Welcome to Madison’s Footnotes, the substack page for the Madison’s Notes podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program.
Here in Episode 7 of Season 5, I interview Dr. Matthew J. Franck. A senior contributing fellow at Public Discourse, a visiting lecturer in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, as well as a senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Radford University, he has written, edited, and contributed to many books, including Against the Imperial Judiciary (1996).
Drawing on his Public Discourse column, “The Bookshelf,” which often veers into film criticism, we discuss American frontier films in light of our country’s 250th anniversary and the successful Artemis II mission. Using Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), we look at why the western is the most prolific genre in film history and how it offers viewers a vicarious lens into the heroic pioneer ethos, from literary works, like those of James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain, to the cinema, whether the westerns of John Ford or science and space exploration movies today.
Among the movies that get discussed are the classic The Wizard of Oz (1939), four films from David Lean—Bridge on the River Kwai (1956), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dr. Zhivago (1965), and Ryan’s Daughter (1970)—many by John Ford—Stagecoach (1939), Fort Apache (1948), The Searchers (1956), as well as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964)—plus historical epics in The Last of the Mohicans (1992), modern action in Dirty Harry (1971) and Die Hard (1989), space films such as The Right Stuff (1983) and Armageddon (1998), and new classics in Hail Caesar (2016) and Oppenheimer (2023). Although the western frontier may have closed long ago, Americans still keep making new ones, including at the movies.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. Please enjoy.
Dr. Frank, welcome to Madison’s notes.
Thanks very much, Ryan. It’s great to be here with you. I’m looking forward to this conversation.
So how did you get here to Princeton?
When I was a professor of political science at Radford University, I applied for a visiting fellowship in the James Madison Program and got here for that academic year of 2008-2009—my first extended sojourn in Princeton.
I returned to Radford for the year that followed, but then came back permanently to Princeton in the summer of 2010 to join the staff of the Witherspoon Institute, where I directed something called the Center on Religion and the Constitution for a number of years. I joined the Madison Program staff for a few years, and then I retreated to part-time work.
Everything in my life is now a side-gig, which is fun. So I write a monthly column called, “The Bookshelf,” which I sometimes devote to movies and instead of books at Public Discourse, which is the daily web scene of the Witherspoon Institute.
I claim no expertise. I’m not a film historian, I’m not a professional critic, but I’m a lover of movies who has Turner Classic movies permanently tuned in on his television at home.
How did you get into movies?
Oh, I’ve always loved them since I was a kid. Of course, when I was a child in the 1960s and well into the 1970s, television in my parents’ house was in black and white. And I remember this remarkable experience I had as a freshman in college when a lot of us students gathered into a dormitory lounge once to watch The Wizard of Oz (1939) on a big screen, like a 70s-era projection TV kind of thing.
I wasn’t even used to it being brown monochrome. I was used to literal black-and-white gray. But all of a sudden, this brown monochrome Kansas in The Wizard of Oz suddenly became the blazing color of Oz itself when her house lands there right after the tornado.
I’d seen the movie numerous times as a child. It was always on network television certain times of the year, but I had never seen it in color. And so I blurted out, “Oh my God, it’s in color.” And everybody turned and looked at me like I had two heads: “What is the matter with you?” But that experience captures for me the magic of film: the way it can, like Dorothy, transport you into a more colorful place.
Especially in a movie theater on a big, shared screen where it’s larger than life with heroic-mythic stature. I once heard movies put as a shared dream. You’re having some experience where the logic is loosely defined.
After Wizard of Oz, what were some of the films that were part of your cinematic education?
Seeing Lawrence of Arabia (1962) on the big screen was just revelatory—to see what David Lean could do with men in the desert.
There’s that scene where Peter O’Toole has first gone from Cairo into the Arabian Peninsula. He’s got a guide with him, and they’ve stopped at a well. While they’re at the well, he begins to see this tiny dot shimmering in the distance. It comes a little closer and a little closer. His Arab guide has sharper vision in the desert than he does. He’s more accustomed to figuring out the shapes of things in that environment. He realizes that it’s a threat coming and goes running for a pistol. And before you’re even able to get more than the barest outline of a man on a camel, a shot rings out and Lawrence’s guide is killed.
That’s the entrance scene of Omar Sharif. That tracking shot of Sharif approaching on his camel is just magnificent.
Films like that were important for me.
You saw that on the big screen?
I did, but not first run. I was three when it first came out in theaters. But it was in a boutique movie house near my college in the seventies. I just remember the overwhelming impression of it.
Still extremely long.
Yeah, I know. Sadly she’s passed away now, but one of my dearest friends was in the movie theater with me, and she said to me afterwards, “If I had to see one more bit of sand, I was going to go crazy.” She thought it was too long, but I think it’s a magnificent achievement.
