My son Marc and I are launching a podcast later this month
The focus of our new Podcast is the art and business of film making… in other words “The Movies.” Our maiden foray into our favorite art form will be “The Great American Western.” We’ve each picked a favorite Western movie to talk about. Marc’s number one is “True Grit,” i.e., the remake (2010), starring Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn. [Note: The role won John Wayne an Oscar (his one and only) in the original film (1969).] My personal favorite is “Open Range” (2003), featuring Robert Duvall and Kevin Costner. There are many available lists of best Westerns. Depending on which one you choose from a Google search, either, both, or neither of our favorites will be included. Some other well-known Westerns, that almost invariably appear on every such list, include John Ford’s “The Searchers”… number one on Vulture.com and number five on Hubpages.com. Among the great Western actors, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood typically run neck and neck for the most mentions. But the wide variety of films that appear and reappear on such lists is dizzying. Consider: “Blazing Saddles,” “Little Big Man”, “Dances with Wolves,” and “The Wild Bunch,” a foursome that by itself runs the gamut from comedy to revisionism to a bloodbath evocative of the slasher” genre.
I’ll leave it to Marc to explicate his passion for “True Grit II”, when we record and post our maiden effort in less than two weeks. As for my choice: “Open Range” takes place in the Montana of the 1880s. It depicts the conflict between open-range cowboys and ranchers looking to keep their grasslands for themselves. This theme echoes a classic work of American history, which I first read way back in the 1970s, when I was working toward my doctorate in American Studies at Case Western Reserve University. The article is entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The author was a young upstart historian named Frederick Jackson Turner, who presented his thesis to the American Historical Association at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Turner began, “Up to and including the 1880s the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into isolated bodies of settlement that there hardly can be said to be a frontier line.” He went on to argue, “The frontier has gone, and its going has closed the first period of American history.” Why does this matter? Turner contended that the American frontier had shaped the American character. And this in turn made America unique. Due to the hardships imposed by the frontier, Americans were resourceful and self-reliant. They developed “rugged individualism,” and this fostered a love of democracy. He wondered what would become of the American character and the American democratic republic in the frontier’s absence.
We are still wondering the same thing in 2024. America has evolved from a frontier nation to an agrarian nation and now (and for a very long time) an urbanized and industrialized superpower of 350 million people, give or take some millions (the number is hotly debated, witness Trump in the last week’s presidential debate) of uncounted, undocumented folks. The Western gunslinger’s love of his six-shooter has morphed into a globally-unique affinity for assault rifles. The costumes worn by many who assaulted the Capitol on January 6, 2021 were evocative of the denizens of our real or imagined frontier. (Who can forget the guy with the buffalo horns?) In the 1960s, media maven Marshall McLuhan (a Canadian) suggested that we Americans saw life through a rear view mirror and that mentally we abide in “Bonanzaland,” a nod to a popular weekly TV Western of that decade.
The closing of the frontier, ala Turner’s thesis,” is the subtext of “Open Range.” Besides being —-in my view and that of many others —- a strong story climaxed by a cracker-jack gun fight, the film has a poignancy that resonates in 21st century America, with its Proud Boys, its rogue police officers, and the current tug of war between those who want to embrace the socio-cultural changes of the past half century and those who would have us return to a more traditional way of life, whether real or imagined.
This, then, is just a sampling of what my son and I will be talking about when we launch our —-yet to be christened —- movie podcast. Hope you’ll be watching for it and listening to it!
