Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

The Way of the Western, Part I: The Tin Star (1957), High Noon (1952), and the Myth of the Cowardly Townsman

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The Tin Star is a movie I’ve meant to review in one way or another for some time. Surprisingly little-known, considering its director and lead actors, it’s become a favorite of mine over the last few years.

The film opens with bounty-hunter Morgan Hickman (Henry Fonda) meeting a cold reception as he enters a town to claim his reward for the body of a wanted man. The town’s leading citizens disapprove of bounty-hunters on principle, while brutish town bully Bart Bogardus (Neville Brand), has an axe to grind as a relative of the dead man’s. The only hospitality Hickman receives is from a woman (Betsy Palmer) who is mostly ostracized by the townsfolk because her young son (Michel Ray) is half Indian. But after the town’s young and extremely inexperienced acting sheriff, Ben Owens (Anthony Perkins), witnesses Hickman’s ability to handle troublemaker Bogardus—who incidentally has his own eye on the sheriff’s job—and learns that Hickman was once a sheriff himself, he appeals to Hickman to give him some lessons in handling a gun and properly carrying out his job, in hopes of holding onto it permanently. Hickman reluctantly agrees, in spite of his own scornful attitude towards lawman’s work owing to incidents in his past—and the continued disapproval of the townspeople, who take issue with Owens’ associating with a bounty-hunter. Matters finally come to a head after an instance of robbery and murder, when Bogardus stirs up a mob to serve vigilante justice, against Owens’ determination to bring the guilty men in for a fair trial.

The Tin Star is a very good film—well-acted, well-crafted, and with a neatly-layered script. One of the things I like best about it is the complexity provided by multiple antagonists—on one side, ordinary garden-variety stagecoach robbers; but on the other, Bogardus’ campaign to see them lynched which forms the crux of the climax. It’s complicated even further by the clash between Hickman’s pragmatic views of hunting down criminals and Owens’ stubborn, idealistic determination to bring his prisoners in alive.

But on my most recent viewing, as I watched, I became aware of a growing dissatisfaction with something about the story. Something which didn’t ring true for me, after the time I’d spent immersed in earlier literature of the American West.

The Cowardly Townsman

The leading citizens of the unnamed small town in The Tin Star are a type familiar in Western movies. Town-dwellers, suit-clad, apparently owners of local businesses, they have a strong distaste for anything smacking of irregularity or lawlessness, but an equal disinclination to personally take action about anything. They want someone else to handle the job of maintaining law and order, but offer him little practical support and frequently hamper him by objecting to his methods of doing it. The ultimate example of this type of citizenry is found in High Noon (1952), where harassed town marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) tramps the streets looking for somebody, anybody, to help him deal with four outlaws, only to have an entire town hem, hedge, and literally hide to avoid taking anything that looks like a personal risk. [Read more…]

The Way of the Western: Introduction

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I’ve long been a fan of primary resources when it comes to learning about history. Particularly when it comes to the American West—in fact, I’ve compiled an entire Goodreads list of memoirs, diaries and letters relating to the pre-1920 West, of which I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface myself. There’s nothing like reading a personal account by someone who was really there—and next best is good fiction by an author who actually experienced the time and place they wrote about.

Of course it’s wonderful for research, if you’re a writer. But after spending some years reading this kind of material, I’ve gradually become aware of an additional side-effect: you begin to develop a sensitivity to false notes struck in more recent historical fiction and in film. Not just blatant errors like anachronistic speech or inaccurate clothing and weapons—subtler things like underlying attitudes, depictions of cultural and societal norms, ways of thinking and reacting, which you realize seem quite foreign to the experience of the people who wrote those earlier memoirs and novels.

I recently had a “lightbulb moment” on this topic as it relates to the Western genre.

Ever since I became a real enthusiast for Western fiction and history, there has been one question puzzling me: what happened to the Western? Though there are periodic claims of a resurgence, and people are still writing books and making the occasional film, let’s face it: the Western as a genre does not exist in the way it once did. It is not widely popular with the masses of readers, and it is not viewed in the same way as it once was. And I wanted to know why. After a lot of thinking and puzzling, the best I could come up with were a pair of companion theories. One, over-saturation—after decades of widespread, pervasive popularity, the Western simply wore out its welcome, eventually swamped by the legions of cheap “shoot-’em-up” imitations that obscured the best of the genre and gave it a bad name. Two, the cultural and moral upheavals of the 1960s, which changed the prevailing American worldview so drastically that the Western, largely rooted in traditional American values, was battered by revisionism and political correctness and could no longer survive in the mainstream.

