A new exhibit in Scottsdale pays homage to Western movies and their appeal through the decades

MARK BRODIE: Westerns have been part of the mythology of this region for decades, from John Wayne to Clint Eastwood to lots of actors you probably wouldn’t think of for their work in the genre.

[WESTERN MONTAGE PLAYS]

CLINT EASTWOOD: You see, in this world, there’s two kinds of people, my friend. Those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig.

JOHN WAYNE: Stand aside, Martin. No, you don’t, Ethan. Ethan, no, you don’t! Stand aside!

VAL KILMER: Don’t any of you have the guts to play for blood? I’m your huckleberry. That’s just my game.

JIM DAVIS: Just who in the hell do you think you are?

JOHN WAYNE: Jacob McCandles.

JIM DAVIS: Oh, I, uh — I thought you were dead, Mr. McCandles.

JOHN WAYNE: Not hardly.

[END OF WESTERN MONTAGE]

MARK BRODIE: And an exhibit at Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West pays homage to Westerns through the decades. It’s called “Still in the Saddle: A New History of the Hollywood Western” and is on display through the end of the year.

An exhibit at Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West pays homage to Westerns through the decades. It’s called “Still in the Saddle: A New History of the Hollywood Western,” and is on display through the end of the year. The exhibit is broken into six sections, each looking into a different aspect of Westerns, and includes movie posters, screens showing scenes from some of the films, and reprints of movie listings from Arizona theaters in 1969, among other displays.

Earlier, I met Andrew Patrick Nelson at the museum to take a look at the show. He’s the museum’s chief curator, and for the record, says his favorite Western is the 1971 John Wayne movie “Big Jake,” while “The Searchers” is his all-time favorite movie.

And we started at the entrance to the exhibit, which features a 20-foot-tall neon cowboy, vintage cars, and a big screen. Nelson says it’s meant to evoke the late ’60s and early ’70s, and that that timing is intentional.

ANDREW PATRICK NELSON: Well, it’s a little bit after the heyday, and that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to do this show. It’s based on a book that I wrote called “Still in the Saddle.” And the book is about the Western in the late ’60s and 1970s. And there’s a certain story that we tell about that period, that it came after that heyday of the ’50s, that it was a time when the Western was declining, maybe wasn’t as popular. And it’s true that it wasn’t as popular, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t interesting films, entertaining films, doing interesting things.

So, the advantage of the museum show is you can actually immerse people in the diversity that was the Western at this exciting moment where you had so many different things happening. You’ve got, like, yes, you’ve got Clint Eastwood, but you’ve also still got John Wayne, who’s a big star. So, yes, you have a film like “The Wild Bunch,” but we’ve got Western comedies, more traditional films.

It’s just a reminder of that, you know, art when it exists in the moment is always complex and interesting, doing different things. And then, you know, over time, we tend to forget how complicated it was, and our memories shrink it down to something a simpler story.

MARK BRODIE: Well, it’s interesting, because I think for a lot of people, they look at Westerns at this point, maybe even the recent past, and think, “OK, this is sort of an oversimplified version of what the West really was.” It sounds like you don’t necessarily disagree with that.

ANDREW PATRICK NELSON: No, not necessarily. I mean, movies are art. They’re an interpretation of history. So, it’s never the case that Westerns, whether Westerns in the ’50s, whether Westerns in the ’70s, or Westerns today, are what you would call historically accurate. That’s not the reason to watch a Western movie. It’s not a history lesson, maybe to get interested in history. It’s not that.

But, you know, certainly Westerns tell us more about changing ideas, changing standards, like in this moment of time, suddenly filmmakers could be more expansive when it came to, say, the violence that they portrayed. So, it’s never the case that earlier filmmakers didn’t want to show violence or sex; they couldn’t because of the censorship apparatus in Hollywood.

MARK BRODIE: All right. Let’s go take a look.

ANDREW PATRICK NELSON: OK. So, the show is organized into different sections. So, we begin here with the Westerns of 1969, again telling that story about all the different movies that were made at that moment in time, telling us that this isn’t a moment when the Western — it certainly wasn’t dead, it wasn’t even dying. It was against, I guess, a backdrop of social unrest, political turmoil, generational change. You had competing visions vying for the attention of Americans, let’s say.

And so as we move into the gallery from here, we can sort of from this vantage point see in the distance a giant poster, billboard-size poster of Robert Redford in “Jeremiah Johnson.” So, we have a section there about the representation of American Indians. Then we have sections dedicated to the changing depiction of classic heroes, so the way Wyatt Earp or Billy the Kid change. Got a big section here dedicated to John Wayne.

