00:00:00
Speaker 1: The West domination, and more specifically, the Frontier West domination of movie and television storytelling for most of the twentieth century is one of the truly remarkable features of American film history. That domination began well over a century ago. One of the very first commercial motion pictures was The Great Train Robbery, filmed in New Jersey in nineteen oh three. With a runtime of twelve minutes. It not only launched the Western as a genre, it introduced Bronco Billy Anderson, who became the first Western movie star, following nineteen oh seven’s Bronco Billy and the Baby. During this early period through the conclusion of the Silent film era in nineteen twenty seven, the western also moved west. Thomas Ince’s Inceville Studios near Malibu not only specialized in westerns, it helped relocate the movie industry to California. It was during the technicolor era from the nineteen thirties through the nineteen fifties, though, that the Western came to develop its principal themes. Its near single focus was the Frontier, often directly translating the nostalgic art of Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell into moving pictures as a kind of tribal history of white people and their settlement. Dramatic Western nature was critical, as landscapes played the role of epic backdrops against which cowboy heroes took on the Western wilds. Animals were central characters, but the Westerns animals were the saddled horse and the cow, not the bison or wolves or even wild horses that actual Western history had nearly destroyed. For serious westerns, the primary lesson was that a civilized society was possible only through the violent intervention of a hero against those forces that were anti civilization, namely natives and outlaws. It was a winning formula. Western film stars became some of America’s first movie stars. Bronco’billy was followed by William S. Hart, who did forty five westerns. During the silent film era, Tom Mix became one of the first movie stars to do ad spots, and he bridged the gap to talkies. Then, starting in the nineteen thirties, the epic Western directors like john Ford, Howard Hawks and John Houston made John Wayne, Gregory Peck, Randolph Scott, and eventually Audie Murphy into film superstars. The degree to which Westerns dominated commercial films, if not necessarily the awards ceremonies, was apparent in nineteen fifty, a year when Hollywood made one hundred and thirty Western films thirty four percent of all films release that year. As televisions became widely available in American homes, it was Westerns that home audiences got. In nineteen sixty eight of the top ten ranked television shows in viewership were westerns, with Rawhide, Wagon Train, Gun Smoke, and Bonanza leading the lists. Then came the nineteen sixties, and with the Vietnam War and civil rights upheaval, a more critical view of Western stories emerged. In nineteen sixty five, the number of Western films release was down to twenty two, only fourteen percent of films release that year. By nineteen seventy seven, a grand total of seven Western films hit the box office, many of those filmed in Spain with Italian casts plus Clint Eastwood. John Wayne blamed the demise of the Western on the negativity of several of the films made in the late sixties and early seventies, particularly Sam Peckinpau’s The Wild Bunch of nineteen sixty nine. Which rejected heroic sentimentality and anticipating Quentin Tarantino, emphasized the blood bath of the West, all in precious slow motion. Even Arthur Penn’s nineteen seventy one Little Big Man, based on a novel by Thomas Berger, inverted the whole story of the West, portraying George Armstrong Custer as a narcissistic sociopath and the Lakotas and Cheyennes as the true indomitable heroes of the Western story. Little Big Man was essentially an anti Vietnam War allegory said In The West, Wayne was wrong that films more critical of the Western experience had awaited the late nineteen sixties, though a shot across the bowl of the celebratory Western had been fired in nineteen sixty one, when Arthur Miller wrote a screenplay for his wife Marilyn Monroe, along with Clark Gable and Montgomery Cliff and Eli Wallack that was released as the movie The Misfits said in the nineteen fifties, The Misfits made two very important points a Western could be about the West after the Frontier and the destruction of the natural West. In this movie, in the form of Wild horses was not something to be celebrated, a point Miller allowed his heroin to make. Taylor Sheridan’s mythologizing of the West in Yellowstone and Its Offshoots is a clear indication that the Western, the classic version, still has traction with audiences. But anymore the stories can’t be the simple parables that once characterized the classic Western, because the truth is we’ve become a little too sophisticated for that. Dan, welcome back.
00:06:13
Speaker 2: It’s always fun to be chatting with you here in the studio, and today we’re talking Western movies, movies about the American West. And we’re joined today by a very special guest, if you’d like to introduce her to the audience.
00:06:27
Speaker 1: Indeed, so, and yeah, good to see you again, Randall. It’s great to be here once more. This is actually the last episode of The American West, and I think doing film is a great way to probably end it. But our special guest sitting next to me on the counts here is Professor Sarah Dant, who actually happens to be my wife. But that’s not why Sarah is here. Professor Dant. Doctor Dant is actually an expert on the history of the American West and a noted writer and author herself who has recently published a really terrific book called Losing Eden and Environmental History of the American West. And she spent most of her career at Weaber Sett University in Ogden, Utah, where she was a distinguished Professor of History, a very select group at that university. And she also was maybe less happily so, but certainly with a great deal of accomplishment the department chair of the history department there for several years towards the end of her career. She’s retired now, just retired a couple of years ago. But Sarah is here because she is an expert in the subject that we’re taking up. And what we’re taking up, of course is film the stories of the American West, movies primarily, but also television shows. And so Sarah, we’ll start with you. We’ll sort of do a round robin with this one where we go back and forth and sort of offer up our favorite films about the West, but we’ll begin with you.
