directly mirrored by the camera itself, which rarely moves except to capture the deliberate actions of each character, lending each shot well to capturing movement as it happened in a naturalistic manner. This phenomenon shows up in much of Ford’s filmography, as the director was loath to move the camera except to mirror actors’ on-screen movement.66
This tight blocking cut down the epic scale of his stories (like that of The Searchers) into digestible films that could be marketed to audiences and held up artistically. A future filmmaker
66 Parr, “John Ford: The Technique,” 34.
who would also come to epitomize this duality, Steven Spielberg, once cited Ford’s combination of painterly touch and rhythmic, firm blocking as a source of inspiration: The way he frames things and the way he stages and blocks his people, often keeping the camera static while the people give you the illusion that there’s a lot more kinetic movement occurring when there’s not. In that sense, he’s a classic painter. He celebrates the frame, not just what happens inside of it.67
These distinctive traits lent well to the creation of a personal cinematic language, one that shifted over the course of the director’s decades-long career, and peaked in works like The Searchers.
When crafting such a rich and varied filmic lexicon, Ford drew from literary sources just as much as visual ones. The Searchers, which was based on a novel published in 1954, was morally darkened significantly by Ford and his hand-picked writers.68 In the end, the narrative and form of the film personified what literary and film historians qualify as Ford’s desire to incorporate “a struggle against an often vast environment which Ford could develop into a mythical dialectic … [and] the texture and detail of common people on the move through the real world,” shaping a course of realism in characterization that intertwined with the mythic qualities of his preferred shot selection.69 His films became romantic, acknowledging and elevating the humanity of their characters as a basis for the mythic quality of the story itself, much like Ford’s admonishment of the American story as being carried out by flawed actors like Ethan. To Ford, the importance of these literary sources, from the Odyssey to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the latter of which he adopted as a full feature, presented a natural balance to the myth of the Western that he could become swept away in. As the scholar Peter Stowell urged viewers:
67 Parr, 34.
68 Eckstein, “Darkening Ethan,” 4.
69 H. Peter Stowell, "John Ford's Literary Sources: From Realism to Romance.," Literature Film Quarterly 5, no. 2 (1977): 165, Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text.
“Combine, then, cinema’s ‘real’ images with Ford’s choice of literary realism the result is a deeply-grounded foundation for the counterweight, the ‘marvellous.’”70 The ineffable ideas that Ford tackles with what began as a simplistic genre playbook become concrete through the technical and storytelling work of the master director, realizing both the groundedness of the humans who could have lived in the Old West and the loftiness of their supposed motivations. Naturally, one can on the surface be skeptical of Ford’s intentions in sharply turning away from the classic mythmaking of Stagecoach and towards the more complex moral realities of The Searchers. Beyond any philosophical or industry goal, though, Ford’s darker turn derived mainly from his personal and professional arcs spilling over into his Western genre work, including aspects of his cultural heritage, familial relationships, and the trajectory of his career. Ford, the son of Irish immigrants, felt a deep connection to the culture of his parents’ birthplace and its values, one that showed up in his approach to established systems. Keeping with the rebellious and bullish Irish attitude, biographer Joseph McBride believed the undertones of films like The Searchers gave insight into Ford’s adoption of his Irishness: “Ford generally approaches the Western genre’s puritanical and imperialism foundations with the subversive, or at least deeply ambivalent, attitude of an unreconstructed Irish rebel.”71 When compared with the deep feeling of patriotism engendered in the legendary director from his military service, it appears odd that Ford could be defined as so blatantly undermining fundamental American myths. Yet, after spending his childhood ostracized in the town of Portland, Maine, where anti-Irish sentiments ran rampant, Ford contained a dual nature ideologically that manifested in many of his movies. Both his Irish cultural norms and experiences as a young man in a discriminatory environment gave him more insight into the tribulations of everyday Americans than meets the
70 Stowell, 166.
71 McBride, Searching For John Ford, 54.
eye initially, a key factor in his willingness to challenge the country’s supposed ideological loftiness.
Beyond his parallel cultural and national identities, Ford also experienced a number of personal and familial issues that turned his leading men into fractured versions of his own regrets, Ethan Edwards included. Despite placing a large emphasis on what scholars call a “vision of family” that runs rampant through his filmography, Ford himself was an unstable patriarch to his own relatives.72 When not working, Ford remained distant to his wife and children, and often veered into destructive habits, including a penchant for drinking and several affairs.73 As McBride describes it, “Ford placed the highest value in his work on traditional family life … [y]et one of the central paradoxes of his life is that this artist who so idealized the family was ‘not a good family man,” his grandson Dan Ford admits.”74 It is reasonable to conclude that the younger John Ford could have become more preoccupied with the idealized version of the family he had at home, one that he could control and allow to have a happy ending. In the same vein, though, his later success and the blending of his personal and professional aspects extended to his relationships with family hence why he directs Ethan, whose strongest bonds in The Searchers could be described as tenuous at best, with so much care. While Ford did not fall victim to any of the same prejudices as Ethan, save for his industry standard depictions of Natives, he did possess an abject cruelty that he wielded at will towards anyone who annoyed him.75 In Ethan’s case, the cruelty makes the character, perhaps explaining how Ford’s thematic turn aligned with his projection of the self onto Ethan. As he aged, and came to realize the negative aspects associated with him, his vision of the American family as an
