American Notebook: Debasement Of A Tradition
Ross, T.J.
Among the staple TV Westerns is one called Colt .45. Its hero, as in most of these shows, is a cowboy-cop. The paces he was put through in an episode of a few months back—something titled...
...That most elephantine of all TV Big Dads—Marshall Dillon—effects her rescue only after shooting, clobbering, and pitchforking to death the desperate gang...
...they kill her dad, too...
...the racketeer's alibi depends on the testimony of his mistress, a jolly night club "entertainer...
...tion of this type, is, sure enough, Shane...
...The paces he was put through in an episode of a few months back—something titled "Gallows at Granite Gap"—exemplify the moral slant of all the TV action shows, a slant worth remarking on not only for its own grotesque sake, but also as a depressing reminder of how the tradition of the old-fashioned Hollywood action movie (before cinemascope) has been turned inside out by TV...
...A matron seeks out the Kid's captors, Special Agent Colt and the neighborhood sheriff, to inquire about the prisoner's true ancestry, for she suspects the Kid may be her long-lost son...
...Because his was not the holier-than-thou code of the insider to the inside born...
...But badman tauntingly reports that he is Johnny's dad...
...In each case, the point of resistance involves a betrayal of a member of a family, or a friend, or lover...
...Of mysterious origins, Johnny has been adopted, and deputized, by the Lawman...
...his deputy is an apple-cheeked young sourpuss named Johnny...
...it is refused unless she squeals...
...Its sources and conventions made for such qualities even as the TV action shows destroy them...
...He asserts his manhood by destroying his father in such a way as to win special approval from the representative of the State...
...When not perched in the front office of the jailhouse, he may be seen like Dale Robertson in the front office of his Organiza tion, serving to untangle personnel problems and to test those characters with suspicious pasts who may deserve a chance to fit-in to the Organization once they have passed a loyalty test arranged by the agent...
...Dad raises his axe to clobber Chester...
...how then does the Lawman help a hapless type adjust...
...Mother might have become Belle Starr, or Florence Nightingale, or Stellas Dallas...
...It is the son who fires, killing Dad...
...In the showdown badman is fatally shot by Law man after drawing on both him and Johnny...
...They next employ keen psychology by taunting her with the difference in age between herself and her younger rival...
...So long as the action movie was anchored in what we may call, by comparison, this Grand Tradition (grand signifying a freewheeling, sentimental, flamboyant, romanticdecadent mode not devoid of humanitarian meanings), it remained anchored to history, its convention and mood rooted in popular forms of the past...
...his infancy, but the mother hopes to ascertain his identity by means of a tell-tale scar on his chest...
...The hint is that the villain is kidding and engaging in a last-minute beau geste for the sake of his boy's peace of mind...
...The cops first attempt to sneak a cop-gigolo-spy (unmarried, we are assured) into her confidence...
...Commercial" entertainment has become a form in a void...
...He bares his chest, and it proves to be unscarred...
...It deals with characters so "colorful," quaint and sturdy that their shenanigans are supposed to represent a "realistic" slice of Old West life...
...In a state of dramatic turmoil, she begs to be allowed to make this examination...
...His enemy was the gang in the backroom of the saloon, led by the compulsive...
...He is of necessity a wise-cracking bore, using the wisecrack (or slogan) as a bludgeon to destroy the implications of thought or emotion...
...Or she might have risen to the more complex action of Choice and committed herself to death by her son's side as she attempted vainly to help him escape...
...Resistance on a TV character's part to a given culture or situation is allowed only when it is asserted with the connivance of the law officer...
...He is indeed a creature of the post-McCarthy period...
...Just before the fadeout the victimized woman stares up at the hero for the Word...
...One skit had to do with a brace of sons tyrannized by a dad who was a religious hophead...
...After the moment of betrayal, the character is shown collapsing limply and gratefully into the arms of the Lawman...
...As a true-blue cop, he is the agent of the public attitude...
...and he threw in his lot with one or another side on the personal basis of friendship, or love for the girl in one of the camps, or, as Robert Warshow has observed, through the romantic need to assert the inviolability of his style, that is, of his private attitudes...
...His very tautness stems entirely from the imperatives of function and evasive ness...
...this gesture marks the acceptance of a character's validity by the State...
...entertaining no illusions about her set-up, she is nonetheless as faithful to her "friend" as she is vulnerable to society...
...The Colt .45 skit went this way: A criminal known as the Comanche Kid is about to be hanged...
...his style is plain, heimisch, and threatening...
...The Man with the Badge now enjoys this freedom on all the action shows, Western or plainclothes...
...The hobby of this colorful trio was to waylay ungodlyseeming wayfarers and beat them up...
...Should the criminal prove to be her son, her joy of discovery will be scarred by the ghastly knowledge that she had given birth to a criminaltype...
...Thus the cards of the plot are so heavily stacked that the action skits must be pointlessly simple or, on the "adult" Westerns, inhumanly grotesque and archaic in situation and treatment...
...In between-times, Dad beats the sons for the slightest defection from his holy orders...
...He didn't want her to become bitter...
...But the present efforts of movie and TV are empty of emotionality, wit, or fanfare...
...So she squeals, collapsing hysterically into the paws of the square-faced gigolo-cop...
...the Younger Son and the Marshal burst through the clearing in the nick of time...
...because he tended to resist organized power rather than reinforce it, he was the recognizable stranger in town, the Outsider whose key strength lay in his fancy style, a shaneh bochur whose name, in the most well-known depic...
...So, like the mother on the Colt .45 show, the populace is being reduced to a thing without a personal history...
...Here is a Gunsmoke skit which offers the purest example of what the message, in such instances, always adds up to: A girl is raped, beaten, and enslaved by a gang of bad guys...
...But what happens...
