I was at my brothers one day, and his TV was on as always. It was John Wayne’s next-to-last movie ( I think) The Cowboys. There was the movie back in the 70s, and a brief TV show. Some of the child stars are still in the business! And then my brother made a rude comment about the schoolmarm and added, “At least that’s how it is in the book.” I had never realized that John Wayne movies were based on books. I thought they just burst out of his forehead. And then I find out that so many of his movies were adaptions. I don’t know why that’s so shocking for me.
Growing up, I watched a lot of Westerns on TV. Bonanza was a staple. Alias Smith and Jones. High Chapparal was one of my favorites. Paul McCartney mentions it in that Get Back movie. I recall trying to out-talk my dad from watching The Cisco Kid one Saturday morning because I wanted to watch cartoons. And there was the Lone Ranger. I don’t recall ever watching Rawhide, Wagon Train, Big Valley, nor The Virginian.
And The Virginian, written by Owen Wister around 1902, was the first Western book adapted to the screen ever! By that I mean, it was the first Western book! And all the cliches are there, where once they were fresh and new: School Marms, cattle rustlers, Indian raids, rattlesnakes, train rides, card games in the saloon turning into shootouts, and for a big finish, the big gunfight on main street at noon. It’s all there. There’s even a primitive version of “Smile when you say that, stranger.”
And it’s been made into movies since 1914, directed by Cecil B. DeMille or Victor Fleming and starring Gary Cooper or Joel McCrae. And there were 9 years of a TV series with Doug McClure back in 1971. And there are newer versions. Having just watched Cecil’s silent version, I can say that just about the only part that he leaves out is the impressionable kid with the pony that gets beat by the abusive rancher. Silently.
So I had to get around to reading it. It’s OK. The narrator gets in the way a lot because he keeps wanting to be a character in the story even though he’s a tenderfoot city boy and is only occasionally anywhere near the action. There’s a lot of hearsay in the storytelling. It seems very clumsily Victorian.
I find it unbelievable how thoroughly mined out every idea in the book has become. It didn’t start out as a list of cliches. People had to keep copying from it over and over for decades before the ideas wore out and only cliches remained.
Now I’ve got to read other famous Westerns to see how they got around this whole problem.
