Peter Stanfield,
Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail.
Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001.
ISBN: 0 85989 694 3 (pb) £18.99
ISBN: 0 85989 693 5 (hb) £47.50
272pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Exeter Press)

John Wayne, after nearly a decade of low budget westerns, finally emerged from Poverty row films with the release of John Ford’s Stagecoach in February 1939. In July 1939 Republic released the Three Mesquiteers western, Wyoming Outlaw, Wayne’s penultimate appearance as Stony Burke. After one more Three Mesquiteer film, New Frontier (also known as Frontier Horizon, 1939), Wayne never returned to the world of series westerns. Yet his career, especially in the 1930s, is often presented as one long continuous string of westerns – the only difference residing in the fact that he made medium and large budget westerns after Stagecoach and low budget westerns before that. In other words, the assumption is that a western is a western and only the budget differentiates them. Fortunately Peter Stanfield’s study successfully eradicates such ideas by demonstrating that the western is not a simple, stable genre.

While Wyoming Outlaw shares certain generic elements with Stagecoach – mainly visual involving iconic aspects such as horses and six-guns – thematically, institutionally and ideologically it is profoundly different. Wyoming Outlaw, like many of the low budget westerns produced by Republic, Monogram and other small studios and independent producers in the 1930s, is situated in a crazy never never world which blends different time periods and different conventions. Such films repudiated conventional notions of historical verisimilitude as specific social and economic concerns were dramatised in a unique fictional world where cars, radio stations and newsreel reporters moved freely through nineteenth century cattle towns. In this world cowboys, dressed in gaudy, theatrical costumes, sang in radio stations and out on the prairie.

The series western, usually starring one cowboy star in six or eight westerns per year, demonstrated little or no interest in the frontier myth and the tension between nature and civilisation, or the oft-quoted “shifting ideological play” between “the Wilderness” and “Civilisation” [see Jim Kitses Horizons West, London, Thames and Hudson, 1969]. Instead these films were more concerned with social and cultural tensions that related specifically to the 1930s. For examples, Wyoming Outlaw shares none of the ideological/thematic basis of Stagecoach. Instead the low budget film dramatises the problem of surviving the Depression on an economically destitute dust-bowl farm. The film’s specific problem concerns corruption in the local relief centre which is controlled by a crooked politician and the film reworks a real-life incident involving the death of a young farmer driven to crime by his economic plight. Thus, Wyoming Outlaw is thematically much closer to the social concerns of The Grapes of Wrath (USA, 1940) and the plight of the dust-bowl farmers than it is to the frontier concerns of Stagecoach. It also foreshadows the ending in Raoul Walsh’s fatalistic gangster film High Sierra (USA, 1941) where a radio reporter coldly describes the entrapment of a young farmer by the law on a barren mountain.

Stanfield’s central thesis is that the series westerns “tell a different story from the Western epic” (226-27). He shows how these films remain firmly outside the frontier paradigm by addressing specific issues such as the confrontation between capital and labour and the impact of new technology. Yet these overarching social, cultural and economic struggles are mediated by the conventions of melodrama in general and the western in particular in their formulaic use of disguise, which is best understood as a metaphor for particular class locations of its audience. As with the musical vernacular traditions in series Westerns, the use of disguise and hidden identity comes from the performance traditions already embodied in the nineteenth-century dime novel and blackface minstrelsy. By considering the western from this perspective Stanfield offers a convincing correction to the received critical opinion on the genre [see p. 79].

The continuing characters of the series western generated a strong bond with a distinct segment of American culture in the 1930s and 1940s. It was not, as many have assumed, a mode which appealed only to a juvenile Saturday afternoon matinee audience. Its audience was primarily rural and small town. To these people Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, Charles Starrett, Roy Rogers, Johnny Mack Brown and George O’Brien were real film stars and their films often played the popular Friday and Saturday night sessions – relegating the more prestigious MGM dramas and the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals to the poorly attended mid-week sessions. This audience, Stanfield argues, was deeply suspicious of the usual studio fare and they “found the ‘sophisticated’ and ‘metropolitan’ concerns of Hollywood’s products unappealing” (115). In this vacuum independent producers and small studios, such as Monogram and Republic, flourished. Republic, Stanfield argues:

knew its audience: men, women and children who frequented small-town and rural and neighbourhood theatres, working class families who wanted ‘a magical, fairy tale transformation of familiar landscapes and characters’. This is precisely the world that the series Westerns gave them, a world where conflicts between labour and capital are resolved in favour of the working man and woman. (115)