And the thing about Lean is that before he made Bridge on the River Kwai (1956), there was no reason to believe that David Lean had it in him to do cinemascope color, epic adventure stories on the scale of those films. His great trio—Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago (1965)—you couldn’t see that coming from Lean’s work in the forties, which is mostly much more intimate black-and-white films like Brief Encounter (1945) and This Happy Breed (1944) and Dickens adaptations. Beautiful Dickens adaptations!
With Alec Guinness.
Oh yeah. He and Guinness had a love-hate relationship. Sometimes Guinness would say, “I will never work with that guy again.” But then Lean would call him up and he’d do it. And of course, he got the Oscar for River Kwai as Colonel Nicholson.
It’s based on a book by Pierre Boulle, who also wrote Planet of the Apes, interestingly enough.
And you have a theory about turning books into films that something like Bridge on the River Kwai were fun, but not great, novels.
Boulle’s Bridge Over the River Kwai—which became Bridge on the River Kwai and the film version—it’s not as good as the movie.
And I explained this in my column: one of the serendipitous things about it was that River Kwai could not be green-lighted for a major Hollywood budget. Lean was stepping up to this huge canvas of technicolor cinemascope, and the only way he could get the movie funded was to have an A-status male lead Hollywood star in the movie with all his British actors, like Guinness.
That turned out to be William Holden, but the only way they could get William Holden was to rewrite a small and insignificant part, originally one of the British officers in the novel, as this American officer. In the novel, Major Shears, the character played by William Holden, is just another member of the British Commando team sent to destroy the bridge.
But when they rewrote the Shears part, they gave it to an American who’s in the camp, escapes from the camp, and then returned to the camp—all of which plot elements in that character’s story arc are missing from the novel.
So Holden’s character in the screenplay wound up stitching together the two halves of the story in a more coherent and interesting way, because he becomes the bridge between the British commandos and the British in the prison camp.
It’s also the contrast between the American and the British officer.
He’s also a fraud. He’s not actually an American naval officer. He assumed an officer’s rank on his capture.
He’s socially mobile, assuming a new identity.
He’s a conman.
Paul Cantor has a great essay on Huckelberry Finn where he talks about the conmen and how it’s an extremely American archetype, right?
It’s very American.
The American officer: he’s moving his way up by taking on a new identity and forced against his own desire into having to fight a heroic situation with swiftness and even devotion.
While that’s happening, Alec Guinness, who has the more old-school patriotism and sense of king and country, is both doing the things necessary to help his men, and also helping the enemy build something, right?
He builds the morale by building the bridge, which actually helps the Japanese war effort.
And even his junior officers are at first mystified before they too throw themselves into it and get wrapped up in the project.
David Lean’s films: he starts out with Dickens adaptations and World War II films, but then he creates a quartet of great films dealing with the edges of empire, the ending of some, and the beginning of others. So Bridge on the River Kwai. You mentioned Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago, but you also have Passage to India (1984).
Yeah. And Ryan’s Daughter (1970) is set in Ireland.
It’s during World War I.
Mm. I think so. It stars Robert Mitcham. It’s not as well-known as the others. It was not as successful. It made it difficult for him to bounce back, which he finally did with Passage to India, which is based on a Forrester story.
But the Bridge on the River Kwai, it’s the end of the British Empire, and it’s the beginning of the American empire…
Right.
And Japan is in retreat. Lawrence of Arabia: it’s the paradoxes that arise from the extent of empire and the Rudyard Kipling impulse to throw off your Englishness and localize with the indigenous population.
To go native, as they say.
Dr. Zhivago: it’s the end of the Czar and then the rise of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Soviet Empire. So it’s dealing with the fall of the old pre-WWI empires and the rise of the Cold War empires, the United States and the Soviets.
Yeah. And the Ireland of Ryan’s Daughter is of course set during the waning days of that period when Whitehall still controlled all of Ireland. So maybe that too even fits the theme. It’s the nearest part of British imperialism, but their empire over the Irish endured for centuries.
All of these films deal with the kinds of heroes found at the edges of world empires, but we’re here to talk about a very specific kind of hero, the cowboy, but more generally, the frontiersman of the ever-changing American west.
Now the western is not as prominent today as it was back then around the mid-century, but it was an extremely prolific genre that dominated the American mind. Yet we have, as you once pointed out to me, very relatively few films involving the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. The western seems to be most of the canon for portrayal of American history or self-mythologizing. Can you tell me a bit about that and why you think that is?
I’m not sure why that is.
I can say this: the American literature from which films are occasionally made of some note is full of frontier themes, if going back as far as James Fennemore Cooper with The Deerslayer prominently filmed many times: The Last of the Mohicans (1992) most recently with the Daniel Day Lewis version, which is very fine.
So Cooper is a frontier novelist. Twain: look, how does the adventures of Huckleberry Finn end? With Huck saying he’s going to light out for the territories. He rejects civilization. He’s going to go west. By the way, Twain had an extremely low opinion of Cooper and his essay on “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” is one of the most hilarious essays you’ll ever read.
