AMC Western brings you to Spain. This is a new TV channel that only includes “Western movies”, a term that has long been used to refer to a supposedly inferior genre. With his usual irony, John Ford introduced himself as a director of “Western films” and when someone told him that the great chronicler of the American epicthe new Homer, answered with an insult and a blow with the horn of his pipe, and glared at his partner with his cyclopean eye.
Of course, John Ford’s fate did not lead to an injury caused by one of those hair-piercings he enjoyed so much, until his carelessness after eye surgery. Ford had an impossible temperament, but he was the greatest genius in the history of cinema. Neither Billy Wilder nor Hitchcock nor Orson Welles can compete with him.
When asked about his masters, favorite directors, Welles replied: “John Ford, John Ford and John Ford”. I knew it when I saw it She works hard more than 40 times to achieve the highest level of artistic excellence Citizen Kane.
In the late 1960s, the West experienced an understandable attack. He held them accountable for having it dehumanized Native American communities justify the genocide committed by white colonization. No one can deny it, quizzes capital sin of the genreIt is no longer recorded, however, that in 1948 John Ford denounced the abuses committed on the reserves at Fort Apache and dignified the character of Cochise, jefe of the Chiricahua Apaches.
Despite the tendency to demonize the natives, it was widely suspected that they were building a false myth about the conquest of America. However, they preferred the legend over the others, as reported by Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young), the director of the local newspaper Shinbone Star at the end The Man Who Went to Liberty Valance. Art sometimes sacrifices truth in the midst of beauty or grandeur. Noble casi siempre implies deception.
In the following decades, the son began to seek justice and brutally showed the war crimes of the army and the colonists. En Blue soldier (Ralph Nelson, 1970), the Sand Creek Massacre was reenacted on November 29, 1864.
On that day, a force of more than six skilled volunteers from the Colorado Caballería Tercero, under the command of Coroner John Chivington, attacked without warning the camp of the Cheyenes and Arapajós jefe of the Black Caldera, attacking men, women and children indiscriminately. An estimated 135 natives and only new whites died.
In many cases, the victims were mutilated or mercilessly tortured. A critical view of Western history is not incompatible with historical fidelity, nor does it settle for the surgical ideals of revisionist relations.
En La venganza de Ulzana (Robert Aldrich, 1972), se muestra abiertamente las miserables condiciones de vida de los nativos confinados en reservas, pero cuando un grupo de apaches se escapa, no se limita a buscar una vida mejor.
Durante su huida, matan y torturan a familias inocentes. Los pueblos nativos —apaches, comanches, sioux no eran pacíficos agricultores, sino comunidades nómadas que sobrevivían cazando y saqueando a las tribus rivales.
Ulzana y su banda ejecutarán las tácticas de guerra habituales en su cultura, que implican la tortura de los prisioneros hasta la muerte. Era una forma de desmoralizar al enemigo y de apropiarse de su fuerza, de acuerdo con sus creencias tradicionales.
Los apaches no eran más crueles que los soldados de la Caballería estadounidense, los cruzados cristianos de la Edad Media o los paracaidistas franceses que participaron en la batalla de Argel. En las guerras entre culturas diferentes, no hay piedad. Deshumanizado y execrado, solo se anhela destruir al enemigo, infligiéndole el mayor sufrimiento posible.
‘Pasión de los fuertes’, de John Ford.
El wéstern no es simplemente un género que exalte la conquista del Oeste. Al margen del rigor histórico, compone un universo con arquetipos que trascienden el marco histórico. El héroe que lucha contra las injusticias es un mito universal.
En el caso del wéstern, suele ser un sheriff, como en Pasión de los fuertes, un pistolero que busca la redención, como en Raíces profundas o un dandi que suscita las burlas de los cowboys, como en Horizontes de grandeza.
El inconsciente colectivo sabe que los héroes suelen fracasar al luchar contra adversarios mucho más poderosos, como los grandes ganaderos, los políticos corruptos o los banqueros sin escrúpulos, pero necesita fantasear con el triunfo del bien.