00:08:21
Speaker 3: Well, thank you very much, thanks for that introduction, Randall. It’s always good to see you. Likewise, and I appreciate a little bit of couch time here with you all, especially on this last episode, want to say congratulations to you on what has been an astonishingly successful and well curated and thought out podcast. You know, given the fact that your readership or listenership continues to expand, I hope that maybe that means that, after a hiatus to write another book, you decide you want to maybe get your step back.
00:09:00
Speaker 1: On the horse.
00:09:01
Speaker 3: Okay, So I’m gonna cheat on the favorite film thing and I’m gonna do a series because that way I don’t have to pick something narrow. And I decided to start with Deadwood because Deadwood is unlike any other Western you could ever see. It was a three season program on HBO. Each of the seasons had twelve episodes between two thousand and four and two thousand and six. It’s sweaty, it’s dirty, it’s muddy, and it also has the most epic swearing known to human existence. And in particular, there’s a fondness in this series for two words.
00:09:46
Speaker 1: Which I know you have teased.
00:09:48
Speaker 3: Earlier in your podcast, and it’s I think important for a girl to just get to say cocksucker and fuck. And one of the things that happens in this program in particular, is that those two words come up a lot. In fact, I saw this terrific discussion. Somebody else did this, so I can’t take credit for it. But in the first hour long pilot there are forty three uses of fuck, you know, the F bomb and jaron form as a noun, as an adjective, as a lament. It’s in there forty three times in the first hour. And somebody went through and counted if it was a drinking game, you would be dead the number of times it had happened over the course of the series, and in three years they said it just under three thousand times. And so if you’re curious, that’s one point five to six fucks for every minute of program in Deadwood.
00:10:53
Speaker 2: So we haven’t nearly approached that right swearing on this program.
00:10:58
Speaker 1: So I’m here, would you say that? First season two?
00:11:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, I’m here to help you elevate just a little bit. So this was a This was a series written by David Milch. He was a graduate and actually taught at Yale University, spent some time under the tulage of Robert Penn Warren. And this is baroque swearing. It’s Shakespearean in its savagery. Almost the entire show is written in iambic pentameter, and you get these characters who will give, you know, the classic Shakespearean soliloquy, completely riddled with f bombs to a mirror or a mud puddle. It’s just an astonishing it’s an astonishing show. And one of the things it does again, you know, one of the reasons I wanted to pick it is because you have tried in your podcast to push against stereotypic Wild West iconography that doesn’t really give us depth of understanding about this place that we either love or live in or both. And in particular, this one is pushing against not only sort of the romantic white hat cowboy riding in on a horse to save the day, because a lot of the characters are just you know, they’re prostitutes and gamblers and abusers and the abused, and all of them are dirty.
00:12:33
Speaker 1: God, they’re all dirty.
00:12:35
Speaker 3: But at the same time, it’s an interesting look at this particular moment in American history. It’s Milch did a lot of research. More than two dozen or almost two dozen of the characters are actually based on real historical figures. Deadwood was a real place and so you could say it’s got historical grounding. It’s not necessarily historically accurate, but one of the ideas he wants to get at in this series is to push against the individual, the rugged individual of the West, because the truth is the only way any of these people is going to survive is by collaboratively working together. It’s a large ensemble cast. The two major characters are Elsewhere Engine, who’s the most eloquent swearer and user. He’s the prime user of the Coxar language in this. But that’s Ian McShane, who you can hardly see him in anything else and not think of him in this role. And then the foil for him is the sheriff Seth what’s Seth’s name I have in here Bullock, thank you, which is Timothy Oliphant. Timothy Olephant is Seth Bullock the sheriff in this and and so it’s inspired by history, but it’s not historically accurate.
00:14:11
Speaker 1: So there’s was a.
00:14:12
Speaker 3: Three series arc and then it just ended abruptly and everybody was clamoring for more. So in twenty nineteen they did a two hour film that kind of brought it all to a close, which was fortunate because the writer David Milch by that point in time, was suffering grievously from Alzheimer’s And there’s an absolutely beautiful New Yorker piece with the by the writer Mark Singer who went and talked to Milch in these last days and.
00:14:49
Speaker 1: It’ll break your heart. Yeah, yeah, that was an incredibly powerful story among many great stories in New Yorker magazine. The man, that one was something because Mills, of course, you can tell from the language in Deadwood the guy was he was a marvel with language. And by the time he had reached that point in his life, there were days apparently when he could still work on the script for the movie version of Deadwood. But uh, there were days when, as as he told, uh the interviewer, you know, when I wake up and I know this is not a day I’m gonna be able to do anything. That I’ve lost this, Yeah, I can’t do a thing. So it’s a yeah. It’s a really really moving piece of writing and a sad end for his career. But yeah, what a fantastic show this was. And yeah, I did reference it in an episode several ago. I can’t remember which one it was, when I was talking about the end of the frontier and frontier anxiety, and I think I said something like, you know, at some point, cocksuckers will return to the fucking West, and that’s what I was referring to. Well, am I up here? Yeah, Randall, why don’t you tell us what your favorite films about the West might be?
00:16:19
Speaker 2: Sure, so this first one just falls into the category of my favorite films of all time. So it happens to be set in the West, and that is the two thousand and seven movie. There Will Be Blood Man, starring Daniel day Lewis, is a Paul Thomas Anderson adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s book Oil and It’s Not. You could very much watch this film and not think of it as a Western, although it does begin with sort of the lone.