72 Eyman, Print the Legend, 107.
73 McBride, Searching For John Ford, 3.
74 McBride, 3.
75 Eyman, Print the Legend, 6.
unimpeachable, idealized aspect (much like the Western hero) crumbled, and the seeds for The Searchers were planted.
While The Searchers, for all its artistic and narrative merit, illustrates the height of Ford’s filmmaking greatness, 1956 represented a time when Ford had come to view his career as beginning to close much like the frontier in The Searchers itself, which has become more suitable for settlers like Ethan’s brother than gunslingers like Ethan himself. By no stretch of the imagination was the great director underappreciated; by the time he died, he possessed awards ranging from a Purple Heart to four Academy Awards.76 Such material circumstances never concerned Ford, though, who spent his life from childhood both lost in abstraction and constantly in contention with others on account of his difficult personality.77 With respect to The Searchers, though, it was clear the clock was ticking on Ford’s career. As one biographer put it bluntly: “The Searchers is the beginning of the last stage of Ford’s career. … As he aged, Ford’s melancholy came to preoccupy his work and threatened to turn it into morbidity.” The Searchers, in effect, came to encapsulate the personal and professional depression that Ford encountered when reflecting upon his legacy. Despite his great success as a filmmaker, his conflicting identities, struggles with personal matters, and general disinterest in being proud of his work worked together to shift the The Searchers, refuting the idea of Ford’s ideological shift as unbelievable.
Perhaps no reflection on the life and work of Ford, especially on the count of his latecareer disappointment, could be more insightful than that of his signature star, John Wayne. Each and every value, story, and prophecy placed and hidden within Ford’s most prominent Western narratives became synonymous with the actor, molding Wayne’s larger-than-life persona into a
76 McBride, Searching For John Ford, 28-29.
77 McBride, 48.
symbolic representation of the American man. Film critic Roger Ebert recounted a moment he shared with Wayne while discussing Ford during an exclusive interview, with the star remarking:
Up until the last years of his life … Pappy [Wayne’s nickname for Ford] could have directed another picture, and a damned good one. But they said Pappy was too old. Hell, he was never too old. In Hollywood these days, they don’t stand behind a fella. They’d rather make a goddamned legend out of him and be done with him.78 Wayne’s miniature eulogy of his director and close personal friend echoes through the complicated annals of Ford’s personal history. As an artist, Ford spent his entire life in pursuit of definitive cinematic brushstrokes that encapsulated his real beliefs; like Ethan, he is doubly fascinated in theory by what he reviles in practice. Ford himself shoots a nuanced portrait of a broken, morally destitute man in The Searchers, 79 forcing the characteristics of Ethan into the light and exposing the myth behind the idealized American man, and with him, the American Dream. While critics, to quote Wayne’s criticism of Hollywood executives, tried to “make a legend” out of the director’s work, pigeonholing his whole career into the formula some of his earlier works went by, he both intentionally and unintentionally subverted the genre he hoped to shape.
78 Roger Ebert, "Remembering John Wayne," RogerEbert.com, last modified December 14, 2012, accessed March 5, 2025, https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/remembering-john-wayne.
79 The Searchers, dir. John Ford.
Figure 8. Ethan stands in the doorway of the ranch where he returns Debbie to what’s left of their family. Partially obscured in shadow, he dares not enter, and leaves to roam the open landscape (The Searchers, 1956, dir. John Ford).
His masterful use of cinematic techniques, like deeply meaningful and referential cinematography and tightened blocking, come to fruition in the film’s cinematic text, and his shifting personal perspective shines through, formulating the basis of a film that, in effect, captures the magnificent subtlety that made Ford’s career so special that which painted the Western landscape in a fresh, more morally complicated light. The Searchers, in its most distilled form, serves a dual purpose as both an extraordinary work of art and a historical artifact of shifting ideology. While Ford’s later-career vision of America would go on to endure along with the film he embedded it in, provoking much scholarship and reflection, it did not do so
alone. Interestingly enough, though, its potentially most iconic competitor for the lasting definition of the Western narrative did not come from someone with a background as interwoven with the American Dream as Ford. Rather, it came all the way from the same continent where Ford filmed some of his most famous Field Photo work on D-Day: Europe, or more specifically, Italy.