But it’s probably not until the end of the 19th century that a kind of frontier mythos in literature really takes hold. So we were talking recently about the great frontier thesis of the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner.
“The Significance of the American Frontier in American History.”
It was in Chicago. My great grandfather was there.
In July of 1893, the AHA—the American Historical Association—had its meeting in Chicago during the Columbian Exposition. Turner gives this lecture there; it’s then published by the AHA. He’s a professor at the time at the University of Wisconsin. And he developed the theme of this essay in a lot of subsequent essays, which were then collected into a book which I have.
Turner was not a mono-causal guy. He believed that historical events and experiences had multiple causes. It’s all very complicated. However, what he wanted to bring to surface in this essay was an underappreciated cause or variable in the American experience—something that is pretty decisive in shaping what America is and how it thinks of itself—and that’s the frontier.
Now that word “frontier” is interesting. Everywhere else, the word “frontier,” which comes to us from the French, means “border” or “boundary” between two nations. So you could speak of driving in France to the Swiss frontier, right? That would just be the border checkpoint. “I’m at the frontier, honey”—you call your wife and tell her. Well, in America—bracketing of course the presence of the tribes of Native Americans who were here when European settlers came—from the settler’s point of view, there was this vast wilderness to their west, peopled, yes, by tribes that they regarded as uncivilized savages and whom they sometimes brutally pushed aside and treated badly. All of that has to be taken as read.
Fierce competition, but also sometimes in different places a lot of cooperation.
But here on this continent, frontier came to mean something new. It meant that wild country to the west that was as yet on people to unsettled by us, by Europeans and the descendants of Europeans. And the frontier was pushed westward first to the fall line of the great rivers like the Hudson, the Delaware, the Susquehanna, and the James River.
This would’ve been during the colonial times and then after the Revolution.
So John Marshall, the Great Chief Justice, grows up on the frontier, which is what: Fauquier County, an hour west of Washington, D.C. And then explorers like Daniel Boone crossed the Cumberland Gap and explore Kentucky. That’s frontier. In Fennemore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, Kentucky is still the frontier. So the frontier keeps moving westward through the northwest Territories through the old Southwest.
When de Tocqueville visits, my home state of Michigan was the frontier.
Yeah, exactly.
I remember somewhere [he says], out west where he was: “I was in a long cabin reading Henry the V for the first time.”
Yeah, right. So Lincoln is born in Kentucky and a log cabin. It’s in 1809. So the frontier moves ever westward, and Turner opens his essay with an observation in which he quotes the head of the census bureau who says, following the 1890 census, that “essentially the frontier is now closed.”
There’s no frontier line, no line that runs north-to-south west of which is the frontier. That’s gone in 1890, says the Census Bureau. And Turner picks up on this and says, “That’s very interesting. That should tell us something about a frontier experience that has been formative, a shaping influence on American life.”
Turner didn’t speak of things this way, but you can take the concept all the way back to John Locke who says in The Second Treatise, that “originally, all the world was America”—by which he means a savage pre-Civil condition, a state of nature without what Locke would recognize as organized civil society with governments and the rule of law and so forth.
So Americans have this in our cultural experience that we’re a mobile people. We’ll pick up and move to new frontiers when life makes demands on us or frustrates us. People came here as immigrants and moved immediately to the West. That’s why you find these interesting pockets of Germans here and Swedes there all over the middle west and the western states.
My great grandfather, who was a toddler from Germany in the years just before the Civil War, came to Michigan with his family and became a blacksmith.
The Shinkels also came pre-Civil War and settled in Indiana and Michigan. There were so many of them with kids who had the same first names that the local administrator took all the last names of the different families and change the spelling in order to divide everyone.
Gosh, that’s funny.
It’s a country where people acquire new identities as well as new lives.
Which is what we’re talking about with the conman, the self-made man. Someone who remakes himself, like being born again.
And of course the frontier has given us so much of our literature, not only Cooper and Twain, but later Owen Worcester, Zane Gray.
Louis L’Amour.
Louis L’Amour, and that line of writers who come down to Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, and so on.
I could also add a local Detroit favorite, Elmore Leonard.
Okay. Yeah.
And some of his western stories.
Yeah, that’s right.
And much of his gangster and lawman novels like Raylan Givens are just modern westerns.
Sure. And eventually, the cowboy or sheriff hero, the loner with a gun who brings rough justice to the uncivilized west comes to be replicated in a new guise in the Sam Spade or the Philip Marlowe of detective noir fiction.
And the outlaws become the gangsters. You mentioned that Clint Eastwood starts playing The Man with No Name in the Sergio Leone trilogy (1964-1966).
Right.
And then immediately starts playing Dirty Harry in the Don Siegel films (1971).
Yep. Yep. Absolutely. And of course, Eastwood memorably returns to the Western in films like Pale Rider (1985) and others.
The Outlaw Josie Wales (1976), High Plains Drifter (1973), and then Unforgiven (1990), which unfortunately decimates the genre, although it is a fantastic film.