00:16:54
Speaker 1: The plains of West Texas or something.
00:16:56
Speaker 2: And he’s got the mule and the pick and he falls and balls in the well and breaks his leg and comes crawling out, sort of one of the most startling opening scenes to him and the you know, the tension of the latter under under strain as he’s trying to climb out. But it tells the story of Daniel Plainview, who’s played by Daniel da Lewis and his rise as an oil tycoon baron to the end of the film, it’s set in this vast, sprawling mansion. He’s got his bowling alley and his butler. Another great final scene. Some of the like most repeated lines from the film are you know I’d drink your milkshake, I’d drink it up. Or the I’m finished is what he is. I think that’s the final line in the films, I’m finished. But it it It is very much a Western in the sense that it’s all about land, and it’s what he’s doing is just trying to control land and gobble up land. And it fits into a discussion of Western history in that I think a lot of people when they think of the West in this old sort of frontier narrative, it’s capitalism and industrialization are Eastern things and as you move west, you sort of break free of the capitalist structure, right, and it’s just an individual in the ground. But you know, ranching, farming, what have you. But if you read Western history and you study it, corporations have a tremendous amount of power in the West. The law as sort of an instrument of power in the West.
00:19:00
Speaker 1: It’s it’s not a place of just.
00:19:02
Speaker 2: Bandits and lawmen and sort of this this there’s an absence, you know, in the common imagination, there’s sort of an absence of institutions and control. But in fact you see this play out again and again in the West, where an opportunist can use the law and can use sort of corporate structures to build up vast fortune and and sort of vacuum up fortunes that rival or exceed those that you’d think of in the Carnegies and the those sorts of folks and the other part of the country. But there’s just so many scenes in this that, i it’s it’s hard to pick one, but you know, it is firmly grounded in the West. There’s the scenes sort at the railroad depot, or his fights with Paul dan right, and and sort of a with Paul Dano. You never quite are clear on the theology of his sect. He’s some sort of minister, but he’s some sort of minister that has tremendous control over his congregation and thereby has tremendous control over this land, which is also something that sort of you see in Western history, especially when you’re talking about Utah. But there’s there’s all number of other stories where there’s commun sort of sectarian communities that break off and perhaps start anew And that’s the sense you get from the Paul Dano side of things. But again, it’s it’s gritty, it’s it’s about ambition, it’s about people being nasty to one another, and it’s it’s also a movie that’s very much centered around people and the landscape, whether it’s you know, the guy crawling out of the crawling out of the well, or when he’s swimming on the coast, or hunting with his boy under the under the auspices of hunting, they’re really sort of scouting for potential oil leases. But again it’s about like he’s at the very core of the movie, it’s about him dominating the landscape, and by dominating the landscape, he’s dominating other people. And there’s sort of a control of resources is inextrictably linked to control over his fellow man. And so that’s how I would make the argument that this is a film about the American West, but it’s also just an amazing movie with an unbelievable, too unbelievable performances by Paul Dano and Daniel Day. Lewis, and it’s just dark and funny, and it’s a movie I can watch again and again.
00:21:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, that one, I will admit was on my short list too, for a lot of the very reasons you went out. I mean, you know, one of the things that Western film historians always say about the West is that the landscape is a character in Westerns. Not necessarily true in a lot of other films about different places, but in the West, the landscape is so awesome and so overwhelming that it’s always a character. And it’s true in this particular film as well, and it’s true in the one I want to I’ll pick up on one.
00:22:29
Speaker 3: I just wanted to say one thing about that too, which is that I think that’s a great choice for a Western, in part because it really picks up on a lot of the themes you’ve talked about over the course of your podcast, where the past doesn’t stay in the past, and it’s a good reminder that that extractive, exploitive you know, take from the Land is very much a nineteenth century phenomenon, but also at twentieth century phenomenon. And this does a nice job. That film does a nice job in such a compelling way of bridging that time period and reminding us that we’re not just talking about a wild West and old West, but in fact today’s West, and those are many of the same issues that with fracking and things like that that we’re seeing right now, and so it’s both a past homage but also very contemporary.