Imported Excellence:
The Personal and Cultural Brilliance of Sergio Leone and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Before considering Sergio Leone’s work as it factors into the landscape of American Western genre cinema, one must consider the filmmaking landscape of the auteur’s home country. Despite the consistent idea that Leone and his “Spaghetti Western” as Italian ventures into the genre would come to be known were at the forefront of the genre’s movement into Europe, silent films set in the Old West were regularly being made by the first two decades of the twentieth century, far before the director’s career started.80 During World War II, though, Italian cinema was essentially shuttered due to the controlling nature of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime, under which ideological dissent was not tolerated.81 Even before the Fascist industry takeover, though, American imports like the standard Western dominated the industry.
In fact, the lack of real domestic movie production in Italy has spurred a historicization of the industry’s change that views the Fascist takeover as a practical response to a stark reality: “The lamentable state of the Italian film industry cannot be explained solely in terms of inferior product but must, instead, take into consideration deadly foreign competition. … Given the circumstances, massive state intervention would have eventually occurred under any
80 Mayer and Roche, Transnationalism and Imperialism, 163-4.
81 Peter E. Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, 3rd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2004), 1213.
government.”82 Among the directors working in these nigh-untenable circumstances was Vincenzo Leone, better known as Roberto Roberti, who would meet the mother of his child while working on a cut-and-dry Western genre film in 1913, and went on to have a long, yet unsatisfactory, career.83 Out of this strange paradox, where the Italian film was left with no substantive past between the filmic interventionism and the lack of any distinct stylistic turn preMussolini, came neorealism.
Neorealism, while not quite reactionary in nature, came to be as a tempered response to the societal repression Fascism induced, a meditation on the plight of the common man in society at large. Fascist filmmaking demanded blind patriotism, asserting the lives of Italians as both glorious and meaningful.84 Instead of using an all-encompassing lens to react to the war and its devastation, though, the neorealists took a number of distinct styles, with the term “neorealism” itself serving as a mere connection between films that largely took on the same subject matter, with one scholar commenting: “The controlling fiction of neorealist films, or at least the majority of them, was that they dealt with actual problems, that they employed contemporary stories, and that they focused on believable characters taken most frequently from Italian life.”85 A prime example of this common factor presents itself at the heart of a crucial work in Leone’s own filmic evolution, Bicycle Thieves
82 Bondanella, 12.
83 Christopher Frayling, Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 29-30.
84 Bondanella, Italian Cinema, 15.
85 Bondanella, 34.
Figure 9. The main character of Bicycle Thieves and his son search fruitlessly for the former’s bicycle (dir. Vittorio De Sica, 1948).
In the classic 1948 slice-of-life story, director Vittorio De Sica uses a fairly basic plotline to tackle the trials and tribulations of the impoverished in Italy, telling the story of a man, young son in tow, desperately searching for a bicycle he needs to earn a living for his family.86 Critics agree that this film serves as a seminal work in the Italian canon, but take a number of potential meanings from its text. The inciting incident for the plot occurs when the main character, Antonio Ricci’s crucial bicycle is stolen by a petty thief, with the surrounding crowd being of little help to the flailing man a stark contrast to the film’s closing, which centers around Ricci, in a moment of desperation, attempting to steal a bicycle back to get even, only to be shouted down by his fellow pedestrians and townspeople.87 The action (or inaction) of the crowd, a core element of the plot, throws a wrench into the typical ideation one would expect from a film that
86
87 Bicycle Thieves.
meditates on poverty, assigning fault to Ricci’s fellow proletarians as well as the society that failed him to the point where he could not provide for his family without committing a crime. Additionally, scholars have made arguments denoting Bicycle Thieves as a purely philosophical exercise, an even starker contrast to the typical derived message, as one scholar notes: The traditional view construes the work as a political film which combines a presentation of pressing social problems with an implicit denunciation of a particular socioeconomic system. … The film may also be seen as a pessimistic and fatalistic view of the human condition, as well as a philosophical parable on absurdity, solitude, and loneliness.88
The myriad themes and ideas present in cinema like Bicycle Thieves no doubt affected Leone, who, at only 19, himself worked on the project. After being recognized off the street as Roberto Roberti’s son, Leone joined the filmmaking team helmed by De Sica, earning a small fee from a brief acting spell and work as a fifth assistant on set.89 Leone, in his words, grew up inundated in cinema through both his father’s career and the habits of his childhood friends, who often spent days taking up whole sections of a newly built cinema in Rome.90 Coming from what the director himself described as a “good family,” or, more accurately, an affluent one, such a poignant and layered exploration into the psyche and everyday circumstances of a large portion of Italy’s citizens gave a young Leone new insight into the topics that could be tackled by cinematic works.91 What kept the neorealist reach largely insular and grounded, though, was their lack of faith in their own stories as vehicles for substantive discussion of Italians’ material reality, as one historian, Peter Bondenella, asserts the most touted neorealists “never forgot [each film was] ...
