Reel West Series – serie

An insightful history and analysis of the importance Delmer Daves' film Broken Arrow has in the western film genre. It was, for its time, a breakthrough in how Native Americans were depicted in the movies. The release of Broken Arrow in 1950 represented a turning point in Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans. Film scholars have often cited director Delmer Daves’s movie as the first sound film to depict the Native American sympathetically, and it appealed to a postwar ideal of tolerance and racial equality that became prominent in later Westerns. Yet Broken Arrow certainly has its flaws: the Apache speak English, whites are cast in leading Apache roles, and Apache culture is highly romanticized. Additionally, many scholars agree that the movie lacks the polish of Daves’s later Western 3:10 to Yuma (1957), with its evocative cinematography and psychological undertones.Despite its inaccuracies and the many artistic liberties it takes, the movie contains powerful political and social statements about Hollywood and its attitude toward Indian/white relations. Author Angela Aleiss breaks down the way Broken Arrow probed these attitudes and influenced a long series of films with Native heroes that followed, marking a transformation in Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans.

A new offering in the nascent Reel West film history series that focuses on that quintessentially American cinematic art form, the western. Few lines of movie dialogue have had greater impact than the most famous line from John Ford’s 1962 masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Although critics of the day did not realize its magnitude, with time The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance has become cemented in our popular culture. This film connects to nearly every Western before or after, from Ford’s own Stagecoach (1939) to Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992). Coming six years after The Searchers, Ford’s other great late-career masterpiece, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance may be even more archetypal of a changing West. In this first-ever book on the subject, Chris Yogerst unpacks one of the signature films of the post-classic Western period and one of the greatest works of director John Ford and actors John Wayne, James Stewart, Lee Marvin, and Woody Strode.

A deft history and analysis of John Sayles’ 1996 cinematic masterpiece. Alison Fields places Lone Star in a western film framework and emphasizes Lone Star's ability to highlight the conflicts between socially entrenched borderlands history and its multifaceted reality. Filmmaker John Sayles has been a key voice in independent cinema since the 1970s, interrogating American legends by retelling stories about class, race, labor, sexuality, history, and violence. Lone Star, released in 1996, was ahead of its time in exploring the prevailing legends of the Borderlands through the intersectionality of Black, Chicano, and women’s narratives. Set in the fictional small town of Frontera on the Texas/Mexico border, the film opens with the discovery of a decades-old skeleton on a rifle range—the remains of racist and corrupt former sheriff Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson). It had long been presumed that Wade was driven from town by Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey), who succeeded him for a long tenure as Frontera’s beloved sheriff. The discovery of Wade’s remains prompts current sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper), who had always lived in his father’s shadow, to question Buddy’s legacy and his involvement in Wade’s death and to look to the testimonies of the poor, the dispossessed, and the overlookedthe very people the late Sheriff Wade had victimized. In the first book-length examination of Lone Star, Fields situates the film firmly in the “new Western history” that has done so much to overturn the century-old Frontier Thesis.

The first book on the groundbreaking 1954 Western by director Nicholas Ray, controversial in its time, now celebrated as a groundbreaking example of high camp, LGBTQ themes, and the outer limits of the Hollywood system. What to make of Johnny Guitar, Nicholas Ray’s high-drama psychological Western from 1954? The film met with a mixed reception on its release but over the years has assumed cult status in some circles, with some critics now citing it among the greatest examples of the genre. In this first-ever book on this divisive Western, Brooks Hefner disentangles the tortured production history of the film and explores the question of what makes Johnny Guitar not only an important film but an important Western in an era rife with classic examples of the genre. Made at the peak of director Nicholas Ray’s career, Johnny Guitar’s layered themes of gender, sexuality, psychology, and politics make it one of the richest examples of the “adult Western,” those increasingly sophisticated films like George Stevens’s Shane (1953), John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), and the Westerns of Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. At the same time, Johnny Guitar represented an effort by B studio Republic Pictures to produce a prestige picture with major Hollywood stars like Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden. Hefner shows how, with the studio system beginning to crumble, Johnny Guitar sits at a moment when stars and directors began to exert more control over their images and films.

Preeminent film historian Thomas Doherty explores the blockbuster 1969 film adaptation of the Charles Portis novel True Grit, which stars John Wayne in his only Oscar-winning performance. The year 1969 was a tipping point for Hollywood cinema and a good year for Westerns. In 1968 the censorious Production Code was eliminated. American cinema responded immediately with a spree of theretofore unseen and unimaginable transgressions—one of which arrived in Henry Hathaway’s adaptation of Charles Portis’s best-selling novel True Grit. True Grit featured blunt language (“Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!”) and bloody imagery that would not have been permissible just a couple of years earlier. Thomas Doherty, one of the foremost film historians writing today, walks readers through Charles Portis’s source novel and its adaptation for the screen, the role of women in a genre often considered antithetical to their presence, and the figure of John Wayne, the Western icon whose public stance as a spokesman for the political right was merging with and complicating his screen persona. While noting its continued appeal for modern audiences, he presents True Grit as a pure product of its time, on the cusp of the Old and New Hollywoods, containing elements of both.