I remember there was a little inside joke that the Coen brothers had in the film, Hail Caesar (2016), which is a particular favorite.
I love that movie.
In the film, there’s a cowboy singer, Roy Rogers figure, who sings songs, gets the farm girl, knows how to lasso, and the studio is trying to turn him into sort of a strait-laced social comedy gentleman, right? But then as George Clooney’s character is kidnapped, he starts piecing together who was the person or the people behind it, and that’s when he starts playing the private detective. He starts figuring things out. So the cowboy turns into the private detective almost by default.
This is in Die Hard (1989) where John McLean calls himself “Roy Rogers,” his nickname on the radio.
Yeah. Yippy kay yay…
Yes. We’ll not finish the rest of that sentence…
But in that film, the cowboy became the law man who is a rough John Wayne figure brought in to deal with frontier-justice-style some threat that is beyond the current bounds of what the law is able to do.
Instead of a gun on his hip and a horse under we have the detective with the gun in his shoulder holster and his car. You have Steve McQueen in Bullitt (1968). You have Dirty Harry. Even John Wayne gets into the private eye genre late in his career.
Now let’s think about that character whose name escapes me in Hail Caesar, the cowboy that they try to make over into a leading man in a more romantic contemporary film.
Hobie Doyle.
There you go. So Hobie Doyle is the star of B-pictures. He’s a singing cowboy, a big star, and a moneymaker for the studio. He’s a Gene Autry or Roy Rogers type. From the dawn of Hollywood in the silent era, countless westerns had been made. But these are B-pictures, B-westerns, that the studio just churns out a fairly low budget. These are not the main attraction at the cinema. And so when they are trying to transition him to a Laurence Laurenz production, they give him to the studio’s most prestigious director to be in a glamorous picture, in a tuxedo. What they’re trying to do is lift this guy up from the B-pictures to the A-pictures. And interestingly enough something similar was done for the western genre and its leading man by our hero, John Ford.
Throughout the 1930s, Hollywood was continuing to make tons and tons of westerns, but relatively rarely were those A-pictures. They were generally B-pictures shown before the main feature. They lasted usually no more than an hour in length—so about half the length of a main attraction.
And one of the stars of multiple B-westerns in the 1930s was John Wayne, who had a big break in a 1930 movie directed by Raul Walsh called The Big Trail, but it hadn’t done well at the box office. And Wayne had receded to B-pictures, doing one after another. John Ford elevates him to star status with a single film in the banner year of 1939: Stagecoach.
But Stagecoach accomplished two things. It made a star out of John Wayne, and it made a respectable picture subject out of the much-derided horse opera, the Western. From then on not just Ford, but Howard Hawkes, Raoul Walsh, Michael Curtiz, William Wyler, and then famously in the 1950s, Anthony Mann, Bud Boetticher, and then Sam Peckinpah comes along.
The Western becomes in many ways the American feature film par excellence.
It’s an interesting question why we are so fixated on the Western as opposed to other films. There’s a famous John Ford Revolutionary War film dealing with the frontier with Henry Fonda.
Drums Along the Mohawk (1939). It’s based on a Walter Edmonds novel that sold pretty well in the thirties. It stars Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert. They live on the frontier of upstate New York in the revolutionary period.
Deals with the area where the Battle of Chattanooga will be fought.
Right, chiefly off-screen. There are some battles that Fonda and his fellow frontier villagers are involved in as militiamen in the Revolution. But it is interesting how not very many notable films have been made about the American Revolution.
Here we are about to celebrate the semi-quincentennial and, Ken Burns has recently done his American Revolution documentary series (2025). People have criticisms of some of its flaws or spins on things. I share some of those criticisms, but overall I think it’s very good.
There’s the John Adams miniseries (2008).
With Paul Giamatti as Adams. It’s very well regarded.
It’s a great series. Although one problem in it is when they’re showing the debate and signing of the Declaration, they keep going back and forth with the kids in the John Adams family because they’re sick.
Oh gosh.
They’re using the leches. It’s just total wrong contrast for sake of tone.
Yeah.
So relatively little.
1776 (1972).
The Patriot (2001), Mel Gibson’s bloody Extravaganza.
There’s obviously Hamilton, the musical.
Hamilton the musical, right. There’s an interesting late fifties entry into the American Revolution, cinema files: The Devil’s Disciple (1959), based on a George Bernard Shaw play, starring of all people Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Lawrence Olivier. But it’s a character study of the characters those three actors play that is not really dependent in a heavy way on the events in which they’re involved. You could have picked it up and put it down in another wartime setting with ease.
It seems there’s so much for the taking, and so little of it has been used over a hundred years of filmmaking. There’s usually some sort of TV series or a TV movie like Washington crossing the Delaware, but there’s so little of it done when you could have such a big budget for it.
Right. And frontiersmen of our early history made television appearances in series devoted to Davy Crockett.
King of the Wild Frontier.