88 Bondanella, Italian Cinema, 59.
89 Frayling, Sergio Leone: Something, 49-50.
90 Frayling, 2-3.
91 Frayling, 2.
produced by cinematic conventions rather than an ontological experience.”92 In fact, the same historian opined that “many of [the Neorealists’ films] underlined the relationship of illusion and reality, fiction and fact, so as to emphasize their understanding of the role both played in their art.”93 When compared to the American Western genre tradition, which emphasized core values to the point of blatantly obscuring the truth, one can begin to understand the interplay between slice-of-life Italian films and the genre epics that defined post-WWII America’s film landscape; the two means of filmmaking do not just contrast in subject matter, but also in the heart of their storytelling philosophy. In this manner, neorealism serves as an unintentional reaction to the American narrative as it does to fascist suppression. While Leone most likely felt the impact of the Neorealist’s chief characterizations and plotlines, this element stuck with him most of all, allowing him to explore the distinctions between myth and history in his Westerns, and setting the stage for a career as a genre-bending auteur.
While Leone’s foray into the Western genre can be explained using a number of personal and cinematic motivations, including his father’s previous endeavors in the same arena, the morality present in Leone’s films certainly takes influence from the complexities of neorealist cinema. Leone borrowed from a number of additional personal and filmic sources when creating his work, even stretching to Japanese samurai movies like Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (which critic Pauline Kael called “the model” for Leone’s first “Dollars” film, A Fistful of Dollars).94 Frayling, in a work covering the history of the Spaghetti Western, illustrates the dominant critical perspective on Leone’s work: Sergio Leone’s use of the … visual cliches of the Hollywood Western can be placed in a fresh intellectual context: his manipulation of the audience’s response
92 Bondanella, Italian Cinema, 34.
93 Italian Cinema, 34.
94 Spaghetti Westerns, 39.
to these codes suggests a clear understanding of what the codes have traditionally been held to imply.”95 In other words, Leone’s reference to the Western form comes as both a sign of appreciation for the inherent beauty of the genre’s various standards (for instance, the lingering wide shot on a vast landscape, a la early Ford in Stagecoach) and a deliberate method of subversion designed to lure audiences into a false sense of security. This sense of comfort with the Western form broke with the tradition of the genre’s films being utilized by moviegoers as windows into a world without the anxieties that threatened the American Dream.
Beyond his father’s profession, Leone’s childhood affinity for the American cinematic imports that dominated the silver screens in his native Rome initiated him into the foreign filmic tradition, one he would meld with the neorealist concepts he picked up as a young filmmaker. In yet another example of his dual approach to the making of Westerns, the director’s adeptness when undercutting and working with the Western myth stems from an affinity for mythmaking as a whole, both in the context of the classical tradition surrounding historical epics and Leone’s appreciation for the American genre movie. Writing about Leone’s style, Siu noted that Leone’s direct words reflect his chief pursuit as a filmmaker in shaping and examining mythology, beyond even making distinct worldviews of his own:
As [indicated by] his remark about Homer ‘I am convinced that by far the greatest writer of Westerns was Homer, for he wrote fabulous stories about the feats of individual heroes … who are all prototypes for the characters played by Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster, Jimmy Stewart, and John Wayne’ Leone is interested in the conveying of myths … his self-image as a teller of stories is more refined than that of a fully-fledged auteur.96
95 Spaghetti Westerns, 39.
96 Siu, “C’era La Volta,” 8.
Like Ford, Leone draws the mythic quality of Westerns straight from the same metaphorical well as any epic story, Ford’s and Homer’s included. While his films center less around a community or family-motivated journey as compared to even Ford’s darkest work, a la The Searchers, he maintains the same appreciation and thematic closeness to any epic, Homer’s included. Additionally, as the biographer Christopher Frayling posits, “For Leone, life in wartime must have made the world represented by American popular culture seem like a dream of freedom and modernity, and an escape from the straitjacket of reality.”97 The otherworldliness of the Old West appealed to the young future director, and also aligned well with Leone’s eventual neorealist-inspired knowledge of film’s ability to blend the division between reality and onscreen dramatization. For instance, Leone’s films prominently featured grisly violence as a casual, daily occurrence in the Old West towns that his films occupied. In The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, violence is but a symptom of society at large, an unavoidable tragedy to even the most skilled of its perpetrators. Viewing the ruins left from a Civil War battle, the main character, nicknamed Blondie, displays a rare moment of poignance, remarking on the horror of the scene before him and his companion.98 Yet, by the time his movies were made, historians at large had shifted in their approach to studying frontier violence, arguing that it proved relatively insignificant compared to the amassing statistics in Eastern urban centers.99 Without the potential for violence and harm embedded throughout his narratives, though, Leone would have no vehicle with which to move characters like The Man With No Name, the protagonist of his renowned Dollars trilogy (played by Clint Eastwood) and company forward, and, by proxy, no means to elicit his commentary on both society and the Western form. Thus, the ostensible mistruth of the
