The 50s: The Beginning of The End?

 The 1950s continued what the 40s had begun. As society changed its notions of what was acceptable in the field of sexual activity, so the Western allowed in themes and ideas which had previously been taboo. In 1959 came Warlock, which in its portrayal of the relationship between Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn came closer than anything seen before to suggestions of homosexuality.

Two years later, in The Last Sunset, the plot turns on the possibility of Kirk Douglas' incest with his daughter. Not everyone welcomed the new kind of Western. Some film-makers attempted to go their own way without conceding anything to fashion. It's well known that Howard Hawks intended Rio Bravo (1958) as a somewhat belated rebuff to the social criticism of High Noon (1952), pouring scorn on the notion that any sheriff worth his salt would want help from amateurs. In Fort Apache (1948), though John Ford admits the possibility that Henry Fonda as the Custer-figure Colonel Thursday may have acted rashly, this is not allowed to damage the potent myth of the thin blue line. Some eminent critics also protested. Robert Warshow in his essay on the Western hero written in 1954 attacked recent films for departing from the original purity of the form. The Gunfighter (1950) and High Noon are accused of distracting us from the central figure of the hero by their insistence on detailing (in what Warshow regards as a fairly humdrum way) the social fabric of the towns where the action happens. Warshow is also suspicious of what he sees as a tendency towards aestheticism in such films as Shane (1952). This is similar to the objection by Andre Bazin, writing just a year later than Warshow in 1955. Bazin identifies something he calls the 'sur-Western', which is 'a Western that would be ashamed to be just itself, and looks for some additional interest to justify its existence - an aesthetic, sociological, moral, psychological, political or erotic interest, in short some quality extrinsic to the genre and which is supposed to enrich it.' As an example he too gives Shane, which he feels is too self-consciously at work on the creation of a myth and which he sees as a possible indication of decadence. Yet the 1950s were also a time of renewal. In 1950 came Broken Arrow', a landmark in the Western's treatment of the Indian. As we have seen, the early years of the century saw a number of films which were sympathetic to the Indian's cause and which even placed the Indian centre-stage. This did not last. With the dubious exception of the Lone Ranger's faithful Tonto, there are no Indians as series heroes in the B-Western and very few in the A-Western between 1920 and 1950. Broken Arrowmay now be seen as something less than the perfectly liberal movie it was once taken for. No one except the conventional villains out for money is held responsible for the Indians' plight, and the Indian girl with whom the hero (James Stewart) falls in love has to die lest miscegenation become something he and we have to live with. But the film did open up a space in which the Indian might be something more than a faceless screaming savage.