Rich Hall’s fine documentary, How the West was Lost was screened on BBC4 again last night. Hall can be a bit abrasive and not to everyone’s taste, but he has a neat line in angry rhetoric and was suitably embittered about ignorant attitudes to the Western genre.
As a potted history of Westerns, served up in ninety blistering minutes, Hall’s film was about as good as it could ever get. The antics of the screwball opening – Hall drives an ignorant young Hollywood exec into the desert to show him why the west matters – is restricted to the first five minutes, after which he settles down for some serious discussion. John Ford looms large over the proceedings, as you might expect, yet what really drives Hall is outlining why the genre became as big as it did, and how it failed to such an extent that Westerns released these days are few and far between.
The tale Hall weaves is nothing new. Westerns are lies, he argues, based on the myth of real life characters like Wyatt Earp rather than what really happened. What the films did was hold up a mirror to America, showing the country both what it was and what it would like to be. Little wonder that the heroes of the early movies were noble outsiders, loners who would turn up to do a job and then just leave, satisfied the world was a better place for their intervention. Later entries would offer a shabbier, darker vision of the west, The Searchers‘ Ethan Edwards held up as a bigot with a blacker heart than those he pursued.
There was much about the role of the Western as allegory. The genre’s history is of course scattered with instances of films that reflect events happening in contemporary reality. Equally fascinating was the discussion of Western characters who have turned up again in more recent and highly respected films. Travis Bickle’s ‘You talking to me?’ speech from Taxi Driver is almost embarassingly traced back to its Western roots.
My only gripe with the show was Hall’s dismissal of Spaghetti Westerns, criticised as being made by chancers working on the cheap and for a quick profit. He may be right, but The Good, the Bad and the Ugly will almost certainly still be in my top ten when I’m on my deathbed. Surely, it deserves better, though I’m yet to scratch beneath the Leone veneer and watch the dross that no doubt lies beneath.
I’ve enjoyed Hall’s criticism previously on his film about the Deep South, not to mention the countless shifts he’s put in on UK panel shows. He’s a cut above the usual stand-up, informed by a ne’er more acerbic wit, and his love and passion for the Western shone through. If only BBC Four had followed it with a film, because I was sure ready for one.