97 Frayling, Sergio Leone: Something, 7.
98 The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, dir. Sergio Leone.
99 Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, rev. pbk. ed ed. (London [England]: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2019), 41.
heightened Western violence becomes a paradox, much like the American Dream of Leone’s contemporaries a falsified element designed to be a pillar of a story that represents a larger truth.
To that end, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly exists as Leone’s most extensive foray into the truths and misdirection at the heart of the Western form. After the successful reception of A Fistful of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More, Leone felt total comfort to expand his thematic reach into the full scope of what he imagined within the setting of the Old West.100 Just a few years after the film was released, he remarked in an interview that “[he] had always thought that the ‘good,’ the ‘bad,’ and the ‘violent’ did not exist in any absolute, essential sense. It seemed to me interesting to demystify these adjectives in the setting of a Western.”101 This quote, while seemingly innocuous in the larger context of the interview as detailed in Frayling’s biography, serves as the key distinction between Leone’s work and both the standard Westerns of the postwar era and the more introspective genre studies conducted by auteurs like Ford. With The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the final movie in the Dollars trilogy, Leone sought to ground the reality of the characters in firm and realistic, personal motives, while maximizing the grandeur and mystique of the cinematic landscape they existed in.
At the heart of this general characterization of Leone’s Dollars films, specifically The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, was his signature leading man: Clint Eastwood. The common pseudonym for Eastwood’s character is derived from the lack of a consistent naming convention for the poncho-wearing gunslinger who becomes the focal point of all three Dollars movies: as “Joe” in A Fistful of Dollars, “Manco” in For A Few Dollars More, and “Blondie” in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. When considering Eastwood’s canon and his place as a representational
100 Frayling, Sergio Leone: Something, 203.
101 Frayling, Sergio Leone: Something, 203.
figure in international cinema, the critic Marcia Landy “addresses how the concept of the ‘real’ has now shifted from an earlier binary conflict between two notions of history, one real and the other fantasmatic.”102 Eastwood, whose role in Leone’s films lifted his career into superstardom, as an icon of a shifting Western historiography in and of itself ideates the Dollars movies as having a massive impact on the filmic landscape. His character was so unique due to the clear parallels The Man With No Name presented when compared alongside the standard Western hero. In the climactic final scene of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, for instance, he leaves his fellow treasure hunter, Tuco, with half of the sought-after gold even after tricking him into a position where the former could have taken the whole loot. Yet, at the same time, he never engages in activities that don’t make him money (e.g. the central plotline of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, which sees him chasing after a stockpile of gold), bucking the community and values-focused idea of the typical Western hero.
103 By comparison, even the more dubious of his supporting characters seem more heroic. Despite being listed in the title as the “Good,” Blondie lacks in morality compared to his eventual bounty-seeking companion, Tuco (The Ugly). The reviewer Richard T. Jameson noted this odd contrast, offering that “[Blondie]’s purpose is casually mercenary; [Tuco] is in it to underwrite a more personal cause, the avenging of the rape and death of his sister [by the third titular character, Angel Eyes, or the Bad].”104 In fact, this crucial background information regarding Tuco is far more than the audience ever receives about Blondie or Angel Eyes, begging the question: is the idea of the all-American, clean cut Western
102 Marcia Landy, "'Which Way Is America?': Americanism and the Italian Western," Boundary 2 23, no. 1 (1996): 47, JSTOR.
103 A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, dir. Sergio Leone.
104 Richard T. Jameson, "Something to Do with Death: A Fistful of Sergio Leone," Film Comment 9, no. 2 (1973): 9, JSTOR.
hero legitimate, or the projection of the audience’s own desires and anxieties onto the silver screen?
Figure 11. A promotional poster for A Fistful of Dollars (1964, dir. Sergio Leone) with a painted portrait of Eastwood front and center.