00:23:28
Speaker 1: Okay, there will be blood, and that’s a terrific one. So I’m going to take us in a different direction, and this will, if nothing else, as we’ve gone around the circle, indicate how varied the topics are that fall into the category of Western films. But this one, I think everybody would agree as a Western. It’s the nineteen ninety film by Kevin Costner, Dances with Wolves, which was only the second Western, and all the Westerns that were being made in the nineteen twenty the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties in particular, when they began to tail off, this was only the second Western that ever won the Academy Award for Best Picture. In fact, it won seven different Academy Awards, so it was a huge success when it came out, and if you haven’t seen it in a while, it’s well worth watching still because it was kind of a breakthrough film in a lot of ways. It wasn’t the first film that sort of took the native point of view, so that we inverted the classic Western story where the Native people or the other and they’re the outsiders and the focuses completely on white settlers. There was a film called Broken Arrow done in the nineteen fifties that sort of did the same thing. But this film, I think captured the imaginations of a lot of people, and it still captures my imagination because it, for one thing, was set on the Great Planes, which in fact is where much of classic Western history took place. Didn’t happen everything in Monument Valley, a great deal of stuff happened out on the planes. That was really the focus of many of the classic Western stories, And this film was filmed in South Dakota, so you got to see really beautiful great planes landscapes. But it also is a film that takes up the subject of not only Native people as primary protagonists. I mean Graham Green’s role as Chief ten Bears, for example, or Rodney Grant’s role as Wind in his Hair. Those were really powerful performances, but it also talks about the destruction of wildlife in particular the massive destruction of bison, which of course were critical to the Lakota people, who are the main tribal entity in this film. But it takes up the story of wolves for the first time, showing a wolf character not trying to eat the main protagonist of the film. I mean, even Jeremiah Johnson’s film On the Mountain Men had a scene, and I think Robert Redford always regretted this, but it had a scene where wolves attack his character, Jeremiah Johnson in the film. And that film, of course is only made about fifteen years before Dances with Wolves. But the wolf character, whose name is two Socks because he has two white front paws, is given a major role, and it’s a portrayal of a wolf that’s not only not a bloodthirsty monster, but he’s playful and he not only endears himself to the Kevin Koshner character, who is a former Union soldier sent out to a post in the west. The post has been abandoned. He ends up spending most of his time with the nearby Lakota people. And much of the film in fact is in English subtitles because it’s spoken in Lakota by many of the actors. But as I said, the bison and the wolf in this film sort of represent well, for one thing, they represent what I’ve been trying to talk about a lot in this podcast, a sort of an American West that we don’t really get in the classic Western stories or Western history even but they are completely they’re amenable to a kind of a benevolent treatment. In the film, the bison are beautiful. There’s that wonderful scene that we’ve never seen in film before that I know captivated moviegoers and probably the voters for the Academy Awards, where there’s actually a bison hunt where Native people, native hunters using bows ride horses bareback after bison. And of course, one of the stories that was told about the filming of all that was that the Native women who were on the scene absolutely fell in love with all these guys who were on horses riding into these running buffalo herds. But it has these great scenes with the wolf two socks whom Kevin is playing with and and that’s the reason he gets the name from the Lakota dances with wolves. So that’s a That’s a film that I really like because of the beauty of it, the story historically and you know, I mean, historians tend to pick films apart, and you can look at this film and say, Okay, this set in the Civil War period, and we’re actually showing Lakotas who don’t know what coffee and sugar is. Come on, they’ve been engaged in trade with white traders since the eighteen twenties, so they for damn sure know what coffee is and what sugar is. But Kevin in the film introduces them to these marvelous bits of advancing American culture. And you can also sort of say, doesn’t it sort of present the one primary white figure, the white male figure. There is a captured white woman among the Lakotas. Doesn’t it present the one white male figure who’s the protagonist as the sort of savior of the Lakotas and doesn’t really allow the Lakotas to save themselves. Those are viable criticisms, But the detail with which the film was done in trying to replicate period correct Lakota clothing, cultural traditions, coffee and sugar aside, uh and the use of the Lakota language in the film is really pretty winning. So that’s my number one choice.
00:30:15
Speaker 3: Well, and and talk a little bit about in some ways that that sensibility really informed that ken Burns American Buffalo two part documentary that you were involved with. I talked about in the book podcast. Roslyn LaPier is then I was in it. Steve, Steve Ranila was in it. So I mean talk a little bit about how that sort of modern sensibility evolved out of things like Dances with Wolves.
00:30:54
Speaker 1: I think I think that very much happened in part because the primary writer for the ken Burns American Buffalo documentary of twenty twenty three was Dayton Duncan. And I know from talking with Dayton about that about Dances with the Wolves, that he was very much taken with it, and in his journeys around the West he would go to tribal communities and had several good friends. Gerard Baker, who’s Mandana Datza, was a good friend and is a good friend of Dayton’s today. And I think that film very much influenced how Dayton wanted to present the American Buffalo film and how he wrote it. And that’s one of the reasons it has I think so many Native people and it liked Rosalind. The whole host of people there are more Native people who speak and are sort of the talking heads of that Buffalo film than there are people who aren’t Native. So I think, yeah, this was a sort of ushered in a new sensibility for a lot of people. I mean, the one group that comes off poorly in that film, or the Pawnees. And some people have said, you know, so this is the result of the particular screenplay that it was based on. It was based on a novel by a guy named Michael Blake, and the novel is actually about the Comanches and Texas and the captured white woman or she’s actually just been raised among the native people is based on Cynthia Anne Parker, the famous white young adolescent who was captured by the Comanches and raised among the Comanches. And the Pawnees were a particular foil for the Comanches, and so in this film, the Pawnees become the bad guys. Wes Study is the leader of the Pawnees. He’s the bad Pawnee as he’s often described in this film. But anyway, I think that is a film that stands the test of time and certainly ushered in, as you just mentioned, kind of a new, more appreciative treatment of Native people and at least finally we get to talk some about wolves and bison and the original batch area of the West.
00:33:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I would say too, one of the things that ken Burns did really well with that American Buffalo program was he not only brought in obviously a lot of Native perspectives, writers, producers, all of that, but he got those of us who were behind the scenes as historians. He was very receptive to us saying, that’s not what the interpretation is anymore. This is where scholarship is now. And so I felt like it was a very fair and up right up today treatment historically. Yeah, and sort of building on that. My second one, which again I’m gonna cheat and just go straight to a series because it’s so terrific, but it absolutely, i think again, is built on that foundation that Dances with Wolves established, and that’s the.