Yeah, wild frontier. And that word frontier keeps coming up, right? When John Kennedy ran for president, he proclaimed a new frontier. When Star Trek went on the air in the late sixties, “space” was said to be “the final frontier.” So Americans have had this frontier thing going a long time.
But the movies thrive on spectacle, conflict, violence. The depiction of strong passions in people appeals to our sense of justice and injustice, and the frontier gives us lots of ready material for that. And so, of course, do war pictures, which does make it interesting that the American Revolution as one of America’s longest wars and the one that made us a country has had relatively little cinematic attention.
Same with the Civil War to a certain degree. Obviously, there’s Gettysburg (1993) with Martin Sheen.
And there’s Gone with the Wind (1939); The Red Badge of Courage (1951) with Audie Murphy—a fine John Houston adaptation.
A little more than the Revolution, but not as much compared to the westerns, which get reinvented like every couple of decades.
Not at all compared to the westerns. And then of course the great war picture period for Americans is from the forties through the sixties with Second World War films. The studio system of Hollywood was large and well established. It was the center of world cinema, with all apologies to the great directors of Europe.
The blockbuster was invented here.
Technicolor was invented here.
The best and highest talent could create crowd-pleasing features, and once in a while you’d have something artistically innovative.
But what happened, of course: the Second World War was an all-hands-on deck mobilization of the whole society, and Hollywood enthusiastically embraced this the whole array of studios. All of the big studios went in for patriotic gung-ho support of the war effort. Directors, actors.
Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series (1942-195), which earned the Pentagon on its one Oscar.
John Ford was wounded at midway filming the Japanese attack.
The serendipity of filmmaking, right?
His superiors sent him there fearing and half-expecting that a Japanese attack would be made on it. So they knew something Ford didn’t know, but he was just going around the island filming the troops in the tranquil days before the attack. Then all the warning claxons started the sound; and suddenly there he was in the thick of the war; and he got a purple heart for it.
Great documentaries were made involving World War II, but there was a lack of great feature fictional portrayals. That only happened after the war. They Were Expendable (1945) by John Ford as an example. Or to deal with the self-mythologizing: Audie Murphy’s To Hell and Back (1955).
And he plays himself.
And becomes an actor. It’s Buffalo Bill writing his Autobiography and as the West is still happening, he starts portraying it. Before the western as a fictional genre, it probably existed in the autobiographies, so Davy Crockett’s autobiography, Kit Carson’s autobiography.
To hype on the western specifically: Turner has an interesting point that the frontier was able to immediately Americanize immigrants more than anything else: you’re a Swede, you’re a German, you’re French, you’re English, you’re Irish, you’re Chinese, whatever you happen to be.
Wow. That was much more fraught with difficulty.
Agreed. Many freed slaves went out west.
Right.
The point is, when you’re out there, the conditions individualize you. They cut you off from whatever is your demographic extraction, and they force you in a similar environment that has a very formative effect. It’s almost like you’re going to marine bootcamp.
Yeah. Turner posits, a democratizing influence to the frontier, and there’s much to be said for that, although we don’t want to overdo it too much.
But the importance is that Americans believe in this kind of thing. It’s not exactly by your bootstraps; it’s obviously communal efforts.
Right. And when immigrants and others and migrants from the east get to the west, the question before them is: can they do the work and make a contribution to collective survival of the budding communities that they’re planting out there, the towns they’re building, the communities, the farms they’re busting sod for, or the range that they’re pastoring their cattle on? Can they do the work and survive? And if they can prove themselves, that suffices.
Okay, so there is a democratizing ethos to it, but we can’t sugarcoat the fact that the racism is still a factor. Yes, emancipated slaves make the way westward, but many of them face great difficulties of the bigotry of whites. The White-Latino, American-Mexican relationship continues to be a very difficult one in places like Texas, where the border had moved over the course of war vast parts of what had once been Mexico were now part of the United States, but Hispanics are left behind. And the Chinese are treated terribly as ill-paid coolies. Then of course, by the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1880s statutorily prevented from becoming citizens by naturalization.
Something you point out though is that a Western director like John Ford is still able to look at these ambiguities and take what is these different minority groups, and value the heroism in each of their examples. and that becomes through the storytelling, the inheritance of all America.
And it’s a bum rap on Ford that he makes stereotypically anti-Native American films.
No. You look at Cheyenne Autumn (1964).
Cheyenne Autumn is a beautiful, elegiac film about what becomes of a tribe of Native Americans who are driven from pillar to post in the dead of winter to be planted on a reservation somewhere that is strange to them. It’s a kind of a heartbreaking film in many ways, and Ford put his heart into it. It’s one of his last films. It’s about 1964 and stars Richard Widmark notably after The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Yeah. When he’s making westerns that are somewhat complicating the picture of the more straightforward heroic westerns that he had been making before. But if you look at They Were Expendable, obviously a World War II film, or you look like The Searchers (1956), he was always dealing with the complexities of the heroic portrayals that he was engaging.