Though modern critics agree that Leone’s direct subversion tactic shines as perhaps the chief formalistic brilliance of the auteur’s career, his contemporary reviewers carried a profound disdain for the style of the Dollars trilogy, unintentionally underscoring the genre-shaping effect the films would eventually come to have. Many found the violence present in Leone’s films, in which characters like The Man With No Name would kill without the same kind of regard as the typical Western hero, gratuitous and useless without explicit, The Searchers-esque acknowledgement of its deviation from the form. While Ethan would be reviled for his
unambiguous and potentially immoral violence, The Man With No Name is never criticized by either the characters of the film or Leone himself. His actions are depicted plainly, mere steps along the path to a payday or out of trouble. This perspective, while potentially useful as subversion, did not play well with all critics at the time of the films’ release. As historian William J. McClain points out: “critics clearly thought the Dollars films lacked something necessary to contain and motivate their violence … that something was not the West, but the Western.”105 In other words, Leone’s trickery when subverting the Western form, in the opinions of reviewers, did not lend itself to any meaningful commentary on the genre like Ford’s more brazen approach to the Ethan Edwards character did. To the observers of the time, the Italian Western held no place in the Western canon. In fact, many wrote off Italian Westerns as a whole, characterizing them as invalid by nature, as Frayling describes: “Given the fact that… [Spaghetti Westerns] had no ‘cultural roots’ in American history or folklore, they were likely to be cheap, opportunistic imitations.”106 The larger context for reviews like these can be most prominently linked back to the Italian Western’s prewar origin as a low-quality copy of an otherwise American product, and something that continued along that path even after the industry-wide course correction of neorealism. Some critics acknowledged that, while Leone’s depiction of the Old West did capture the same dusty aesthetic and gritty nature of many acclaimed Westerns that preceded it: “If Leone captured what critics believed to be the material aspect of historical realism, [his films] nonetheless missed the spirit; they were, as one critic described the spaghetti Western genre as a whole, ‘long on gore and short on lore.’”107 This criticism focuses on the idea of the American Dream as essential to the endeavor of creating a Western, not the other way
105 William McClain, "Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the 'Death of the Western' in American Film Criticism," Journal of Film and Video 62.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 57, JSTOR.
106 Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, 121.
107 McClain, “Western, Go Home!,” 58.
around. It postulates that when the mythic background falls to the wayside in favor of clear subversion, the resulting product appears inauthentic and irrespective of what makes the Western genre iconic.
Despite these criticisms, and in the spirit of The Man With No Name in relation to his fellow Western leads, Leone’s highly distinctive, intense style of filmmaking functions precisely because of its idiosyncratic nature. While it parlays the Western form into something different louder, more maximalist, with less courageous leads it does not play as a parody of the genre itself. The American Dream is an implicit idea in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, regardless of a character’s nationality. It is shown, though, as a material pursuit, one that The Man With No Name perfects hence his place as the de facto hero of the story. In this sense and many others, Leone’s Western takes on its own form, one characterized by the tendencies of the director. Critical perspectives that take a more revisionist view on Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns tend to view its approach to the American Dream as incorporated into the Old West as both more realistic and nuanced than its standard genre predecessors. As Landy argues, “[Westerns’] dependence on the past, on the “West,” is … tied to the culture of the dominant class and, in its own way, has drawn from it the motifs which have then become inserted into combination with the previous traditions. Besides, there is nothing more contradictory and fragmentary than folklore.”108 The idea of the Western as a story derived from the legends of the “dominant class” specifically elicits why Leone himself was able to find so many common threads through which he could criticize the form as a student of the neorealists, even while abandoning their stylistic conventions, he maintained their tact and incisiveness when considering social commentary
108 Landy, “Which Way,” 52.
In addition, the characterization of Leone’s work as messy and unkempt compared to the deeply serious, reverent Westerns of the American variety does not hold up when examining his general processes and the reasoning behind his most memorable cinematic choices. Put simply, Leone expressed that his job was little more than creating the fancies he had once enjoyed during his youth, albeit to a more mature audience, once saying: “As a film-maker, my job was to make a fable for adults, a fairy-tale for grown-ups, and in relation to the cinema I felt like a puppeteer with his puppets.”109 In his work, Leone puts this sense of showmanship on full display, and invites his collaborators to do the same. For instance, Emilio Morricone, the composer that aided Leone on The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, created a recognizable score that features prominently in the background of the film. Where a traditional Western would leave silence or reflective music to heighten the drama of a particular scene, Leone and Morricone instead choose to add pressure and intensity through the reverse tactic. Film historians believe that the score served a deeper meaning beyond that of pure tension-raising, with one posting that “[t]he scores for Leone's films serve a number of functions: as affective commentary on a character's actions or state of mind. … The music is a major carrier of the historical excess that creates the sense of openness and heterogeneity of narration.”110 Even as the events of the film contrast the audience’s expectation of the Western, and the hero and his supporting cast fail to live up to the genre standard’s heightened morality, the soundscape itself creates an epic tone and high-stakes atmosphere that engrossed audiences, in turn forcing them to plainly consider the depth and motives of Leone’s characters. Morricone matches the film’s cinematic and thematic content, breathing new life into the crucial moments of films like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. For instance, in the climactic stand-off scene, close-ups of the three main characters’ faces and their
109 Frayling, Sergio Leone: Something, 11.
110 Landy, “Which Way,” 51.
relative inaction juxtaposes Morricone’s crescendoing score, enrapturing the viewer in the tension the three men face as they duel for their lives and the treasure they have sought thus far.
