The 1960s: The International Western 

 Yet if there was by i960 a drastic decline in the number of Westerns being made, the new decade was to see the genre once again revitalized, this time from an unexpected source. One film right at the start of the 1960s was to prove especially significant in the light of what was to come.

  The Magnificent Seven was based on The Seven Samurai, a Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa. It demonstrated that however American might be its origins, the Western was by now a truly international form. If a Western could be made from a Japanese movie, with the plot virtually unchanged, then the genre belonged to anybody. As if to prove the point, The Magnificent Seven, only moderately successful in America, went on to do huge business in Europe. Ever since World War I the European market had been important to Hollywood. Now, with the uncertain?ties of the domestic market, it became a good deal more than that. And soon the unthinkable would happen; Europe would itself become a centre for the production as well as the consumption of Westerns. In 1962 the Germans had pointed the way with Der Schatz im Silbersee (The Treasure of Silver Lake), the first of the Winnetou films based on the Karl May novels. Its financial success showed that there was an audience for Westerns made in Europe. The Germans had imported Lex Barker, a former Tarzan, to play Old Shatterhand, Winnetou's Aryan friend. Two years later Sergio Leone brought over a minor television star, Clint Eastwood, to play in Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars), based on another Kurosawa film, Yojimbo, and a boom was under way. The Magnificent Seven also gave a boost to a theme which was to become one of the mainstays of the 60s, that of the small professional elite hired to do a specialist job. Elements of such a theme had long been present in the Western (and indeed in the crime film and war film), and perhaps it had always been embryonic in the figure of the hero whose gunfighting skills secure his triumph over evil. But in the 60s the Western hero seemed finally to lose touch with his origins in the cowboy and, retaining only the traditional cowboy costume, become a gunfighter pure and simple. As such he also became a mercenary, hiring out to the highest bidder. The tension between the amorality of the cash nexus and the hero's own loyalties or scruples became the basis for the drama. The distance between this and the fully-fledged cynicism which was to characterize the Italian Western is perhaps not so great. Cynicism, or something approaching it, had already entered the American Western at least as early as 1954 with Robert Aldrich's Vera Cruz, in which a couple of adventurers (Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster) sell their services below the border. The scene in which they demonstrate their shooting prowess to the Emperor Maximilian is a blueprint for all the show-offs in the Spaghetti Western. There is rather more continuity between the Hollywood Western and the Italian Western than is usually allowed. The Italians not only imported actors -including, significantly, Eli Wallach, who had made a name for himself as the bandit chief in The Magnificent Seven and was to play The Ugly in Sergio Leone's // buuno, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). They took certain attitudes and themes which had already emerged and pushed them further. The mercenary (and his cousin the bounty hunter) is one of the key characters in the Italian Western, where any motivation but self-interest is regarded with suspicion. Most notoriously, Italian directors displayed a fascination with the violence which was inherent in the dramatic tensions the Western had traditionally explored. One can see in The Magnificent Seven a tendency towards the aestheticizing of violence, celebrating the balletic beauty of a gunfight. This was developed by the Italians into a fully-fledged obsession, taken to extremes of parodic excess in which hordes of extras described extravagant parabolas as they fell beneath a hail of bullets. When the supercharged violence of the Italian Western was imported back to Hollywood in such films as The Wild Bunch (1969)  there was  an  outcry  from  critics,  eager to  make  facile  connections between what was happening on the screen and the rising tide of crime on the streets of America's cities. 1964, the year of Per un pugno di dollari, was also the year which saw Cheyenne Autumn and A Distant Trumpet, the last Westerns of two great veterans, John Ford and Raoul Walsh. Hollywood productions held steady during the rest of the 60s at about 20 a year, but the old confidence was gone. There no longer seemed any certainty about what kind of Westerns to make. As the 60s gave way to the 70s Hollywood searched, with increasing desperation, for new consti?tuents to replace those who had deserted the traditional Western. There were, inevitably, imitations of Spaghetti Westerns. Some were feeble, such as El Condor (1970), starring Lee Van Cleef, the actor who, after playing innumerable heavies in quality pictures such as High Noon, Ride Lonesome and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, had become a star in Italy. Some, such as Hang 'Em High, starring Clint Eastwood, who used his Italian success as a springboard to even greater fame in the Hollywood Western, were interesting hybrids. Many of the Italian Westerns were set in Mexico, partly because
