Word: zane
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Zane Grey Theatre (CBS, 8-8:30 p.m.). Edward G. Robinson acting for the first time with Son Edward Jr. in Loyalty, a Civil War skirmish involving Reb raiders...
...Latest Nielsen ratings: Gunsmoke (40.1), Wagon Train (38.3), Have Gun, Will Travel (35.7), The Rifleman (34.0), Maverick (32.9), Wyatt Earp (31.8), Zane Grey Theater (31.1), Wanted, Dead or Alive (30.6). Only nonwesterns in the top ten: Lucy-Desi (34.9), Danny Thomas...
...bluecoats, amnesic prospectors. Then there was the Civil Rights Western, and all the persecuted Piutes, molested Mexicans, downtrodden Jewish drummers and tormented Chinese laundrymen had their day. Scriptwriters are now riding farther from the train, rustling plots (from De Maupassant, Stevenson, even Aristophanes), introducing foreigners (an Italian tailor on Zane Grey Theater, a samurai on Wagon Train) and dabbling in rape, incest, miscegenation, cannibalism...
...much more convincing case is made by theorizers, both professional and amateur, who think the western helps people to get away from the complexities of modern life and back to the "restful absolutes" of the past. Western Man in Zane Grey's definition of the term is in fact an almost exact opposite of Western Man in Toynbee's sense. In the cowboy's world, justice is the result of direct action, not of elaborate legality. A man's fate depends on his own choices and capacities, not on the vast impersonal forces of society...
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...