Figure 12. The now-iconic stand-off scene in The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, with Blondie in between Tuco and Angel Eyes, and the powerful and now-iconic Morricone score thumping in the background (dir. Sergio Leone, 1966).
Besides direct opposition by way of score, Leone and company also shifted the Western genre standards in many cinematic realms, including depictions of non-settler inhabitants of the Old West, the landscape itself, and even the typical faces of actors. Leone largely replaced Native Americans in his films with Mexicans, which allowed him to illustrate the realities of settler’s attitudes regarding those whose land they impeded on. In A Fistful of Dollars, The Man
With No Name is asked directly whether he would intentionally come into conflict with the Mexican faction in the area he roamed at the time, to which he firmly declined due to the sheer impressiveness and numbers of the Mexican fighting forces.111 This acknowledgement of the infringed upon as not either backwards or a tortured reflections of the settlers, as standard Westerns and The Searchers alike tend to portray Natives, but rather opponents on the same
111 Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, 79.
scale and with the same ends and means as figures like Eastwood’s character completely flips the genre standard, prompting the audience to further reflect on The Man With No Name’s connection to the traditional morals and mission of the portrayed American settler.
In a similar vein to how Leone shifted the way in which Natives are portrayed by the standard Western, he also shaped a new function for the almost anthropomorphized qualities the landscape takes on in Westerns. Much like his and Morricone’s use of music to heighten the tension of a film, he utilizes the emptiness and grandeur of the land not as a reflection-inducing mechanism or conflict-minimizing reminder of the characters’ destiny, but as a method for inducing more drama. In Leone’s films, “space is a constant adventure… [the director’s] baroque vastness resonate[s] with the promise of a detonation that will at once supply energy for the winning of the West and shatter its aesthetic sublimity.”112 To put it bluntly, Leone did not care for the internalities that the land could thrust upon a character not when there was so much, materially speaking, at stake. While he did utilize awe-inspiring wide shots to foster the aforementioned sense of security in the viewer, who could recognize them from standard Westerns, many of his wider shots solely focused on providing tempo for the action or stand-off to come.
For the director, each and every aspect of the composition was a potential canvas to find meaning within, including the faces of the actors he cast. As such, Leone opted for uglier-thanusual actors for almost every character but Eastwood, giving the close-ups of characters’ faces he enjoyed cutting to a more jarring feel. One film critic noted that, in Leone’s shots “the faces of the supporting cast … became landscape themselves in huge, flyspecked closeup.”113 This cinematic technique represents yet another subversion of expectations from Leone, who places
112 Jameson, “Something To Do,” 11.
113 Jameson, 8.
the same kind of emphasis on the faces of the relatively unknown, uglier characters that standard Western ones often fail to receive. While he does not qualify as somebody that would be out of place at Central Casting, Eastwood gains from this tactic as well. His character, largely silent and entirely mysterious, accrues most of his most emotional moments purely from close-ups on his eyes, which often depict the signature focus that The Man With No Name came to represent.
Leone once joked that, when working on the script for Bicycle Thieves alongside the notoriously meticulous Vittorio De Sica and his team, the young filmmaker once thought to himself, “Oh my God, we’re in trouble. If in writing a screenplay you have to deal with these kinds of details, it must be a crazy business!”114 Like Ford, comments like this only served to deflate the auteur’s outward ego, downplaying his role in the stylistic choices that inform viewers’ ideas of him as a filmmaker. In reality, Leone made sure that each and every aspect of his films, including something as simple as a startling close-up on a more off-putting face, served a purpose. When seriously considering his tight shot tactic in an interview, he conceded that “I’m very careful [when considering shots], so they call me a perfectionist and a formalist because I watch my framing. … You have to frame with the emotion and the rhythm of the film in mind. It takes on a dramatic function.”115 For Leone, this dramatic function serves as the key figurehead in understanding his work. While inspiration for the director’s work was drawn from a number of sources, and expressed a number of questions and, by inference, opinions considering the truth behind the Western form, it nonetheless sought to heighten the drama and intrigue surrounding said form, adding layers of easily digestible entertainment onto the neorealist and historical epicinspired qualities hidden below. Thus, the ending point of Leone’s impact can be understood one defined by the director’s incorporation of both plain realism within characterization and
114 Warren Heiti, "Lyric Details and Ecological Integrity," Ethics and the Environment 22, no. 1 (2017): 95, JSTOR. 115 Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, 100.
cinematic excess with composition, all jammed into a form previously defined by weighty morals and plainer cinematic tendencies.