Stanfield traces the origins of this form to the dime novel, nineteenth century melodrama and, especially blackface minstrelsy and in this regard it is also worth reading his follow-up book, Horse Opera: The Strange History of the 1930s Singing Cowboy (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2002). These elements combined with specific tensions emanating from the 1930s Depression to shape an “imagined heritage” for a marginal, but not unsubstantial, audience that were often forced from their rural, subsistence lifestyle to find work in the large cities. Often the series western dramatised this movement by focusing on the threat to rural properties and the problem of self-employment and wage dependency. There was also the more generalised anxieties generated by the onset of modernity. In this context the films of cowboy stars, especially Gene Autry, provided the means to negotiate between pre-industrial and industrial life. Thus the function of the series cowboy in these narratives was not as an agent of progress who will in turn be superseded by the arrival of the modern world in the form of organised society – the predicate of the frontier myth. Instead, the cowboy operates … as a figure able to forestall or moderate progress. (110)

Stanfield also demolishes the misleading perception that these films appealed exclusively to a masculine audience and they only emphasised the male star at the expense of the female characters. This was also addressed by Gene Autry in his autobiography:

The leading ladies in Autry films were not just for decoration or to point out which way the bad guys went. As written, they gave me a lot of anything-you-can-do-better sass, smoked a lot of Kools … and, in general, played a thirties’ version of waiting for Gloria (Steinem). That may have been due, in no small part, to the presence of such screenwriters as Betty Burbridge, Luci Ward and Connie Lee” (Gene Autry with M. Herskowitz, Back in the Saddle Again, New York, Doubleday, 1978, p. 66).

The popularity of Autry’s music, and his huge female fan mail base, confirms his estimation that at least half his audience were women. Stanfield also shows that in Autry’s films there were a number of roles constructed around young women, who are clearly signified as independent wage earners, managers, or property owners. There is a marked absence in these films of the traditional matriarch. Instead, the central family unit is often formed around the younger women who must provide either for an ailing father and/or younger or weaker brother. The mother’s absence is rarely if at all marked upon. Nor is the role assumed by the younger woman.’ ( 94-95)

Stanfield’s book also shows how the fragile production of large budget studio westerns, which the studios preferred to call “outdoor dramas”, was affected by the failure of three key films in the depression years of 1930/1931 – Cimarron, the Big Trail (starring a very inexperienced John Wayne) and Billy the Kid. It was another five years before the majors tentatively resumed production of big-budget westerns and only when there was a threat to their block and blind booking system, where the exhibitors were forced to take the entire studio output for the year, did they try to appease provincial and small exhibitors by resuming production of large-scale western epics. In the late 1930s the discourse of these films, such as Jesse James (1939), merged with the prevailing themes of the series westerns – especially the displacement and the threat to home and family through repossession. And herein lies the real significance of Stanfield’s book. Most people have seen or heard of Stagecoach. Yet how many film scholars, or anyone else, has seen and considered the significance of films such as Wyoming Outlaw or any of the more than 3,000 series westerns produced in the 1930s and 1940s? While James Cagney, Fred Astaire, Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Clark Gable, William Powell and Myrna Loy, and many others, were playing to near empty film theatres in parts of the United States in the 1930s, these audiences were flocking to sixty minute westerns starring Gene Autry, Charles Starrett, Tex Ritter, William Boyd (Hopalong Cassidy) and Johnny Mack Brown. Stanfield’s excellent study provides an explanation for this and it is a valuable corrective to standard film histories of the 1930s.

Geoff Mayer.
La Trobe University, Australia.
Created on: Sunday, 2 May 2004 | Last Updated: 2-May-04