I belong to a Yahoo discussion groups for fans of Westerns, and one of the curious things is how very passionate some of the members are about their favorite authors, and western series, some of which are well known, like Elmer Kelton and some quite obscure like Amelia Bean, who wrote about the Fancher party, of the Mountain Meadows Massacre fame. Old western movies are also mad faves, everything from the acknowledged classics like “Stagecoach” and the original “3:10 to Yuma” to obscure B-movie features and movies made for television that have since sank like a stone. Generally the older stuff is held in higher regard. Oddly enough, many of the members of the group are English – at least to judge from the frequent laments about how little there is in the way of ‘Westerania” to pick through on the other side of the pond.

Like it or not, this is how we begin to visualize the past, through books and movies, first seeing these things, as if through the prism of how a writer, movie producer or TV director visualized them. The trouble with this is that the farther we are in time from the events pictured, the more of the milieu of the time that such things were created seeps in around the edges. Look at a movie like “Gone With The Wind” – it practically screams the date of it’s premiere. But as hard as the various creators might have tried to banish every scrap of inauthenticity in trivial things such as women’s hair-styles, interior decoration or weaponry – contemporary sensibilities and habits of thought are even harder to root out. Movies like “The Patriot” and “Dances With Wolves” took especial pains to superficially and physically appear authentic – but then fell apart when it came to things like the likelihood of a village of escaped slaves being out in the open, and a Union officer in the 186os going over to the wall, metaphorically speaking, to join the Sioux Indians. But never mind – it’s a story. Like “Gone With the Wind” we can overlook anachronisms and accept gaps in logic in service to a riveting and entertaining story. Well, sometimes – depending on how much of a fuss-budget we are for strict authenticity. If something that feels to us like authentic sensibility is present, though – who wants to quibble about details?

But this gets harder to do with a great many more recent movies, and not just Westerns. Something went out of our movies when many producers and directors began to think more about a ‘message’ and a movie as a personal statement of belief… not strictly as something that a great many people would plunk down the price of admission in exchange for being entertained for a couple of hours. The old studio system turned them out assembly-line fashion, good, bad, indifferent and superb, A-list, B-list, genre, serials, bios, epics, musicals and all. As one of my former bosses was fond of saying – it’s a numbers game. The more there is of any one thing, be it sales calls or movies, the better the odds that more of it will pay off… or be really, really good. The old studios diversified their releases. If a movie bombed… well, there were three or four more in the chute, so who cared but the accountants and maybe not even them, very much. Some of them which bombed, or did indifferent business at the time of release later made a better showing, farther on down the track. And some of those are beloved by website discussion groups, so here I am circling around to my main point… which was that there were Western movies made after the 1960s (to pick a date at random) but few of them seem to attract much of the same degree fanatic devotion.

Why? I wondered if the reason might have something to do with the fact that watching this show a couple of years ago on PBS left something of a sour taste in my mouth.

(To be continued)