Word: filming
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Many critics have tried to prove this proposition (the most famous of these is Robert Warshaw's essay "The Western" included in Dan Talbot's Film: An Anthology). Their reliance either on not calling a film a western merely because it does not fit a presupposition or on setting up as many as ten distinct types of westerns (the lone man western, the calvary western, the adult neurotic western, etc.) should be evidence in itself of the dubious quality of this theory. However, what concerns me more at this moment is the effect this idea has on filmmakers themselves...
...girl Maddy Ross is front and center in the film as are her values. Her education consists mainly of her realizing that her prejudices are indeed correct. She objects to her father taking Tom Chance along with him on an errand because Chance has not been appreciative enough of the Ross family's housing him in a tool shed. And, just as she expects, Chance goes ahead and kills the elder Ross. Later he tries to push Maddy herself into a pit full of rattlesnakes...
THROUGHOUT the film the girl espouses a true belief in the capitalist west. "I am Maddy Ross from Yellow country--my family has property so I don't see why you are mishandling me," she says when she falls into the hands of an outlaw band. (Like every other utterance she makes this emerges as what can only be described as cultivated Indian--speech entirely devoid of conjunctions and intonation.) She is cold and resistant to Campbell's obvious sexual interest in her until Campbell is safely dead, at which point she strokes his hair, thus demonstrating her felling...
...between a two-shot of Wayne and the examining attorney for their dialogue and a two-shot of Wayne and the judge for theirs. Maddy at the hanging is present head-on and medium-close against a background which is a neutral as the courtroom. Because nobody in the film shows any development or chance in their attitude and since nothing "wrong" results from the characters' actions, Hathaway's shooting forces us to believe that he condones these values, that he is in favor of them, presumably because these are the values of the west...
...audience, these are values which I particularly despise. By never questioning the values he presents, Hathaway removes from the audience all responsibility of evaluation. Either one is with him and for the film or one is against him and his product. Our values remain unchanged and, since we have not had any confrontation, unconfirmed as well...