And Ford had an interest in beleaguered peoples, you might say.
The Irish, for example,
The Irish, his own Irish, right? John Ford won the best director Oscar four times. None of the films for which he won were westerns.
How Green Was My Valley (1941).
How Green Was My Valley, which is Welsh coal miners under the thumb of English coal mine owners.
The Quiet Man in 1952.
The Quiet Man is his love note to Ireland.
But the first movie in which he won a Best Director Oscar was a much darker movie about Irish life called, The Informer (1935), which is about a man who betrays his fellow Irish republicans to the British authorities. A lovely performance by the great character actor in the Ford Stable, Victor McLaglen.
The John Ford Stock Company, it was called, where he has the same actor, the same crew.
Ward Bond, Barry Fitzgerald, Ben Johnson, Harry Kerry, Jr.
To finish off dealing with why the Western fascinates us: it seems that those harsh conditions create a kind of vicarious way of living out the idea of heroism. It’s something in which the harsh justice the passions, the violence, the spectacle, bring out a situation in which greater nobility is required to survive.
Sure. And some of it is just the bigness of the west, right?
The mythic stature of it.
The incredible wide-open spaces of it all.
You think like the early films of Terrence Malick—those huge horizons.
Yeah. Gregory Peck in The Big Country, for instance, or think of the expansive vistas even in a dark Coen Brothers film like No Country for Old Men.
Fargo, or True Grit.
Yeah. Last night I watched a film I’d never seen before. It was on TCM: a John Sailes film called Lone Star with Chris Cooper. I very highly recommend it. It’s set in the present day in the year that it was made, 1996. It’s modern day 1990s Texas.
Chris Cooper plays a small-town sheriff in a county on the Rio Grande River on the border with Mexico. And there’s a nearby army post. The colonel who’s commanding that army post is a black man. Most of the town, most of the county, are Hispanics, Mexican Americans. There are constant crossings of the border by illegal immigrants coming into the United States.
But the story fits the western template in so many ways. You’ve got the lonely sheriff in pursuit of justice. You’ve got a life lived violently on the dirt planes of west Texas. You’ve got all the racial conflict of three races meeting in the same community and conflagrations erupting between them: the Mexicans, the Blacks, and the Whites. No prominent Native American roles, but of course the Mexicans are mestizos, right? So they stand in as well for the Indians.
But it’s a very affecting film. It has some of the noirish aspects of a detective story because the sheriff is trying to figure out an old mystery when a skeleton is unearthed in the desert.
Western noir.
Yeah, it’s western noir. It’s also a sort of a socially conscious message picture about the encounters of cultures on the frontier.
On that very note, Ben Franklin once wrote about the phenomenon that goes all the way back to colonial times. If someone got kidnapped by an Indian tribe, once later freed by their relatives, they would want to go immediately, at the first chance they get, back to the tribe. It is impossible for them to stay among European civilization.
Right. And it may be that people simply long to be with those with whom they feel an authentic cultural affinity. And if you’ve been kidnapped as a child and raised by the Indians, that may simply feel like home to you. The encounter of the cultures and the assimilation of members of each race with the community of the other is also a recurring theme in some of our films. Right, so Last of the Mohicans: Hawkeye is raised by the Mohicans.
Daniel Day Lewis’s character in the Michael Mann film.
Right. So there’s example one Cooper gives us. A man raised by the Native Americans. Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man (1969). Dances with Wolves is another example.
There’s a kind of elegy for this lost wave of life, as if there is a way that the Western settlement could have been done in which native life was still preserved. But there’s also the sense of isolation. Everyone was a man for himself, but then you have The Music Man (1964) with all of the little local platoons marshaling together in the small town. That is what you’re trying to recreate for yourselves. Western films replay the rebuilding in how we envision what America truly is.
That state-of-nature, social-contract theme is a useful one for understanding the American Western our country’s self-understanding of its character.
But look at some of the westerns we’ve already mentioned, like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Violence. In both of those films, John Wayne plays a man who was indispensable to the taming of the West.
In The Searchers, he rescues his niece, Natalie Wood, who has been kidnapped by the Indians and been their captive, and made a part of their community for several years by the time he finds her. But at the end of The Searchers, in that beautiful closing scene when young Natalie Wood is reunited with what remains of her family and community. Really her old family is gone except for her uncle Ethan (John Wayne), but she’s adopted into the loving arms of neighbors at the end of the film on a return home.
And what’s literally the last shot of the film before the credits roll? The front door of the cabin, which from the interior closes and the screen goes dark. And on the outside of the door is John Wayne. He’s the man outside civilization. He can’t come in.
The greatest closing shot in film history.
He has lived a violent life, and he has separated himself from decent polite society. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Violence, it’s much the same.
