Word: villainizing
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...professional worriers are concerned about the violence and sadism in the horse opera. Psychoanalysts are looking for sex symbols (all those guns, of course), Oedipal patterns (to kill the wicked sheriff really means to kill Pop), indirect aggressions ("Women are apt to think of their husbands in the villain's role," says one Payne Whitney staffer...
Novelist Wister established the basic form of the modern sagebrush saga: the strong, silent, shy and virtuous hero; the hard-drinking, materialistic villain; the pretty, intelligent schoolteacher-heroine; the cattle politics; the slow drawl, the fast draw; the long, wary walk down Main Street to a blazing finish. And Zane Grey, a cactus-happy New York dentist who wrote 54 western novels that sold more than 25 million copies, started the mass exploitation of the Wister formula that soon turned the western story into a beltline business. Only since World War II have the cliches been rescued by a serious...
...this time, the visual language of the basic western had been written. The Good Guy wore a white hat, the Bad Guy wore a black hat. G.G. was clean-shaven, B.G. had 5 o'clock shadow, and an experienced horse fan could predict the depth of the villain's depravity by checking the length of his sideburns. The villain chased the hero from right to left, but when the hero was winning, he was naturally headed right (with his pistol hand closest to the camera). Anybody shot was assumed dead, unless the audience was notified to the contrary...
...hero of Have Gun, Witt Travel is actually just a hard-boiled egghead, western style, who spouts Shakespeare while the lead flies, smokes 58? cigars, advises the public to "try marinating venison in whisky." He is a private eye in peewees, and though he always brings the villain to account, he usually tempers justice with money. At 41, bulb-nosed, thrice-married Actor Boone, a veteran of TV's Medic, is well-preserved in a rugged, meaty way (he was light-heavyweight boxing champion at Stanford). Has gun (Colt .44), will travel on horses, but much prefers sports cars...
...also raised some eyebrows. In 1941 Chesler turned up as a crown witness in a case involving illegal sales of Canadian government bonds. Actually, Chesler and his firm had been ordered by the Bank of Canada to play along with the hanky-panky to trap the villain...