By Michael Bayer
Film noir is rightly credited as an American invention, but never could it claim the title of most American film category. That honor indisputably befits the western.
Read on or click here for a complete list of noir western titles.
The single most popular American film genre of the 20th century, at least through the 1960’s, the western captured the untamed, unpredictable landscape and pioneering spirit of a relatively young country. Think about this: when Edison in 1903 released the 12-minute The Great Train Robbery, one of the earliest motion pictures and certainly the earliest western known today, the Wild West was still alive and well out there beyond the Mississippi River (Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma weren’t even states yet). Wild for its uncharted terrain, yes, but also for its unsophisticated or nonexistent systems of law and order.
Having traveled across America 70 years earlier in 1831, French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “In the new states of the Southwest, the citizens generally take the law into their own hand, and murders are of frequent occurrence. This arises from the rude manners and the ignorance of the inhabitants of those deserts, who do not perceive the utility of strengthening the laws, and who prefer duels to prosecutions.”
Sounds like a perfect setting for film noir.
The wide, open plains represented America’s sacrosanct ideal: freedom. (Referring to the typical American pilgrim, Tocqueville wrote: “He is goaded onward by a passion stronger than his love of life; before him lies a boundless continent.”) This may be why the western genre reached its creative zenith in the 40’s and 50’s, just as America was fighting against freedom’s opposite in the form of encroaching totalitarianism. This era’s moral and political convulsions also birthed a new breed of western, one that was darker, deeper, and more despairing. These films would later be categorized as western noir.
Traditional westerns were light and bright, heroic cowboys teamed with comedic sidekicks, produced with high frequency and low budget. Their protagonists were equipped with reins and rifles, Stetson hats and cowboy boots, buckskins and bandanas, vests and spurs, because the threats they faced were generally external. Often drifting and exploring, they struggled against the elements, the Indians, and the absence of authority. They were strong, stable men – women were ornamental – hoping to civilize a harsh landscape. The villain, wearing a black hat or face paint, made his presence obvious. Endings were almost always unambiguously happy. Change, however, was in the air.
Widely considered the first western noir, William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) was a commercial flop but attracted the attention of critics for its serious tone and moral complexity. It wasn’t entertaining the way westerns were expected to be but it was riveting for its psychological tension: call it a thinking man’s western. As the war had thrust America and her allies into an existential crisis, Wellman had projected this crisis onto the screen; he’d twisted the kaleidoscope of western tropes so they fell into a new, hopeless pattern. Starring Henry Fonda as a drifter who stumbles upon a lynching, the film illustrates the folly of the crowd, the evil that comes from men acting irrationally. Innocent men are executed, a sheriff commits suicide, and a town is left to reflect on its shame. We’re no longer in Roy Rogers territory.
With the release of Raoul Walsh’s Pursued and Andre DeToth’s Ramrod, both in 1947, the western noir became its own crossover category. These new westerns were dark and angry, night scenes alternating with claustrophobic interiors, snow battling wind, heroes turning anti-heroes, now turning inward to face threats in the mind, inescapable, generally in the form of psychological trauma (Jack Slade, 1953; Day of the Outlaw, 1959). The driving force was no longer a heroic instinct to civilize but a thirst for revenge. His family slaughtered, his wife raped, his comrades having left him for dead, the noir western protagonist was nearly always tormented by a monomaniacal need to hunt down his demons and bury them in the dirt (Rancho Notorious, 1952; The Bravados, 1958). Until he’s achieved his goal, there’s no chance he’ll fit in to polite society. He won’t even try.
The narrative and thematic similarities between noirs and westerns are obvious. As noir dealt with the psychological impact and aftermath of World War II, western characters had often been changed by the Civil War. As noir protagonists were often surrounded by gangsters, western protagonists battled bandits and bank robbers. (What’s the difference between John Dillinger and Jesse James?) Noir criminals often escaped to Mexico, the same exotic landscape where westerns were often set. The wide, open plains of the frontier brought about isolation just as noir’s overcrowded, heartless cities did. The one common western plot element without a noir parallel is the presence of “Indians,” or that sense of a racial “other.”
The noir influence added new elements to the western genre too: specifically, explicit violence and complex women. Much of the new violence was sadistic and humiliating, again transcending the physical to take on psychological dimensions. (The random attack on the protagonist’s wife in 1959’s Last Train from Gun Hill is a prime example.) Female characters also became deeper, more challenging, more thoughtful and empowered compared to the ingenues of earlier westerns. French critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton called her the “ambivalent heroine,” and she was a very welcome and long overdue arrival.
These new “psychological” westerns were recognized as fundamentally different by critics, especially in Europe, and especially Borde and Chaumeton, whose pioneering A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953 had highlighted the impact of noir sensibilities on many westerns as early as 1955: “The genre conventions might even be absent. More interesting is why the crime failed, what led to the disintegration of the posse or gang of bandits.” Or, more often than not, the disintegration of the cowboy’s mind.
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