The 40s: Resurgence of the A-Western

 The 1940s proved to be the most decisive decade in the history of the Western. Everything that happened to the genre in the 20s and 30s is in a sense contained within its origins with Broncho Billy, William S. Hart and Tom Mix. But in the 40s the Western set out in new directions. Stagecoach and Union Pacific are still in their way films of innocence, no less than the fantasies of Gene Autry

The 1940s proved to be the most decisive decade in the history of the Western. Everything that happened to the genre in the 20s and 30s is in a sense contained within its origins with Broncho Billy, William S. Hart and Tom Mix. But in the 40s the Western set out in new directions. Stagecoach and Union Pacific are still in their way films of innocence, no less than the fantasies of Gene Autry. Two films of the early 1940s represent a break with the origins of the genre. Howard Hughes' notorious production of The Outlaw, begun in 1940, is generally credited with introducing sex into the Western. Broncho Billy, Hart and Mix all got their girl at the end, but their feelings were never less than wholesome. In The Outlaw there is a salaciousness that is quite new. If the publicity campaign was more single-minded about sex than the film itself ('What are the two reasons for Jane Russell's rise to stardom?' demanded a poster on which her bosom was prominently displayed), the scene in which she hastily marries the wounded Billy the Kid (Jack Buetel) before jumping into bed with him to keep him warm certainly represented a departure from the tradition of chivalrous romance. The second film to point in a new direction is The Ox'Bow Incident (1942). Before this the hero had always been certain of his moral rectitude in a universe where right and wrong were clearly separated and right was sure of ultimate triumph. In The Ox-Bow Incident lynching (which previously, in The Virginian, was treated as an unpleasant duty which had to be faced if justice were to be achieved) becomes symptomatic of a community which is rotten inside. Those who perpetrate the crime are driven by a variety of motives, hut a desire for justice is not prominent. Though Henry Fonda is ultimately the mouthpiece for decency the film has, properly speaking, no hero and the darkness of its moral universe is unrelieved by the light of any shining armour. The Ox-Bow Incident introduces into the Western both a bleak view of the frontier and a complexity in the delineation of character which would lead critics to observe that the Western had 'grown up' since it was now 'about' something. The film is therefore the harbinger of two related tendencies. One is towards the Western which rehearses a 'social' theme. High Noon, coming early in the next decade, is probably the best known example of this kind, though the town-taming Western, which contains a social theme in embryo, had renewed its popularity around the turn of the decade with Frontier Marshal (1939), Dodge City (1939) and Tombstone, the Town Too Tough to Die (1942). The second tendency is towards a deepening of character motivation, and in particular the ascription of villainy to more diverse and complicated motivations than a simple greed for money. The 'adult' or 'social' or 'psychological' Western did not of course replace overnight what went before. In 1943 the decidedly uncomplicated Roy Rogers replaced the equally serene Gene Autry as the top money-making Western star and he was to remain so for the next eleven years. But the trends that had been started gathered pace as the 40s progressed. In 1946 Duel in the Sun picked up the torch of sexual desire which The Outlaw had lit. In 1947 came Raoul Walsh's
is not easy to say. The explanation that the new Western was a sign of the times is no more convincing of the 40s than of the 30s. Just because the 40s were, in the conventional account, gloomy years (the atom bomb and the cold war following hard upon the horrors of World War II), there is no particular reason why the Western should follow suit. The B-Western went cheerfully on its way. Nor did other genres always reflect the prevailing angst. The 40s are also the heyday of the mgm musical. All the same, there is a definite, if not all-encompassing, movement in Hollywood cinema at this time towards a bleaker, even more cynical, view of the world, and also a renewed interest in psychology. This is manifested in the rise of film noir (which dates from the start of the 40s); in Citizen Kane (a trendsetting film if ever there was one); and in the prevalence of abnormal psychological states as character motivation in such genres as the melodrama. These influences made their way into the A-Western. That the B-Western was minimally influenced by such developments only demonstrates how self-contained it was.