This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
That line, from John Ford’s seminal 1962 Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, doesn’t just encapsulate the movie’s theme, Ford’s overall career or even the entirety of the Western genre. No, “print the legend” are three words that describe America, a country where stories become legends and legends become fact. For proof, look no further than one of America’s greatest contributions to cinema: the Western.
And this summer you won’t have to look too far. Playing Aug. 13-16, the Sie Film Center in Denver will run a special program of nine movies and one panel in a series called “Westerns: The Golden Years: 1930s-1970s.”
This three-day crash course offers classics — Stagecoach (Aug. 13), My Darling Clementine (Aug. 14), High Noon (Aug. 15) — alongside postmodern revisions — Once Upon a Time in the West (Aug. 15), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Aug. 16) — to highlight the vast sweep and surprising malleability of the genre.
“The Westerns are always the lens on a contemporaneous society set in the past, to make things easier — easier to digest,” says Vincent Piturro, an English and film professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
Prior to “Westerns: The Golden Years,” Piturro will offer “Westerns 101,” a three-hour course on Aug. 9 at Sie designed to prep moviegoers for their wagon ride out west.
“One of things we’re going to talk about with Stagecoach is how it is pre-World War II, for the U.S. anyway,” Piturro explains. “The rest of the world was getting ready for war, or at war, but the U.S. was still neutral at that point. Stagecoach is really a sort of plea to Americans to work together to fight a common enemy. So it’s really much more about 1939 than it was about 1881.
“You take a look at something like High Noon,” Piturro says, referring to the 1952 film. “It was much more about the McCarthy era than it was about the 1890s.”
“Westerns 101” covers four films from 1939 to 2007, diving into the genre with Stagecoach. Directed by Ford and starring John Wayne in the role that made him a star, the film set the standard. Seventeen years later, Ford and Wayne challenged that standard with The Searchers, Piturro’s second pick.
Piturro continues the cinematic journey out of Arizona’s Monument Valley and into the dusty shrubbery of Spain and Cinecittà for Sergio Leone’s 1964 film A Fistful of Dollars, the first spaghetti Western and a riff on the conventions and forms of Ford.
“That’s the counter-culture generation, the children of the Western generation,” Piturro explains. “That’s why the spaghetti Western became popular, because it was the Western repackaged for that generation.” Piturro concludes with a look at James Mangold’s 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma, starring Christian Bale and Russell Crowe.
“What I want people to get out of [the course], is understand, number one, [the Western] is a very dynamic genre and we shouldn’t oversimplify it,” Piturro says. “Number two, that form is what’s important and that form lives on in many different genres today. … The form is really powerful.”
The forms of the past that reflect the present also point to the future, and that future is the new Western, shot right here in Colorado, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.
Viewers will have to wait until December to get their eyes on Hateful Eight, but the Sie is welcoming two production team members on Aug. 15 for a panel discussion with film critic Robert Denerstein: “Designing the Modern Western” with costume designer Courtney Hoffman and set decorator Rosemary Brandenburg.
The Western benefits heavily from its use of costuming — think of Eastwood without that signature poncho — and hearing how Hoffman articulates a character’s backstory and social position with a piece of clothing isn’t something moviegoers will want to miss.
This is similar to Brandenburg’s challenge with set decoration. In an interview with the American Film Institute, Brandenburg refers to her position as “the sociologists of the picture,” and when dealing with the Western genre, she must make sure that every prop, every piece of décor must have conceivably been trekked hundreds of miles to the remote location where it now resides. There is no room for frivolity in the Western, only purpose.
The Western is more than just the history of America; it is a chance to grapple with America then and America now. Along the way gender roles are challenged, relations with races are complicated, the ideals of law and order are stretched to their furthest limits and the eternal struggle of man versus man and man versus nature play out on a screen full of energy and excitement.
There is also hope. A complicated hope, but hope for a better, more civilized America. As Mrs. Jorgensen tells Ethan in The Searchers, “Some day this country’s gonna be a fine, good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.”
