The Way of the Western, Part I: The Tin Star (1957), High Noon (1952), and the Myth of the Cowardly Townsman
The Tin Star is a movie I've meant to review in one way or another for some time. Surprisingly little-known, considering its director and lead actors, it's become a favorite of mine over the last few years.
The film opens with bounty-hunter Morgan Hickman (Henry Fonda) meeting a cold reception as he enters a town to claim his reward for the body of a wanted man. The town's leading citizens disapprove of bounty-hunters on principle, while brutish town bully Bart Bogardus (Neville Brand), has an axe to grind as a relative of the dead man's. The only hospitality Hickman receives is from a woman (Betsy Palmer) who is mostly ostracized by the townsfolk because her young son (Michel Ray) is half Indian. But after the town's young and extremely inexperienced acting sheriff, Ben Owens (Anthony Perkins), witnesses Hickman's ability to handle troublemaker Bogardus—who incidentally has his own eye on the sheriff's job—and learns that Hickman was once a sheriff himself, he appeals to Hickman to give him some lessons in handling a gun and properly carrying out his job, in hopes of holding onto it permanently. Hickman reluctantly agrees, in spite of his own scornful attitude towards lawman's work owing to incidents in his past—and the continued disapproval of the townspeople, who take issue with Owens' associating with a bounty-hunter. Matters finally come to a head after an instance of robbery and murder, when Bogardus stirs up a mob to serve vigilante justice, against Owens' determination to bring the guilty men in for a fair trial.
The Tin Star is a very good film—well-acted, well-crafted, and with a neatly-layered script. One of the things I like best about it is the complexity provided by multiple antagonists—on one side, ordinary garden-variety stagecoach robbers; but on the other, Bogardus' campaign to see them lynched which forms the crux of the climax. It's complicated even further by the clash between Hickman's pragmatic views of hunting down criminals and Owens' stubborn, idealistic determination to bring his prisoners in alive.
But on my most recent viewing, as I watched, I became aware of a growing dissatisfaction with something about the story. Something which didn't ring true for me, after the time I'd spent immersed in earlier literature of the American West.
The Cowardly Townsman
The leading citizens of the unnamed small town in The Tin Star are a type familiar in Western movies. Town-dwellers, suit-clad, apparently owners of local businesses, they have a strong distaste for anything smacking of irregularity or lawlessness, but an equal disinclination to personally take action about anything. They want someone else to handle the job of maintaining law and order, but offer him little practical support and frequently hamper him by objecting to his methods of doing it. The ultimate example of this type of citizenry is found in High Noon (1952), where harassed town marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) tramps the streets looking for somebody, anybody, to help him deal with four outlaws, only to have an entire town hem, hedge, and literally hide to avoid taking anything that looks like a personal risk.
The typical Western movie would have you believe that this was the standard attitude of people who lived within town limits (though ranchers from a few miles outside town usually show a little more spirit). But looking at it in the light of the dozens of early Western novels, short stories, and memoirs I've read, it begs the simple question—where did these people come from?
It's well acknowledged that there's always been friction between East and West—examples are plentiful of imported Easterners having difficulty in accepting ways of life on the frontier. But think about it for a minute: the bulk of small towns in the West weren't populated by imported Easterners. Their citizens were the people who had pioneered and settled the country, or generations born and raised there. A race of fastidious suit-clad businessmen didn't just spring up spontaneously like mushrooms along the Front Streets and Main Streets of frontier towns.
If, as the retired marshal in High Noon claims, the common people really just don't care about law and order...if, as is oft reiterated in The Tin Star, they want someone else to do the dangerous work, but only according to methods they approve...why, it's really a miracle that the West was ever civilized and settled at all, isn't it?
Louis L'Amour—who may have had his own shortcomings, but was famously keen on historical research—drew a very different picture of such a town in the opening chapter of his novel High Lonesome, as being a tough proposition for bank robbers owing to the very ability of the townspeople to protect their own interests:
Take the banker of this town, for example. He had been a colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War, and had been a lieutenant in the War with Mexico, and he had fought Indians and hunted buffalo...The saloonkeeper across the street was a noted buffalo hunter...The man who owned the general store had been the crack shot of his regiment during the Civil War, and had fought Indians in Wyoming and Nebraska.
The whole town was like that. Probably there weren't three men who had not used guns, and used them a lot. It was a time when every western town's population was made up of the daring, the adventurous, and the skilled. By those standards, the scene in the Disney comedy The Apple Dumpling Gang where townspeople shoot a whole street to splinters to help stop a bank robbery is closer to the spirit of the times than High Noon, where they sit cowering inside waiting for the sound of gunshots to tell them they're down a marshal.
But let's dig even a little deeper.