He’s the man who shot Liberty Violence. (Spoiler alert!) It’s not Jimmy Stewart who killed him, right? It’s from the alleyway with a Winchester rifle. It was Wayne who kills Liberty Violence, an act attributed to Jimmy Stewart’s character which makes him a hero, which makes him the champion of statehood for the territory, and which makes him the long serving first Senator of the new state, the man whose name everyone knows.
And John Wayne’s character: the indispensable man of violence. Jimmy Stewart is playing a lawyer who’s literally bringing the rule of law to the community, right? John Wayne is the gunman, the man himself borderline lawless who is indispensable to taming this frontier, but can’t assimilate into the decent polite society.
To delve into these two films. In The Searchers, John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, and he’s a former officer in the Civil War, he was…
Confederate cavalryman.
Confederate, cavalryman.
Anytime he’s in any domestic situation—whether he’s coming home to his brother’s family, interrupting a wedding, returning at the end—there’s always someone who is like, “Why are you here?” They’re always looking a little askance. His presence, even if explicitly welcomed, is somehow creating tension because he is a rough and ready guy.
He’s a hard and menacing figure.
He is not in exile, but a servant of the domestic sphere, and eventually of the town that will grow from it, but he cannot partake of it, right? He must defend it on the outside, but that means he has to do dirty business. His hands are bloodied. He can’t just wash them clean like Pilate. He has to protect civilization, but has to engage in things uncouth for civilized people.
He does show animus towards specific native tribes based on what they did to his family. He also does show at different moments respect for his rivals, almost as if both he and the one native he’s hunting, who’s kidnapped his niece, need this mimetic rivalry Rene Gerard would understand. They hate each other, but They actually need each other.
They have a very tense face-to-face encounter in the Indian chief’s teepee in which it becomes quite clear that each one understands who the other is and what their conflict is about. And it’s really extraordinary.
Yeah. And he and Jeffrey Hunter actually get out of there alive. Wayne played this figure in a number of westerns.
It’s his Ur-character.
His best roles were as the hard man whose place in polite society is deeply in question. So even in his cavalry trilogy pictures—Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950).
Even in The Quiet Man too, a little bit. Just as a former boxer.
Yeah. He’s the man out of place. You see it as well in his great performance in Red River for Howard Hawks—the film in which John Ford after seeing it proclaimed that he had discovered that Wayne could really act after all, that Hawks had pulled a performance out of John Wayne that Ford wasn’t sure he had in him. And then of course, he got even more out of him in The Searchers.
It’s a heroic type that we both look as scandalous. The PI—the private eye detective who’s always being taken into custody by the local district attorney: “You’re not allowed to solve this case.”
You notice that the noir private detective never has a stable family life either. He too is a loner.
Often an alcohol quest to learn how to get over is alcoholism by taking on a case again.
At the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Jimmy Stewart is at John Wayne’s funeral telling all these reporters that Wayne—the lawman who taught him this lawyer how to use a gun—later told him, “I shot Liberty Valence.” They rip up their notes. The editor explains, “This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
The rule of the law has replaced the rule of a gun. Once the railroad comes, civilization is complete. John Wayne’s character realizes his role is no longer needed, that this noble lie has to be put forward, and that he’s lost the love of his life to the lawyer…
The great Vera Miles.
He burns down his own house. This elegy of the old west, this old rose that’s now gone. But that noble lie: that’s the western being told.
John Ford said that the noble lie, “print the legend,” was based on a love of country. Do you agree with it in Fort Apache and Man Who Shot Liberty Valance? Would you have printed the legend, or would you have gone with the truth?
Oh my, yeah.
As a philosopher.
Oh, that’s a tough question.
In Fort Apache—again, spoiler alert for a great John Ford film—Henry Fonda’s character, who’s based strongly on George Armstrong Custer, dies at the hands of Indians in an attack very much like Little Bighorn.
Of course, the point of the story is he’s trapped in a tragic end of his own making. His own folly did him in and John Wayne, who succeeds him as the commander of this frontier army post, knows it full well, but he tolerates and even does his part to advance the legend that Fonda died heroically without a stain on his character or on his record as a military tactician with some acumen. But, of course, what he lacked entirely was the tactical acumen to keep himself alive.
So what would I have done? I don’t have to make that choice fortunately, but I respect the choice that Ford’s John Wayne makes and that Jimmy Stewart and the newspaper editor make in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
But the western ethos gets channeled into other things. So Frederick Jackson Turner will talk about how agrarianism, science, technology are the things that are going to channel the future. It wasn’t so much the Western continued that the frontiers expanded.
So the 1983 film, The Right Stuff, starts out with Chuck Yeager on horseback. It’s basically a bunch of fighter pilots taking jets as high and as fast as they can, decimating the planes. And then the space program is continuing that.
Or going from the stratosphere to the atomic, in a recent film like Oppenheimer (2023), J. Robert Oppenheimer’s always going on horseback out west. The Manhattan Project takes place in the desert: a bunch of scientists creating a new town for themselves in Los Alamos and building the atomic bomb.
