The West Revised
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff The West Revised The western on TV has shown a stubborn durability. To be sure, there have been enough modifications to make purists turn in their spurs. The...
...The theme of sound intergroup relations is even more sedulously developed in a recent episode of Bonanza (NBC-Sunday...
...Would it be too solemn to suggest that our guilt with respect to the American Indian should be kept alive...
...The men, it appears, have been driven to the brink of exhaustion, and they are muttering about "fixin' to quit...
...When Muley sings, branches snap, horses run wild, mirrors crack...
...The episode is entitled "The Odyssey"—Rooney is a Greek-American—and the parallels are thin and strained...
...The old Western can now be found in its pure, archetypal form only in the early evening...
...audience...
...Into this discordant scene comes the stock figure of the wanderer (Mickey Rooney), who joins the wagon train...
...The boss of the wagon train is a hard-nosed type given to such remarks as: "I'm the boss...
...A recent episode on Rawhide (CBS-Thursday) is a case in point...
...Yet there is something disingenuous about all Westerns...
...Mickey Rooney preaches to the wagon master that the men must be apprised of what they are doing and why...
...I assure you," he declares, "that my report will be most eloquent in behalf of White Bear and his people...
...But the critical point of the story concerns the local Indians, who are in danger of being relocated if they get into trouble with the new Indian agent...
...The violence is there in all its unlovely abundance, but history is deprived of all its claims...
...He correctly perceives that a local bootlegger, whose machinations have been blamed on the Indians, is carrying hootch under his coat...
...A recent episode, though comic in tone, provided a particularly outrageous example of this tendency to revise the historical past...
...And in Gunsmoke, there are some adult ambiguities of a familiar sort...
...Among adult Westerns, Gunsmoke (CBS-Saturday) still focuses on elemental conflicts between the forces of good and evil, but what gives Gunsmoke its adult appeal is the hulking giant of a marshall who is powerful enough to figure as big brother even in the psychic life of grown-ups...
...Muley bellows one of his ungentle folk songs ("Beautiful dreamer, come here to me/Your booze I'm breaking with my melody"), the bottles crack, and the evidence spills around the bootlegger's ankles...
...Kitty is that old standby, the good-bad girl, while the Marshall's assistant—at least in the days before he was replaced—was the weakling with a hidden vein of iron...
...It is as if 19th-century America were viewed through the distorting prism of contemporary suburban piety...
...Muley ultimately resolves the Indian crisis by means of his mischief-making voice...
...Of course, the original begets its parodies...
...This program concerns a solidly respectable ranch family which each week rescues its community from a new peril...
...Thus a legion of stonyfaced Western heroes begot Maverick, the anti-heroic hero, a little like Gary Cooper turning into Red Skelton...
...Children, it seems, permit little tampering with the real thing, and it is they who compose the 7 P.M...
...True, this episode is only comedy, and one might hesitate to press it for too much significance...
...Happy ending...
...Unlike the wagon-train type of Western, Bonanza is a more suburbanized variation in which people have roots and turn out for PTA meetings or their frontier equivalents...
...The pitch for better personnel relations is unmistakable...
...The good intentions of the Indians are established, and the agent is appeased...
...I give the orders...
...The rest of the story is concerned, somewhat incongrously, with Mickey Rooney's quest of a girl he once knew...
...Either they take 'em or they don't...
...and a good part of the 8 P.M...
...An unregenerate Westerner like John Wayne would hoot at such advice, but in Rawhide the wagon master follows Rooney's lead and succeeds in boosting the morale of his men by patiently explaining their mission...
...What has lately become apparent, however, is the degree to which the Western has not only modified its own format but also engaged in some revisionist tinkering with American history...
...Yes, they still write dialogue like that...
...The story dealt with the Bonanza family's cousin, Muley Jones, a Li'l Abner Westerner, all muscle and good nature, who constantly gets into trouble because his huge singing voice detonates explosions wherever he goes...
...What we now have is a fake mishmash of sadism and good will, tough-guy antics and suburban sweetness...
...Since the annals of the West tend to be nasty, short, and brutish—no uplift there!—TV has introduced into the Western some strange "civilizing" touches...
...But this wanderer, one of whose traditional functions is to act the savior, sounds as if he just got a Master's degree in personnel work from the Harvard School of Business...
Vol. 47 • April 1964 • No. 9