locations in Italy or elsewhere in Europe could be made to stand in for south of the border, partly because that way Latin characters could be privileged at the expense of Anglo-Saxons. The Americans soon followed suit, shooting many of their 1960s Westerns in southern Spain, where the landscape approximated to Mexico and the costs were much lower than Hollywood. The racial balance of the Western in fact changed markedly by the end of the 60s. Besides more frequent and more dignified Mexican characters, there were, if only occasionally, substantial roles for black actors, as in The Scalphunters (1967), in which Ossie Davis took his opportunity well. With Cheyenne Autumn John Ford had made a serious, if still compromised, attempt to set the record straight about how the Indians had been treated. Two films in 1970 went further towards closing the gap between the Western's caricature of the Indian and historical reality. Soldier Blue tried to shock with explicit depiction of carnage, rape and mutilation in its account of the infamous Sand Creek Massacre. Little Big Man attempted to communicate some of the attraction and strangeness of an alien culture. Since there was no such thing as a Native American film industry it was inevitable that Indians would still be seen through white eyes, but the 'me heapum big chief stereotype had become unusable. Women, on the other hand, another disadvantaged group in the traditional Western, did not find their role much improved. The Italian Western had virtually ignored them, and although a few films such as Hannie Caulder and Cat Ballon provided meaty roles for Hollywood female stars, the Western could find no plausible way in which to grant women equal screen time. In part this was doubtless the result of a scarcity of role models in the history of the West (Calamity Jane and Belle Starr notwithstanding). But it had more to do with the fact that the central dramatic conflict in the genre invariably involved a trial of physical prowess. Hollywood could not in its heart believe in women taking up arms; especially in a genre which was, however notionally, set in the age of the crinoline. The withering away of the traditional audience for the Western had led by the 1970s to a free-for-all, where in order to find a market everything was tried at least once. There were Westerns for children, for blacks and hippies, for liberals and conservatives. There were softcore and hardcore Westerns, science-fiction Westerns and Western allegories about Vietnam. There were ecological and ethnographic Westerns, and plenty of parodies just in case anyone thought Hollywood still took the Western seriously. There were British Westerns shot in Spain, American Westerns shot in Israel, German Westerns shot in Yugoslavia. There was more violence, more sex, more violent sex. The history of the West was ransacked to find new stories or, failing that, a new twist to old stories. Everybody who had ever been anybody, Jesse James and Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp and General Custer, was debunked. There were good Westerns, too. Peckinpah was active, as were Burt Kennedy, Monte Hellman, Clint Eastwood, Sergio Leone. Two themes in particular proved fruitful. The first took familiar Western characters or events and tried to tell the story with a little more realism. In Will Penny (1967), for example, we are shown the economic hardship and loneliness of a cowboy's life. The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972) is another disenchanted look at the emotional and physical deprivations of a life spent driving cattle. At its extremes, in such examples of the so-called 'mud and rags' school as The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), this approach seemed in danger of romanticizing squalor. A different variant of the romantic appeared in another popular theme of the 60s and 70s. Sam Peckinpah had set the trend in 1962. His film Ride the High Country (Quns in the Afternoon in Britain) was about the end of the West, a look back to the moment when motor cars, Chinese restaurants and 'the steady businessman' had conspired to sweep away the era of rugged individualism. This theme can be traced back at least as far as The Gunfighter, made in 1950. Its hero (played by Gregory Peck) is tired of his wandering, lonely life, which he feels is appropriate neither to his advancing years nor to the changing life of the frontier, with its new schools and churches. He wants to settle down and raise a family. But his reputation attracts a succession of youths ambitious to achieve fame by beating him to the draw, and one of them proves the impossibility of his dream. In the 1960s the idea of the hero who cannot settle down, who is unable to adjust to change, or perhaps even to society itself, became almost commonplace, and Peckinpah was to return to it obsessively. Two other films of 1962, Lonely Are the Brave and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, also in their very different ways lamented the passing of the Old West. In Peckinpah's work and in other films on the same theme such as The Good Guys and the Bad Quys (1969), Monte Walsh (1970) and The Shootist (1976) the aging cowboy or gunfighter is seen as symptomatic of the decline of the West itself, often signalled by the incursion of modern inventions such as the motor car. This was not nearly such a novel theme as the film-makers seemed to think. Back in the 1830s the painter George Catlin had lamented the imminent demise of the distinctive Plains Indian culture. At the end of the century Frederic Remington was saddened by the inevitable destruction by the encroaching farmers of the free and open life of the plains. Stephen Crane's story 'The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky', published in 1898, is an elegy for the rowdy excitements of a frontier town. Indeed, it seemed as though at the very moment of its creation the West was suffused with a rosy tinge of nostalgia. But if it was an old theme it was a good one; though perhaps, as Pauline Kael remarked, it wasn't so much the West that was growing old as the Western stars themselves. With Randolph Scott (b. 1903), Joel McCrea (b. 1905), Henry Fonda (b. 1905), John Wayne (b. 1907) and James Stewart (b. 1908) all entering their sixties and few younger stars coming along to play their roles, old age was by the 1960s not so much a theme selected by film-makers as forced upon them.