You mention in terms of space westerns in Dr. Strangelove, when the bomb’s going down, the guy on the bomb…
Slim Pickens is waving this cowboy hat, yelling Yeehaw as he falls to his death.
If you had to come up with a new frontier film, what are some of your favorites?
Oh goodness. What was that Bruce Willis film in which a bunch of mining engineers…
Armageddon (1998).
Armageddon. It’s a completely implausible and absurd premise that somehow works. It’s movie logic. They improvise their way to exploding an asteroid that’s threatening to collide with the earth and destroy all life on the planet. But they have to send up these guys who are just cowboying it, right—they’re improvising it on the fly—rather than professional astronaut scientists. The whole Star Trek genre, which I think has exhausted itself on television and played itself out in multiple series.
Wrath of Khan (1982).
Yeah. And had a spotty run in the movies. But it’s not accidental at all that Gene Roddenberry had William Shatner from episode one of the original Star Trek intoning over the opening credits, “Space: The Final frontier.” Final Frontier, right? And we’re going to go splitting the infinitive—which HW Feller says is okay—we’re going “to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
There are obviously other nations of the Earth without the American frontier experience exactly.
That are rivals and competitors in the space race of the sixties and the present and the present day: Russia in the sixties, China today. But for Americans, the whole enterprise of space exploration and going back to the moon now as the Artemis Project intends to do, ultimately as Elon Musk wants to do for colonizing Mars, all of this is part of the American explorer and frontiersman ethos that has really animated Americans since before there was an America. We are in many ways the heirs of Columbus and Vespucci and Cabot and all these other explorers
And the nameless people who went down, almost like out of George Elliot, had these hidden lives in unmarked Graves who helped build this country.
Exactly.
From all across the world, from all different continents.
And now we want to do it off planet. We want to do it on the moon. We want to do it on Mars.
And space gives us a new and unprecedented perspective on God’s creation.
Any of us who have lived through cataclysmic moments in American history have the memory of those days burned on our brains. Any Israeli will remember October 2023. Any American will remember 9/11 if he was of age to have that in his memory to this day from now almost 25 years ago.
I’m old enough to remember the funeral of John F. Kennedy, but I’ll tell you, when I was 10 years old, Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, and I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when that came on the television.
Just as tragic cataclysms catastrophes stick in our mind if we were around when they happened— Pearl Harbor for my dad’s generation, 9/11 for mine—so too, but on rarer occasions, landmark positive moments, moments of awe and wonder by which we are simply overcome with amazement that the human being has been able to do this thing.
That’s what landing on the moon felt like in July of 1969. And most days I’m blase about the whole space program, but there are times when I think: really, going back to the moon, maybe planting a permanent human settlement there of some kind; a rotating population but people actually living on the moon; that is so cool and would be such a landmark moment for the human species.
It’s a collective victory.
Yep.
What are some Frontier films besides the westerns that you would recommend? Frontier very generally defined.
Yeah, that’s interesting. The sort of encounter of adventurers with other cultures. Far from home is always of interest, right? It’s always a meaty subject.
So in the 1930s, Gary Cooper made a film in which he started as Marco Polo going to China. Frank Capra directed a movie of the very short novella of James Hilton: Lost Horizon is a film that was nearly lost and has been reassembled by post-production, recovery, and restoration.
Lost Horizon is a film about an altogether mythical place up in the Himalayas of Tibet or Nepal, where a perfectly peaceful culture exists in which people live for extraordinary lengths of time, in some cases for centuries. And a man, who discovers that culture and then must leave it, sacrifices everything to return to it.
It’s told off screen, but it feels so heroic.
By the way, I will recommend Terrence Malik’s 2005 film, The New World, to everyone as a frontier film when John Smith and the Virginians are about to arrive, the beginning of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen Overture, where it’s the awakening of the gods, is playing. It’s about America and the Jamestown colony. Pocahontas is this stuck between the love of John Smith, who is always looking for the West Indies, and John Rolfe, who’s more like a Wendell Berry figure always trying to plant and create.
To close things out, would you be willing to read this section from your essay on John Ford in Public Discourse:
Yes. What I wrote a few years ago about John Ford was this:
“Together Ford and Wayne created the image of the western hero that endures in the American imagination. That hero is tough, laconic, principled, and duty-bound unto death, but governed by a code that does not always coincide with the law. He is loyal to friends, but capable of getting along with very few of them, gallant to women, but no fool for them, and capable of lethal violence for the sake of any of these loves that govern his heart. John Ford’s America is a good deal, like Ford himself, loud, brawling, and hard-charging. Ford’s Americans are also honorable, self-sacrificing, and faithful to their promises. That’s not the whole truth about America, not by a long shot, but it’s true enough that in John Ford’s films, we will forever see something of ourselves.”
And with that, we shall close. Matt, thank you for joining us on Madison’s notes.
You’re welcome, Ryan. Pleasure to be here.
And to everyone, a Happy America250.