00:34:19
Speaker 1: Series Dark Winds.
00:34:21
Speaker 3: Dark Winds is it may be one of my favorite things on television. It’s current. So it premiered on AMC in two thousand and two. It just finished its fourth sis. I’m sorry twenty two. Yeah, you know, I dropped in a couple of decades there. In twenty twenty two is when it premiered. They just finished the fourth season. They’ve been renewed for a fifth season, so there will be a new series. They usually do now eight episodes in a series. But it follows these two novel Navajo tribal pul police officers that originally appeared in Tony Hillerman novels, and add a third tribal police officer that Tony Hillerman’s daughter, Anne Hillerman, continues to write about to this day. So you have the Leephorn and she novels from Tony Hillerman, and then she adds a third character, a woman Bernadette Manuelito, And so it follows these three tribal police officers on the Navajo reservation in the nineteen seventies. So again this is the idea that the West is not just something in the past, but it is very much in the present. Plus it’s just downright groovy to get to talk about the seventies. And it’s set in the Four Corners area of the Southwest. It’s gritty, it’s bold, it’s authentic, it’s visually stunning. And the executive two of the executive producers on this are George R. Martin of m Throne’s Fame and Robert Redford, Rest in peace, Robert. In fact, you get to see Redford’s last few moments on film are in a cameo with him and George R. R. Martin playing chess or checkers through the bars of a jail cell. I mean, it’s just absolutely terrific, and they’re uncredited, but it’s totally it’s totally worth it. And to me, again, this gets it many of the ideas that you’ve been working on here with your podcast about how the West is not just great white tails of great white males chasing great white whales. It really has a depth of character, and in particular, I think for a lot of Native people there’s a real frustration now that Indians were only somehow a nineteenth century phenomenon and then they just kind of disappeared into the landscape when white people showed up. And that’s so problematic for so many reasons. They you know, that classic sort of Frederick Jackson Turner telling of the West. The whole point of Indians is to act as the thing against which white people struggle to become Americans, and that’s problematic for so many reasons. And so this series I think is important because it blends kind of a film noir crime detective program with very thoughtful Navajo cultural tradition and practice. They speak Navajo, many of the characters do.
00:37:38
Speaker 1: Most of the.
00:37:39
Speaker 3: Actors on the show portray Navajo characters, although not many of them are actually Navajo, but many of them.
00:37:48
Speaker 1: They’re all Native people.
00:37:49
Speaker 3: Many of them enrolled, and so it very much feels like a reminder to Americans that peoples have always been a part of the West and they remain so, and they remain a really essential part of the West too. And the main character is Joe Leeporn. He’s the lieutenant of the Navajo Police. It’s played by John mclarnin, who is one of the executive producers. They’ve really made sure to bring in many Navajo writers. They’ve just done a spectacular job of making this authentic and culturally accurate and correct. Kyle wa Gordon plays Jim che who is sort of the apprentice coming on. And then Jessica Mattin plays Bernadette Manuelito, who’s this strong, charismatic, always fighting for justice kind of woman. But I would say the fourth made your character in this film is the landscape again, because when you read a Hillerman novel or when you.
00:39:07
Speaker 1: Watch this show.
00:39:08
Speaker 3: You don’t escape the fact that the landscape, the setting for where all of this is taking place, is really critical. And I mean, and I will add one other thing, because this seems to be so of the moment. There’s enough of a sort of a supernatural aspect to this that borders a little bit on horror that it just is perfect for all audiences.
00:39:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s a great series. And so it’s on AMC and as Sarah says, it’s about to go into its fifth season of filming. This is actually a Santa Fe, New Mexico production. Georgia R. R. Martin and Robert Redford both lived in Santa Fe. Redford lived there for most of the remainder of his life before passing just recently, and George R. Martin has been in Santa Fe since the nineteen eighties actually, and much of the film work is done around Santa Fe, although there are you know, the Navajo reservation. There’s a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, but it’s called the Checkerboard Reservation, but the primary reservation is in Arizona. So they do have quite a number of shots of Monument Valley and of Arizona, but it’s pretty much a local production out of Santa Fe. So one of the things that’s been kind of fun is we actually saw Jessica Mattin just a couple of weeks ago in town for Santa Fe Magazine festival, and she was there. And I haven’t run into Zon mclarnin yet, but you know, I mean, as he says in an interview he did with Santa Fe Magazine, and he says, you know, so I’m not Brad Pitt. Nobody is chasing me around with cars and stuff. So I just get to kind of walk through the streets of town and go to restaurants and people will occasionally say hello, but they don’t really you make any sort of big deal out of me. So I’m hoping we get to see Zon in the Santa Cafe or something. At some point.
