Originally published in the Observer on 20 March 1960: The western, unlike the thriller series, is very seldom totally unviewable
An eccentric viewer of my acquaintance, a rich, scholarly recluse who looks only at westerns, has asked me to protest for him at the Wednesday clash between Rawhide and Wells Fargo. This for him is as frustrating as one of those nights when the BBC gives Ibsen and ITV Shaw. Even viewed simultaneously on two sets, when there is apt to be a certain amount of merging of horns, hooves, hats, shots and shouts, these two are instructive as illustrating current trends in the reigning dwarf movie form that rides the small screen. Wells Fargo is a traditional thriller western slightly slicked up. In the last instalment I saw, there was a dwarf Dietrich mistress-minding the gold robbery. Rawhide is far out on the neo-Freudo-Marxian wing of the intellectual western, with sociological overtones, high sadistic content and some distinctly psychopathological undertones. It scores with its herd-riding scenes and the ruggedly natural appearance of the cowboys.
Two other rival sagas, the BBC's Laramie and ITV's Wagon Train, are intellectual westerns, with Ibsenish tendencies and built-in charges of depth psychology, which sometimes impede the action. Laramie, which is also the more sadistic of the two, is more inclined to compromise with the old fast-riding form. The trouble, according to purists, with intellectual westerns is that they too often dismount and slow to a talking pace instead of galloping endlessly over the same Californian location-landscape like a mystic's timeless continuum. But there is no doubt about the continuous efficiency of the genre as a whole. The western, unlike the thriller series, is very seldom totally unviewable. I would sooner sit through a Rin Tin Tin than a Holmes or Philip Marlowe travesty. There is always the chance that the great dog actor, the canine Henry Irving, after one peace pipe too many, will turn, Method-wise, on the boy, Rusty, for screen-stealing.
■ For Wednesday's party political broadcast, the prime minister made a light, well-cut flannel speech to match his light, well-cut flannel suit. His manner was as relaxed and anxiety-free as ever. And if the science of telly-diagnostics can be applied to a recorded appearance, his glandular balance is still very nicely adjusted. Indeed, he looked, from one camera angle, so alarmingly young that you began to suspect there might be a portrait of Dorian Macmillan hanging behind a curtain in the locked attic at Number 10.
I suppose that coming between the tour and the summit, a quiet, confident soft-pedaller on African self-government with a Commonwealth theme was a permissible tactic. The film backgrounds included a few feet of a riot in Africa to suggest fact-facing. The mood was rational, but the content gave me a twinge of uneasiness, as if Hubris was handling Nemesis her invitation card.
This is an edited extract
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2012/mar/19/archive-lure-of-the-neo-freudo-marxian-western-1960
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