And then to round it off, a section dedicated to Clint Eastwood, sort of the inheritor of the mantle of great Western star who then becomes a great Western filmmaker. And then the last section takes us into the 1980s and ’90s to see how the Western petered out to a certain degree over the course of the 1980s, but then came back in the early ’90s for one last hurrah.

MARK BRODIE: What is it about this part of the world, do you think, that appeals to filmmakers so much? I mean, you don’t see a lot of movies about the Midwest or New England or Florida or any place else really, but this is a whole genre.

ANDREW PATRICK NELSON: Yeah. No, people make that point that for this remarkably confined period, as I said, end of the Civil War, maybe a little bit earlier, maybe the Gold Rush, to the turn of the century, and then a very restricted place, west of the Mississippi, east of the Rockies. So, that brief moment in this sort of strip of land has occupied more imaginative territory not only in the United States, but maybe in the world, than any other period in the United States.

So, that big question is why. Why is that? Well, it could be that this was just the moment that forged the American character. Many people have made that argument, that it was the pioneer experience that distinguished America from many other nations, that westward-moving frontier on which the opposed forces of so-called civilization clashed with so-called savagery or wilderness. And that then became ingrained in our popular culture.

MARK BRODIE: How have you seen the stories that are told in these movies evolve over the years?

ANDREW PATRICK NELSON: So, what’s remarkable is they haven’t changed all that much. I mean, the nice thing about the Western, though — and we might compare it to other genres that have persisted for a long time, maybe the horror genre, right? — is that there’s a reason we tell the same stories over and over again, because that’s a new generation offering their spin on a particular story.

MARK BRODIE: When you talk about the characters in these movies, I’m curious how you see sort of the character of the place changing, and maybe different filmmakers looking at it differently, because obviously the Western is not a Western if it’s not in the West, right?

ANDREW PATRICK NELSON: That’s absolutely the case. Now, what the West is, of course, is there are different Wests, right? Like Monument Valley is a different West than Colorado or Utah or Wyoming and so on. So, the West itself is maybe a bit of a misnomer, because there are different Wests, even if they all tend to be kind of conflated.

But that landscape becomes very important. I think one thing you do begin to see in later Westerns, and I think we see it today, is that landscape has been codified in particular ways because we’re so familiar with it, right? So, some filmmakers approach the landscape with a kind of reverence, but at the same time, in a lot of these films, you see some filmmakers trying to push back against that a little bit, either trying to show familiar landscapes in new ways or to take us to potentially different places in the West to show us the West the way it really was.

MARK BRODIE: You kind of alluded to this, but I want to ask you more specifically about how have you seen over the years Native Americans’ portrayal in Westerns change?

ANDREW PATRICK NELSON: Yeah. I mean, this is a nuanced topic, and I come at this just having seen a lot of Westerns. So, I would push back on the idea that uniformly American Indians were depicted as one-dimensional savages or something like that. It’s never been that simple.

I think what you see over the course of history, I mean, there are some historical factors. The big one is you almost never had an American Indian actor in a leading indigenous role. Was it wrong? Yes. Was it the case that there weren’t important American Indian actors or filmmakers doing important work really from the teens onward? No. I mean, there are many remarkable stories of great Native actors and filmmakers in the film business. But when it comes to the Western, yeah, we have to concede that redface performance was a part of it. It’s still a part of it at this moment.

You know, this ’70s moment, this is the moment of the American Indian Movement, a moment of indigenous rights visibility growing largely from a frustration of the lack of gains for Indian peoples coming out of the civil rights movement. But even in this moment, we still have Hispanics or white actors, or sometimes Asian actors playing lead Indian roles.

So, we’re standing in front of a poster for “Little Big Man,” which is a very famous movie because of the performance of Chief Dan George, right? So, he’s a chief from British Columbia, Canada, limited acting experience, and only on television in Canada — not to say anything bad about television in Canada. I watched a lot of Canadian television growing up. But that’s kind of seen as a real watershed moment for Indigenous representation. And so that’s great. We never want to take that away. But he was not the first choice for that role, and there are many other Indigenous roles in that movie that are played by non-Indigenous actors. So, it’s sadly never straightforwardly beneficial.

MARK BRODIE: Andrew Patrick Nelson is chief curator at Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West. The exhibit, “Still in the Saddle: A New History of the Hollywood Western,” runs through the end of the year.

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