Back From Boot Hill

By Richard Zoglin

Alan Ladd rides off into the vast Western sky in Shane. Henry Fonda, as Wyatt Earp, kicks up his feet in front of the saloon in My Darling Clementine. Marshal Dillon stares down Dodge City's main street, and the boys of the Ponderosa sit tall in the saddle together. Few images in popular entertainment have the primal resonance of those from the classic westerns. Or at least they used to. The western, a genre that once proliferated on the big screen and small, until quite recently seemed to be one step away from Boot Hill.

Today westerns are back, guns blazing. The immediate impetus is a series of unexpected hits: CBS's high-rated 1989 mini-series Lonesome Dove, based on Larry McMurtry's novel; the popular frontier series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman; and a pair of Oscar-winning films, Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven. They have been more than enough to set off a modern Hollywood version of the Oklahoma land rush.

Costner, Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster and Kurt Russell are among the stars who will don Western duds for upcoming movies. Two films based on the Wyatt Earp legend are in the works; so are movie versions of the popular TV series Bonanza and Maverick. In prime time the western is making a slow but notable return, with shows such as Fox's The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Ken Burns (The Civil War) is overseeing a 10-hour documentary series on the Old West, due in 1996. Lonesome Dove, meanwhile, has spawned one TV sequel, Return to Lonesome Dove (airing on CBS over three nights next week), and the promise of a second, based on McMurtry's own (and very different) follow-up, Streets of Laredo, published last summer.

But if the Old West is back, it's not necessarily the West of old. Call it political correctness or a long-overdue historical corrective, but Hollywood's picture of the West has a grubbier, less celebratory, more multicultural look this time around. The moral verities are not so clear-cut. Indians -- now Native Americans -- are more likely to be tragic heroes than whooping villains. Women and blacks, long ignored, are major participants at last. These adjustments reflect the revisionist bent of much recent historical writing about the West -- the view that America's westward expansion was not the triumphal taming of the frontier but a morally dubious enterprise in which a race of people was conquered, the environment ravaged and democratic values frequently trampled.

Hollywood's depiction of the West, of course, has always changed according to the times. In the years before and after World War II, westerns were poetic, patriotic odes to the frontier spirit. In the 1950s, westerns like High Noon served as allegories through which contemporary social issues could be played out. During the Vietnam era, the genre turned more cynical and ambiguous, reflecting doubts about America's might and the morality of violence.

Disillusionment over Vietnam helped cause the western virtually to disappear from the theaters and network TV for nearly two decades. Now it is being viewed through a fresh '90s prism. Richard Slotkin, an American-studies professor at Connecticut's Wesleyan University, points out that westerns have traditionally provided "a way of testing out different ways of looking at the past. The events of the past 20 or 30 years -- in such areas as race relations, the ecology movement, the relationship between Native Americans and the government -- are all being revisited through the western." Notes Burns: "History isn't really about the past -- settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are."

Consider the life of Wyatt Earp. The frontier lawman was romanticized in earlier films and a TV series as a paragon of moral virtue and gunfighting prowess. In Wyatt Earp, scheduled to be released next summer, Costner portrays the complete Earp, a gambler and businessman who lived nearly 50 years after the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Tombstone, the competing Wyatt Earp saga (due in theaters next month), sticks to more familiar terrain, but with a contemporary spin. Tombstone, Arizona, is a boomtown beset by very recognizable urban problems. "Normal people are terrorized by gangs," says producer Jim Jacks. "The cowboy gang of the Clanton brothers wear red sashes around their waist. We use gang colors." Notes Kurt Russell, who stars as Earp: "In terms of violence, Tombstone made South Central look like the Garden of Eden."

Geronimo, another Christmas release, was held up for years, according to producer-director Walter Hill, by his insistence that a Native American be cast in the lead role. (Wes Studi, of The Last of the Mohicans, finally got the part.) The film presents a more sympathetic picture of the Apache warrior than in westerns past. "This film examines the social and cultural tragedy of the Apache nation in the latter part of the 19th century," says Hill. "It's about the end of a culture."

Women too are getting an aggressive re-examination. In Bad Girls, due next spring, four prostitutes quit their business and strike out on their own, a sort of Thelma & Louise on horseback. "It's what freedom felt like at a time when the only value placed on a woman was as a wife," says executive producer Lynda Obst. In Maverick, another spring release, Mel Gibson plays the wisecracking gambler, who this time is teamed with a card sharp played by Jodie Foster.

Blacks have become more visible as well, though with less self- consciousness. Morgan Freeman played Clint Eastwood's best friend in Unforgiven, and Return to Lonesome Dove features both a black villain (Dennis Haysbert) and a black hero (Louis Gossett Jr.). But race does not become an issue in either film. Hollywood's reinterpretation in this case follows historical fact. "By some estimates, 25% of the cowboys during the heyday of the range-cattle trade were African Americans," says Slotkin. "It's really a very neglected aspect of American history."

Not that westerns must, or necessarily should, be historically precise. The Old West provides a mythic setting whose power is not dependent on its faithfulness to fact. Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman focuses on a female doctor (Jane Seymour) who moves to a Colorado town and adopts three orphaned children. Her weekly crusades for everything from environmental protection to gun control seem laughably anachronistic, but the show provides a bucolic backdrop for an exploration of social, ethical and family issues.

Lonesome Dove, by contrast, was perhaps the most realistic picture of the Old West TV has ever presented, its often shocking bursts of violence suffused with a lyrical stoicism. Return to Lonesome Dove, however, is less a sequel than a lazy recycling of scraps from older, blander westerns. Captain Woodrow Call (Jon Voight replacing Tommy Lee Jones) makes a second trek from Texas to | Montana, this time to drive a herd of horses, while his unacknowledged son (Rick Schroder) goes to work for a powerful cattle baron. In place of the hardscrabble poetry of the original is a meandering frontier soap opera, which lopes at a pace that could put tumbleweed to sleep.

What accounts for the western's resurgence? Industry watchers point to a general revival of interest in Western clothing and memorabilia, the boom in country music and the appeal of a rural life-style at a time when urban problems seem more oppressive than ever. The old-fashioned moral values of the frontier also seem especially inviting today. "In westerns," says CBS Entertainment chief Jeff Sagansky, "the bad guys are bad not because they were abused kids or temporarily insane. They are bad, and they meet their end. There's a catharsis the audience is allowed to feel that they don't get in society."

The western's long hiatus has also given the format new room to roam. Patricia Limerick, a professor at the University of Colorado and a leading revisionist historian, sees the end of the cold war as liberating. "We don't have to create an image and an ideology of ourselves as heroic expanders of the frontier and innocents who fight evil," she says. "All of that cold war fervor that drove the old westerns has lifted, so you can do more complex and interesting westerns." At a time when gritty urban realism and literal-minded docudramas hold sway, westerns are a refreshing departure. They provide escape, but also a chance to confront issues of universal significance and spiritual weight: a history lesson, but also a reminder of the imaginative power of myth and allegory. All that and a lot of pretty scenery too.

With reporting by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles and William Tynan/New York