New Frontiers:
Ford and Leone’s Legacy
The story of the Western must begin and end with the frontier, the unconquerable placebetween-places that, in both its literal portrayal onscreen and figurative representation through concepts like the American Dream, inspires so much awe in the nation’s public at large. As America has grown and changed, the art it has consumed and elevated to classic status has shifted with the country’s attitudes, and the works of Ford and Leone are no exception. The Searchers, when it was first released in 1956, did only moderately well for a Ford film and was considered a standard Ford-Wayne Western, with little intrigue attached; eventually, it has come to be known as one of the great American films116 Leone’s work, once scorned by critics, has now come to represent the dominant perspective on the veracity of the American Dream, one that takes into account the ills of settlers and their true motivations. When explaining why the standard genre Western has fallen off the map in terms of production, one scholar offered a concise critique of the genre as it relates to the public’s cinematic appetites: “Today, rather demoralized by a number of political, social and economic disappointments, the country no longer accepts the fundamental euphoria of the Western. Its illusions have ceased to be credible.”117 When Leone began making the Dollars trilogy, a few years after Ford made his darker turn via The Searchers, the idea of the Western inspiring anything other than hope would have shocked viewers. Yet, even Ford’s work has come to represent a similar sense of countryspecific fatalism as Leone’s has, with a modern critic ideating that “[Ford’s films] produced a
116 Eyman, Print The Legend, 425-426.
117 Ramonet, "Italian Westerns," 31.
sense of hollowness about the myth and futility about the history. The only conclusion one can draw from this is that the path traveled by Ford … is a path many of us have traveled the past few years.”118 When attempting to make sense of this nationwide turn, there are a number of factors one must keep in mind.
Most saliently, both society and media have long exited the honeymoon phase associated with World War II, one in which propaganda operations like what Ford and the Field Photo unit participated in abounded. Absolute loyalty to American ideals in the age of true global hegemony for the country has fallen to the wayside, having outlived its use in the modern context. Considering the dilemma of Western relevance, Hervé Mayer and David Roche proposed that “[i]deologically speaking, the genre’s relevance would, then, lie in the narrative of US imperialism itself, which acquires ‘universal’ and/or local relevance through allegory; when deterritorialized, the Western's political relevance would stem from the ‘universality’ of imperialism.”119 One reading of this concept insinuates that, as the United States itself has moved away from a reality in which Manifest Destiny, or some form of it, serves as a chief foreign policy and cultural sticking point, the potential use of the Western story to the public remains in demand no longer.
The straying from the common form that has taken place since the impactful subversion of Ford and Leone should not be viewed as the conclusion of the Western story. Rather, it is but the beginning of a filmic evolution that seeks to capture the realities of the Old West, as well as the American Dream, in a more wholesale context. The legacy of the filmmakers behind the American icons featured in the Westerns, from all-encompassing landscapes to pure-of-heart cowboys, lives on in future generations’ narrative and form-based shifts. After all, as Peter
118 Brauer, "The Fractured," 83.
119 Mayer and Roche, Transnationalism and Imperialism, 10.
Stowell opined when considering Ford’s legacy, “what is valuable is what we remember, and what we remember is what shapes our present lives, and what we remember never dies.”120 Those seeking evidence to support the notion of lasting cinematic impacts should look no further than the Italian Western under Leone, which both subverted and shifted the genre to promote its own ideas while remaining wildly popular among mass audiences. Ramonet directly links these two aspects, writing “[t]he commercial success of Italian Westerns also allowed many filmmakers to truly express themselves, to reach a mass audience and to appropriate the genre on behalf of very explicit political ideas.”121 Ford and Leone, as dedicated auteurs and filmmakers, did not cut corners to achieve this success, as evidenced by their myriad cinematic techniques and layered characterizations and moral principles. With that being said, their masterpieces have taken on the mantle of defining pieces in the American filmic canon, and the two directors have assumed the role of truly American storytellers, pointed towards the flaws of the American Dream while, in a strange manner, representing the foundational points that allow the nation and its filmmakers to look farther and more creatively into the Old West.
120 “John Ford’s Literary,” 169.
121 Ramonet, “Italian Westerns,” 31.
13. Ethan turns heel and leaves for parts unknown at the end of The Searchers (1956, dir. John Ford).
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