00:41:25
Speaker 2: I’m going to take a hard pivot from the road we’re going down here. So my number two film is The Ballad of Buster Scrugs, which is twenty eighteen. And I kind of knew coming into this that I would choose a Cohen Brothers film because they’re always funny and the dialogue is just lively, keeps you on your toes. You never know where it’s going, and they’ve done a lot of work in the West. No Country for Old Men, Raising Arizona, Raising Arizona, True Grit, Like, these are all films that they have a certain feel to them. There’s a lot of surprises. No Country for Old Men certainly Big Ki, Right, they’re just moments where the whole story flips on its head and the ballad of Buster scrugs. I don’t even know of how to explain. I don’t know that I want to get into the individual stories, but there’s it’s it’s unlike ninety nine percent of the movies out there in that it’s a series of short stories. It’s an anthology of short stories in a feature length film. There’s six stories in total, and they all have different characters, different you know, it’s like picking up a book, right, but you sort of enter these stories in the middle of things and you think it’s going one way and it goes another way. But throughout the movie sort of the two through lines I would say are that they’re playing with all of these conventions of the Western film.
00:43:18
Speaker 1: Right.
00:43:19
Speaker 2: There’s all these set pieces that are sort of classic. There’s there’s a guy who’s gonna get hanged, there’s a singing cowboy like Roy Rogers. There’s uh, there’s trains, there’s a min there’s a prospector, right, and.
00:43:37
Speaker 1: All of the stories are just sort of thematically.
00:43:43
Speaker 2: It’s just there’s no real meaning to anything like life like life and death and tragedy. It’s all arbitrary. There’s an absurd quality to it, to it all. There’s sort of an inevitability of death, and you don’t really know where death is coming from. Whereas in the conventions of Western filmmaking, you know, the hero does one thing and the villain does another, and the hero triumphs over the villain and they ride off into the sunset together. And this is not really a film in which any of the characters live out the fates to which they’d be entitled in a classic Western. So it’s very funny, it’s dark, it’s comic, it’s Coen Brothers. Yeah, and so I you know, it’s it’s I need to rewatch it, having just thought about it for the past twenty four hours. It’s been a little while, but just a film that you sit down and it plays with you and then you walk away and you think that was that was something very different.
00:44:56
Speaker 1: I’ve always loved how the Coen Brothers have sort of gone around on from region to region in America and done this, you know, old brother of course, the South Fargo is, you know, the Upper Midwest, northern plains, you know, the big Lebowski of course, you know SoCal. Yeah, I mean, so they’ve always and Raising Arizona, which is I mean, to me, that’s one of you know, and it was a huge oversight on my partner. Well, I’m yeah, Raising Arizona is a tremendous and of course it’s a Western, but it’s a twentieth century modern Western, and very much like Milch’s language in Deadwood. I mean, I always loved about Raising Arizona, the language that particularly the language that they have. You know, what does he label himself as, I’m, you know, the son of pioneers and hunters. You know, I’ve got a long genealogy of people who were hunters and pioneers, and.
00:46:03
Speaker 3: And her womb was a barren and rocky place upon which no seed could find.
00:46:09
Speaker 1: Which my seed could find, no personship. So that kind of language, you know, it’s just kind of incredible. But that’s a feature of Cohen Brothers films. That’s the way they write them. I love that stuff.
00:46:20
Speaker 3: And they did the the Audie Murphy like Singing Cowboy and Hale Caesar, which was just and he’s the hero of that movie, right.
00:46:30
Speaker 2: And they’re just endlessly rewatchable movies because there’s so many layers to them, and the language too, it’s like you’re hearing it for the first time every time because they’re so playful and skillful with it.
00:46:44
Speaker 1: Yeah. So the Dude of Bides, Yeah, the Dude of Bids. Okay, so let me do you know. I’m with Sarah on Dark Winds. That’s kind of a choice for me. But I’ll do one other movie, and I’ll explain why this one in particular, because this is another movie from the nineteen nineties. It’s actually from nineteen ninety three, and it’s the film adaptation, once again by Robert Redford, who we’ve talked quite a bit about, of Norman Maclean’s little novella A River runs through it. And the reason I think I’m drawn to that particular film as a favorite, and I’ll admit I haven’t when I watched it probably six or eight months ago. It was the last time I watched it, and was captivated by it again is that it makes a point that I kept trying to make throughout the podcast, and I wanted at least one film that I talked about to make, which is that the West, in contrast to what classic Western films wanted us to believe, the West, didn’t end with the end of the Frontier. We’re all in the West Bozeman, Montana right now, and so in the twentieth century West, as I tried to argue in a bunch of the podcast episodes, is simply fascinating and equally as interesting as the nineteenth century Frontier, because all sorts of remarkable things happen with the creation of the public lands and national parks, and I mean, on and on and on attempts to rewile the West. This film is set in the period of the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties. It’s set during Prohibition, and it’s set in Missoula, Montana, which is where Norman McLain had grown up. Norman McLain was a professor, a longtime professor of English and English literature at the University of Chicago, and he only wrote a couple of books, and he wrote these books really at his retirement and after and this one was the first one, and it’s actually a collection of three these stories. A River Runs Through It is the longest one. It’s kind of a novella, and the other two that are added to it or short stories, and the other two are not really that great, not very memorable. A River Runs Through It, though, is an extremely powerful story, and it’s actually about something that happened to his family and his brother, and so Robert Redford got the film rights to it. They were owned at the time by Bill Kittridge and Onyx Smith, and Redford managed to get them to surrender the film rights to it as long as they could be pulled in as executive producers. And when I’ve asked Bill and Onick about it in the years after the film came out, I said, so, what was your role as executive producers? And they said, oh, A couple of times we went and sat on the river and drank beer and watched them shoot a scene. But they evidently didn’t really make very many contributions, in part because the the book and the events that are described are not filmed in the place where the movie is set. The movie is set, and the little novella is set in Missoula, and the river is the Blackfoot River, but in filming a river runs through it, Redford decided that he wanted to actually film over east of the Continental Divide, in the area around Bozeman and Livingston and primarily on the Gardener River, although they did go down to Wyoming and film a particular waterfall scene that was in the film. So it was actually filmed over east of the Continental Divide in Montana, in the area around Boseman and Livingston. But it’s about Missoula and it’s about the Blackfoot River, and it’s as everyone I think has seen this film and remembers. For one thing, and it won an Academy Award for Cinematography. It is a remarkably gorgeous film. I mean, Montana has never looked so wonderful, and all the films made about Montana, I think the portrayal of the rocky mountain setting is done. And of course the trout stream and the fishing scenes with Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt, and Brad Pitt is he’s young at this time.