En el wéstern, el verdadero enemigo es el mal, que se manifiesta bajo distintas formas. En Centauros del desierto, de John Ford, el mal es el odio que consume a Ethan Edwards, el excombatiente sudista interpretado por John Wayne. Su deseo de venganza lo convierte en una criatura antipática y desdichada. No es un héroe, sino un espíritu atormentado que no conocerá la paz hasta transformar su ira en ternura.
Dispuesto a matar a su sobrina, que ha asimilado la cultura de los comanches tras ser secuestrada por ellos en su niñez, la confrontación final se resolverá con un gesto protector. En vez de disparar, Ethan levanta y abraza a la sobrina perdida. Ese cambio de actitud restituirá su humanidad y le abrirá la posibilidad de echar raíces. Sin embargo, preferirá seguir vagabundeando por Texas, sin otra compañía que su caballo y su rifle.
John Ford no era Chaplin. Los desenlaces de sus filmes nunca escatiman ciertas dosis de amargura. En Pasión de los fuertes, Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) se despide de Clementine con la incertidumbre de un adiós definitivo.
En Fort Apache, la ambición sin límites del coronel Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) provoca una absurda masacre. En El hombre que mató a Liberty Valance, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) sacrifica su felicidad para que desaparezca la violencia y prospere la civilización.
Thanks to his anonymous intervention in the duel, he saves the life of abogado Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), a man who has fallen in love with his promise Hallie (Vera Miles). This gesture deprives her of the affection of a beloved woman and turns her into an outcast. The artists of the new world that will emerge after the pacification of the West will disappear to the margins of history. Shane (Alan Ladd) comes to the host who supports the farmers, victims of the gang’s code, but does so at the cost of the violence he swore he would not bring.
He is a hero, perhaps a traveling horseman, but also an underdog and a villain. Society does not want to know anything about those who have lost their blood so that the law ends with the supreme law. The history of nations is silent about their origins, always bloody cases and no examples.
Women in the West threw away their secondary papers. Self-sacrificing wives, modest teachers or lovers of the home. However, the main character is Vienna (Joan Crawford). Johnny guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954). A game room owner, she handles a revolver better than many men and shouldn’t be intimidated by her enemies.
William A. Wellman made two movies with women as good as him Vienna: Caravana de mujeres (1951) Amber sky (1948). In the first place, a group of pioneers perform a dangerous skit, knowing that a third will not survive.
In the second, Constance “Mike” Mae (Anne Baxter) protects her friend from gunmen in an abandoned mine. In the modern series Wickeda group of young women with a hairy group of pickers during a bloody skirmish.
It is obvious that the classical Western world reflects the mentality of another era, but It retains its appeal on its epic load. In a time without great adventures, heroism and legends were created by a powerful seduction.
Quizzes and that explains the spread of series taking place in the West, as Yellowstone and his followers and precuelas, Wicked, Billy the Kid, Once upon a time in the West, Horizon or Deadwood.
Making AMC Westerns confirms that the genre remains very much alive. No matter how young children get excited about great classics like Grupo Salvaje, Two Men and Destiny or Winchester 73, but the result of Sin pardón (Clint Eastwood) in 1992 clearly shows that the boy had the ability to reappear time after time.
The West will never die
The truly versatile is always done in a small place. Troya has not fallen into the shadows and also symbolizes the great moral dilemmas associated with war, such as the possibility of experiencing compassion for a ravaged enemy.
Dodge City, the town pacified by the legendary Wyatt Earp, also holds a place in memory and for many represents the struggle of civilization against the predatory impulses of the human condition. The West will never die and never stop evolving. I think the best western that has been made in recent years Comancherie (David Mackenzie, 2016), a gritty portrait of rural America, poor and forgotten.
Its tragic ending takes place in Texas and coexists with a hopeful message: the poor can sometimes defeat the powerful, and there is always hope to come. I think the west will follow alive while mankind retains the seat of freedom and adventure. AND cowboy It is not an imprint of the past, but one of the rostros of human rebellion.
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