Friends in Need
Both The Tin Star and High Noon involve men being deserted in the hour of need by the very friends they should have been able to count on. In The Tin Star, Hickman bitterly recounts how in his days as a sheriff, the people of his town whom he called his friends turned their backs one by one and refused to help him when he desperately needed money for his sick wife and child.
For contrast, let's take a look at a passage from one of O. Henry's finest short stories, "Friends in San Rosario" (1902):
Tom Kingman had not been cut to any pattern. He had been mule-driver, cowboy, ranger, soldier, sheriff, prospector, and cattleman. Now, when he was bank president, his old comrades from the prairies, of the saddle, tent, and trail found no change in him. He had made his fortune when Texas cattle were at the high tide of value, and had organized the First National Bank of San Rosario. In spite of his largeness of heart and sometimes unwise generosity toward his old friends, the bank had prospered, for Major Tom Kingman knew men as well as he knew cattle. Of late years the cattle business had known a depression, and the major's bank was one of the few whose losses had not been great.
Emphasis mine.
A lot has been written and said about a "cowboy code" or "code of the west," a lot of it probably nonsense. But as I read the early fiction and memoirs of the West, a pattern does begin to emerge of character traits that were highly regarded on the frontier, and of the type of man who was accorded respect. A man whose word was good; a man who stuck to a job to the finish; a man who could be counted on...a man who stuck by a friend. In a time and place where being able to depend on a neighbor and friend could mean life or death, friendship was more than just a name. In fact, Westerners seemed to err more often on the side of taking loyalty to extremes, being willing to bend or break the law to save or help a friend in trouble.
Read "Friends in San Rosario" in full—it's well worth it in any case. Note that the entire story, both in its portrayal of the Western townsman and its attitude toward friendship and loyalty, is practically the antithesis of the same depictions in The Tin Star. Also worth reading is Henry's "A Call Loan," (1903) which is a more concise reworking of a very similar plot involving banking and friendship in the West. Rather than refusing loans to friends who could offer no security, the Texas bankers in these stories are willing to violate banking regulations to help friends whose need and integrity they are equally assured of.
(The idea of men willing to go the limit for friendship was evidently so well established that Henry even found it ripe for satire in "The Friendly Call.")
If you're familiar with older Western literature, you'll notice those themes cropping up again and again. Edith Eudora Kohl wrote of homesteading in South Dakota:
From the beginning cooperation had been one of the strongest elements in western life. When no foundation for a civilized life has been laid, when every man must start at the beginning in providing himself with such basic necessities as food and shelter, when water holes are few and far between and water to sustain life must be carried many miles, men have to depend on each other. Only together could the western settlers have stood at all; alone they would have perished. In times of sickness and individual disaster, it was the community that came to the rescue. If only for self-preservation, it had to.
In Eugene Rhodes' short story "An Executive Mind" (1909), his protagonist describes cowboys and ranchers pitching in to help a struggling homesteader's family:
Taylor takes up a homestead on the Feliz. He wasn’t affluent none. I let him have my old paint pony, Freckles—him being knee-sprung and not up to cow-work. To make out an unparalleled team, he got Ed Poe’s Billy Bowlegs, née Gambler, him havin’ won a new name by a misunderstanding with a prairie-dog hole. Taylor paid Poe for him in work. He was a willin’ old rooster, Taylor, but futile and left-handed all over....In the spring we all held a bee and made their ’cequias for ’em. Baker he loaned ’em a plow. They dragged big branches over the ground for a harrow. They could milk anybody’s cows they was a mind to tame, and the boys took to carryin’ over motherless calves for Mis’ Taylor to raise.
By the end of the story, the protagonist will have cheerfully tampered with the U.S. Mail and indulged in an impulsive spot of impromptu blackmail to help out a friend who he feels is being unfairly taken advantage of. And in "Aforesaid Bates," Rhodes draws an amazingly comprehensive picture of a ranching community pulling together to defeat the combined forces of a drought and a crooked lawyer.
It doesn't sound much like High Noon, does it?
Conclusion
It's easy to understand the appeal of the High Noon-type plot—the lone man standing for justice, deserted by all, is a compelling and dramatic storyline; rightfully so. But reiterating a portrayal of Western American townsfolk as essentially indecisive, narrow-minded and helpless, to the point where it became one of the tropes of a then-popular genre, is to sweepingly malign the pioneer spirit and fortitude of a whole people. Fiction has followed film since then, too; it's easy to trace the influences of popular movies in more recent Western books. I'm sure I've been as guilty of absorbing the influence as anyone else. (One of the first things I did after that recent viewing of The Tin Star was to thankfully scrap a troublesome short story concept based on the cowardly-town trope that had just never "worked" for me.) For a generation of increasingly suburbanized 1950s moviegoers, already growing more and more out of touch with the experiences of their forefathers, did movies like these primarily inform their view of the historical West?
Previously: The Way of the Western: Introduction
Next time: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and vague history on film.