00:51:25
Speaker 3: He’s let’s just you know, if we’re going to talk about things that look really great in this movie.
00:51:30
Speaker 2: Well, and it’s it’s the Yellowstone before Yellowstone, as far as it’s credited in a lot of ways by a lot of observers with triggering one of Montana’s real estate land rushes.
00:51:45
Speaker 1: Right, it did. Yeah. Immediately in the wake of that film, particularly Hollywood stars began buying up ranches in the Paradise Valley south of where you live, and some of them over in the area around Missoula in the Bitterroot. Andy McDowell had a ranch just west of of Missoula that she bought in the wake of that film. So, yeah, it triggered a land rush, one of the early land rushes into Montana. Uh. And it’s uh, it’s a really moving story. Uh, it’s a true story. Uh. The younger brother, played by Brad Pitt, does get killed. He’s a newspaper writer and although his death actually happened in Chicago rather than in Lolo, Montana, but he does get lose his life and the father, who’s a Presbyterian minister, mourns him, of course, and as does Craig Schaeffer plays Norman McLain uh in the in the film. Uh, so it’s a it makes the point about as well as any film I’ve ever seen, makes that the West is a continuing The West is not the phase called the Frontier, which of course happens all across America in terms of white settlement of America. It’s about a specific part of North America, and it’s the part west of the Great Plains, in this case, in the northern Rocky Mountains.
00:53:19
Speaker 3: Well, and not all of the West has cactus and tumbleweeds and desert in it, that’s right, yeah.
00:53:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it.
00:53:27
Speaker 2: In some ways its role or its connection to Western history is not like it is itself an artifact of Western history, sort of the harbinger of the amenity West and the fly fishing. I mean, it put Bozeman on the map as a fly fishing mecca, even though it’s not set in Bozeman. But it’s it is itself a historical agent in terms of changing this.
00:53:57
Speaker 1: Place Old West to New West. Yeah, it’s a New West film, and that’s an important point to make. There’s a little reference to the Frontier. I mean, although Brad Pitt of course does have a girlfriend who is a Native girlfriend, and there are all those great scenes where they can’t get into speak easy because she’s native and they won’t let her in, and Brad nonetheless it gets her in of course do anything. Yeah, yeah, so what else do you have?
00:54:30
Speaker 3: Well, so I like this idea of being both serious but also fun. And so my final pick is A Million Ways to Die in the West by Seth MacFarlane, because that twenty fourteen Western comedy is an absolute send up of all the stereotypes that you can possibly come up with. And I will say about Seth MacFarlane, he was actually a history major and he really knows his history, and he also is a huge fan of Western films, and so when you watch A Million Ways to Die in the West, there are all these easter eggs hidden throughout the if. So if you are a big fan of Western movies, you can find, oh, there’s a reference to Shane, and there’s a reference to this. And you can also find a little homage to Back to the Future, because evidently McFarlan owns the DeLorean from Back to the Future and it shows up in this movie, which of course you would expect in Old Stump, Arizona. They have pot cookies and snakes and tumbleweeds. There’s he sings the Tarzan boy by BALTIMOREA. Oh yeah, he does that, and Django shows up very briefly. So I mean it’s so it’s this classic send up of a lot of Western iconography. There’s tumbleweeds, the wolves haul off the mayor who’s been dead for a week.
00:56:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, my favorite things. Yeah.
00:56:15
Speaker 3: But in the whole refrain, because I thought, you know, I would bookend it with the F word today, the whole refrain of this movie is I hate the fucking West because there are a million ways to die in the West. And Seth is Albert Stark, a sheep farmer, and he’s a bad sheep farmer, bad sheep Sorry, he’s bad sheep farmer. And so he’s already set himself up as one of the lowest of the Western icons.
00:56:45
Speaker 1: Already he’s not even wealthy enough to have a mustache.
00:56:48
Speaker 3: No, and he can’t afford a mustache, and so he gets ridiculed. But he nevertheless catches the eye of the girl, who is Charlie’s there on having so much fun being a bad girl, and they eat pot cookies and have a trip out in the desert, and at some point he gets captured by Indians and drinks way too much of the medicine that they’re passing around and has a hallucinogenic experience, and Wes Study is playing co cheese. I mean, it’s just too priceless. And at one point, I want to make sure you get this right. Wes Study says, there’s an ancient proverb among my people sometimes the only way for a man to find true happiness is to take drugs in a group. And so, I mean, you know, just those kinds of just complete poke you in the eye. At one point, Charlie’s they’re on She and Albert Stark are at the fair and he’s talking about how deadly fairs are.
