By Jim Kitses, September 2004
1844570509 £17.99
Horizons West is a study of the Western genre through the lens of its major directors: John Ford, Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood. It canonises these six men by showing how they represent a great tradition in cinematic history. Professor Kitses could thus be called the F.R. Leavis of his subject.
John Ford, the founding father of the genre, is the book's central character. His movies are shown to be deeply rooted in their time: optimistic, unselfconscious and truly creative. Their celebration of loving family life and loyal brotherhood made him unpopular with a post-modernist critical community, but also assured him of artistic immortality. George Lucas acknowledged the Western's absence as the motivating force in his creation of Star Wars and Kitses explains how the genre's waning popularity in the cynical late 1960's-70's eradicated one of the Western's most traditional forms: the morality play. Lucas wanted to fill that moral and spiritual gap with the science fiction movie ('the Western in futuristic dress'). Likewise, the road movie with its journey structure depicting the tensions between the nomadic and the settled, the challenge of the unknown and the quest for America.
In contrast to Ford, Kitses shows how director Anthony Mann explores the more solipsistic aspects of the frontier experience with his disturbed heroes: usurpers who reject the settled family life of Ford's universe. These maladjusted victims of a distorting macho universe serve to explore more disturbing oedipal tensions and thus make his movies more accessible to a post modernist critical community. However, Professor Kitses rejects feminist dismissals of the genre as an excuse for celebrating male conquest and sexual dominance and shows how it dramatises tensions within all of us between our individual freedom and our social loyalty.
Sam Peckinpah, the meticulous visual artist controlling every aspect of production from casting to cutting, with his beautiful cinema of montage, is said to have brought the Western up to date. Peckinpah turned the genre upside down, yet in inverting it he also paid homage to the old themes of Ford's original myth. Likewise with Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns where the amoral world with its comic-book images and exhibitionist melodrama (his use of extreme close up being his trademark) offer both a critique and a celebration of the original Western form. Leone's parody becomes so unified and skilled at expressing the corruption of materialist humanity that it ultimately transforms the Western.
The study finishes with an account of Clint Eastwood's acting and directing career. It offers a defence of the artist's minimalist style against the politically motivated criticism of his contemporaries and explores the ways he brought the genre back to its former artistic glory. I found it a relief to read this lucid and academically informed text. It has a feisty attitude to political correctness and dares to take on a patriotic perspective. The writer is clearly inspired by what he talks about and this comes across in his persistent rooting out of ideological falsehood among his critical peer group. He is an enemy of ideological criticism and thus a friend to art.
Deborah Nichols
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