...The motif had carried over into the movies, from the earliest silents on up to a stray underground film or two of the fifties, like Randolph Scott's Seven Alen From Now...
...It served thus to assuage the aggressions and aches and pains of the populace in a traditional mode: a mode, that is, allied to the more vulgar aspects of humanism...
...But when the cell's incumbent removes his sombrero he proves to be —you guessed it—none other than the Special Agent, his vapid face contorted in a big "sheepish grin...
...One day this team (about as "realistic" a crew as will be found this side of Charles Addams) waylays Chester Goode, the Marshal's crippled assistant...
...But the Younger Son, feeling some qualms over such extremism, hastens to summon the Marshal...
...This act of betrayal signifies a "weak" character's moment of self-assertion, of growth to manhood...
...It remains wide-eyed and genial-seeming, unaware of its true, wild blood relations...
...He was selftaught, autonomous, and, like Hemingway's types, a "hurt" man...
...Take this skit from a Western called Lawman: A vicious badman comes to town...
...Badman makes a death-bed clean-breast-of-it, exonerating Johnny of any blood-guilt...
...He had been kidnapped by the Indians in...
...The audience stares at an "entertainment" which neither soothes nor teases it, but solemnly and religiously reduces it to the sum of its lowest common fears and pins it back on the sources of its own intellectual and emotional inarticulateness...
...We gather that a pep talk, and mauling about, given him by the Lawman before the showdown influenced his final testimony...
...His origins, like those of the TV deputy, were mysterious, but unlike the deputy's, his code was neither formed nor approved by the State...
...For think where bitterness may lead to...
...The detectives are sure that a certain racketeer is guilty of murder...
...The End...
...But what if the action is such that a dread truth, or fact, cannot be avoided...
...As a classless hero, he was more graceful than the plebeian homesteaders, more vulnerable and isolated than the bourgeois ranchers...
...The revenge-motif from Sene ca through the Renaissance to Dumas has been a constant in the tradition of the thriller in its liveliest and most free-wheeling aspects...
...For now it is the "hero" who sits in the front room of the jailhouse, surrounded by his coffee klatsch, wait ing to be roused to action against some maladjusted lout...
...Here is an even less charming example taken from a show titled, Detectives...
...Gunsmoke, for example, is supposed to be the classiest of the Western shows...
...nor was his style that of a trained seal...
...Rather than manipulate situations himself, he usually acted on the spur of situations arranged by the everplotting bad guys...
...Since she herself is an innocentmothertype, both Colt and the Sheriff feel for her and wish they could Do Something...
...generally, his role, as in the skit just described, is to free a wholesome, adjusted type from guilt-feelings aroused by a sudden sense of connection to a shady, failure-type (the failure-type is quickly recognizable as the character who is or is about to become a criminal...
...In contrast to TV's cowboy-cop, for ex ample, the traditional Western hero was a Lone Rider, something of an ur-Hipster of the Plains...
...Ix THE PEPPIEST and purest types of action movie the hero's personal choice was spiced frequently by a revengemotif, the imperative to square accounts for an outrage perpetrated on a member of his family, or a friend...
...His morale upset, Johnny offers to resign his deputyship, for if badman is his dad then he himself is probably no good (a simplified point of view which none of the characters ever thinks to pause over...
...The mistress still refuses to betray her lover...
...She is shown as being in a perfectly cozy relation with her lover...
...The cops go to work on the mistress...
...The Lawman-hero is a mature, hard-bitten type...
...Standing ready to depart from the shack of horrors he says, with a throaty, hard-bitten sincerity: "Don't be bitter...
...ly competitive capitalist, who owned the town...
...The Kid lurks in the shadows, a jauntily tilted sombrero covering half his face...
...The TV cop incarnates Function...
...III In its heyday, the Hollywood action movie—pirate, gangster, or Western— did contain, among its gross and silly aspects, some qualities of wit and emotion...
...The villain's henchmen were outlaws of the sort our hero understood well, for he was usually an ex-outlaw himself, haunted by his romantic past...
...that is, she might have been transformed from an anonymous, lovable Type to a being with a singular, problematic, personal history...
...By means, this time, of exacting false confessions the Lawman fulfils his role as tight-lipped smooth manipulator of peaceful states of mind...
...When this fails, the cops tighten the screws by exposing to her the twotiming activities of her lover...
...to punish Chester for his frivolous attitudes, the father decides to chop off his arm...
...We have here an interesting and starkly simple situation, one which approximates to the primitively horrific and simple dilemmas of ancient tragedy, and which, in consequence, might have led (all within the half hour's format) to the moment of recognition and then perhaps to a resounding speech by Mother as she reproached the dooming paradoxes of fate, her eyes fixed all the while on her flesh-and-blood being marched off to his death...
...THE POINT OF THE TRICK ending, however, contains a grim message of its own: that the Man with the Badge Knows What's Good For You even to the extent of being allowed carte blanche to poke his finger in the familial pie...
...repressive rather than expressive, it is an entertainment which, like an iron curtain, separates the populace from its past moods...
...Remaining, therefore, within the Code, the action might still have played itself out to a dignified and rousing conclusion...
...She begs for police protection...
...Mother is so relieved that she explodes with a holier-than-thou crack at the Kid's expense: "I feel sorry for you"—then hastens away to catch the next coach back home, safe in the shelter of her stance as the wide-eyed, innocentmother type...
...Finally, the cops terrify her by staging a mock attempt on her life...
...Gathered in the TV room, family and friends nightly watch such a character operate to put strangers and family black sheep in their place...
...And this is precisely why Special Agent Colt hid the truth from mother...
...Sheriff leads Mother to the outlaw's cell...
...In a well-earned bitterness, after all, lurks sometimes the beginnings of idea or desire...
Vol. 7 • September 1960 • No. 4