00:58:01
Speaker 1: People die at.
00:58:01
Speaker 3: The fair, and he said, you know, last year there was a huge Indian raid. And she says, and this is again a classic way that he’s sending up Western traditional Western history. She says, why are the Indians so mad? I mean, we basically split this country with them fifty to fifty. And so just that fun, ironic way of sending up a lot of the mythology of the West that is in fact so unhelpful for understanding the real current West, I think is a fun way to get at Nevertheless, some of the themes that you talked about.
00:58:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, one of my favorite scenes in that movie, and there are a bunch of them. For one thing, I love that they do a cardboard cutout prop up of monument valley out at the edge of one of the saints. The Mittens are like everywhere, the Mitens up as cardboard cutouts out on the edge. But there’s a scene where Shirley’s gives him this poor sheep farmer who can’t afford to have a mustache. She gives him a present and it’s a photograph, and it’s a photograph like these old Western photographs from the eighteen eighties of two people smiling. And he says, no way, there is not a single photograph. How did you find this? There are no photographs of people in the West smiling smiles. They hate the fucking way. So it’s a.
00:59:41
Speaker 3: And if you look at the fair scene, one of the reasons it’s particularly fun for us is because it was filmed right near where we lived, and especially in the scene at the fair when they pull back the camera, if you could then zoom in in the background a little bit, you can see our house.
01:00:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s filmed at a place called Movie Ranch, South.
01:00:04
Speaker 3: Center and they used the old Bonanza sets I mean so really yeah, so Seth was very much trying to be true to self here.
01:00:14
Speaker 1: That’s a fun one. It was, so what’s your last one?
01:00:16
Speaker 2: Then, well, now you’re making me regret not choosing Blazing Saddles.
01:00:22
Speaker 1: There’s a lot of or or any I did. I did debate.
01:00:29
Speaker 2: Tarantino’s Jago or Hateful Eight, right, but I went with I went with Killers of the Flower Moon.
01:00:38
Speaker 1: Oh Man, a serious one then, yeah. Twenty twenty three, Martin Scorsese.
01:00:43
Speaker 2: It’s based off of a book by David Grant, who’s been on the Meat Eater podcast, and it’s a story about It’s based on a true story about set in Oklahoma in the nineteen twenties after World War One, and it’s it follows this sort of plot by white people on the reservation who are marrying members of the O Sage tribe and then killing them in order to ah steal their their entitlements to the money that the tribe has made through oil production. And at the time, the O Sage tribe is very wealthy because of their mineral rights on the reservation. And Leonardo DiCaprio plays this scumbag guy sort of the lead, Robert de Niro’s in it. I mean, it’s an incredible cast. Yeah yeah, and it did it win Best Picture. It was nominated for a lot of Academy Awards, but she won, Lily Glaston won. And the reason I chose this is one, it’s an unbelievable movie. It’s a long movie, but it’s Scorsese, and I think.
01:02:12
Speaker 1: It tells us it’s.
01:02:14
Speaker 2: The rare that a movie can get into a subject like tribal resources and sort of the arcane, arbitrary ways in which the relationship between the federal government and tribal nations across the West has either denied access to resources to which they’re entitled or or somehow you know, like, if you’ve studied Western history, if you’ve studied the history of Native America, you know that a big part of the story from throughout the reservation era up to the present has to do with dispossessing Native people of their wealth. And I’m like, this is a movie, a feature film, an award winning film, that gets to the heart of that truism that through line throughout Western history, and it does so in a way that’s compelling, and it’s a horrific story. I mean, it’s a story that it’s almost two.
01:03:13
Speaker 1: It does.
01:03:14
Speaker 2: You don’t want it to be a real story, but it is. And it gets to these questions of the legal framework around which tribal resources are divided among individuals and attempts by outsiders to separate them from those resources. So it’s one, it’s a compelling film, but two, it gets to a question or a theme in Western history that is very, I feel like, very hard to crack into in a way that’s accessible to a larger audience.
01:03:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a hell of a choice. I mean, the truth is, I mean these have all been great choices of films that there’s so many out there. Of course, we could have started over and a completely different set and probably had quality at the same level. But I want to say this actually brings the American West podcast to a close. This is the last episode of forty two. It’s a podcast that Steven Ranella talked me into doing. I will say, and I appreciate that he did. I appreciate you doing this with me, Randall. I mean it was like, you know, our old times over at the University of Montana talking about some of the same things. I mean, this podcast has been unusual, I know, because it’s been scripted, and what it’s been based on primarily is readings from my books and articles and columns and essays, primarily many of them from a book called Wild New World, and one called American Serengetti, and a couple of pieces from Coyote America, the last three books I’ve done. But it’s been an attempt to offer up a different look at the West. Sarah and I have talked about this an awful lot, and so that was the idea in the very beginning. And I hope people have enjoyed listening and watching, and I hope they feel smarter about the West as a result of listening and watching. And there’s a line that I’ve used a couple of times in the podcast, and I’ll use it again here at the end. I hope this podcast has rearranged the furniture in your head about the American West. Bravo, nice guys, Thank you,
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