That’s the best I could figure, but I was never wholly satisfied with those conclusions. Something was missing. And then one day recently, a conversation with my mother about the destruction of American literature, coming on the heels of reading Eugene Manlove Rhodes’ essay “The West That Was,” made something click in my head. The Western didn’t die a natural death, nor was it defeated by force in the 1960s. The Western was destroyed from within, and evidence of steps in the process can be seen in some of the most popular and well-crafted Western films of the mid-20th century.

I’ve always been aware that period films show the influence of the decade in which they were made, from the cut of the costumes to the attitudes reflected in the screenplay. In fact, I once wrote a blog article on how the influence of the Great Depression can be seen in the B-Westerns of the 1930s. I now believe that what killed the Western was a gradual assimilation and reflection of the values of the 20th-century decades in which the films were made and books were written—until by the onset of the 1960s it was ripe to vanish into the sea of revisionism that wiped out its last resemblance to the West that writers like Rhodes knew.

What I have in mind now is to sort out some of the thoughts that led me to this conclusion, over an informal and likely rambling series of posts, using examples from Western film compared to some of that early literature. Titles I’m thinking of covering include The Tin Star (1957), High Noon (1952), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Yellow Sky (1948), and possibly more. I may even catch up on a couple of films I haven’t seen yet, for the purposes of comparing them to their source material. I don’t have a planned schedule and I may very well go off on tangents, but I hope you’ll come along for the read (very bad pun) and find some food for thought along the way.

Subsequent posts:
Part I: The Tin Star (1957), High Noon (1952), and the Myth of the Cowardly Townsman
Part II: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and the Pitfalls of Half-Told History
Part III: Four Faces West (1948), 3:10 To Yuma (1957), and the Problem of the Quasi-Accurate Adaptation
Part IV: Yellow Sky (1948) and the Ambivalence of Film Noir
Conclusion

image: “Stray Man Heads Home” by W.H.D. Koerner

Why Genealogy is Good For Historical Fiction Writers

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My interest in putting together my family tree has always stemmed from my fascination with history. Answering the questions of Where were my ancestors at this point in history? What were they doing, and how did they live? forges a link between us and the past, a curiously immediate and emotional link—it’s a different feeling than one gets from merely reading and studying history from the foreign vantage-point of the twenty-first century.

On the other hand, the more I dig and discover, the more my writer’s imagination feeds off the little scraps of information I piece together. My amateur-level genealogical research has already led from hazy possible beginnings among the Normans of William the Conqueror’s time, to the early colonial settlements of Massachusetts; from brick row houses in Dublin to textile mills in New York; from farms in Vermont and Minnesota to a boarding-house in California; through orphanages and Army barracks, through Castle Garden and Ellis Island—from Constantinople to Marseilles to Bremen to Texas. The mere listing of individuals’ professions on census records are myriad little sparks of the imagination, begging to be blown into the flame of a story someday. Farmer. Laborer. Sawmill worker. Woolen mill foreman. Teamster. Chauffeur. Mechanic. Domestic servant. Schoolteacher. Housekeeper. Photographer. Railroad fireman. Clerk. Carpenter. Tailor. Café owner.

The answers to who and what my ancestors were create another set of questions: What did this place look like when they lived here? What kind of a living did a man in that profession make; what kind of clothes did his family wear? How and where did the paths of this couple first cross? The figure of an ancestor in the foreground makes me want to learn more about the background…and to resurrect all those forgotten stories in imagined stories of my own.

Of course, there’s even more prosaic ways that researching genealogy can inspire a historical fiction writer. Character naming, for instance. If you ever run dry when trying to name characters, just take a look over a census for the time and place you’re writing about—or even just look at the names in your own family tree. To give you a slight idea of what a fruitful resource this can be, here’s just a sampling of women’s names that I’ve seen, as either first or middle names, among my own ancestors and their relations:

Agnes – Almira – Amelia – Amy – Anna – Aurora – Belle – Bertha – Bessie – Beulah – Blanche – Bridget – Calista – Catherine – Della – Eileen – Elizabeth – Ella – Emily – Emma – Essie – Estella – Ethel – Etta – Fidelia – Frances – Grace – Harriet – Hazel – Honora – Ida – Irene – Jane – Jemima – Jennie – Jerusha – Josephine – Julia – Julietta – Laura – Lela – Lena – Louise – Lucinda – Lucy – Luna – Margaret – Mariah – Marion – Mary – Maud – May – Myrtle – Ora – Phoebe – Rebecca – Ruth – Sarah – Sophronia – Susan – Susanna – Teresa – Ursula – Valeria

You could write a dozen novels and not exhaust that list.

When it comes to colonial and early America, the names can be particularly unique and entertaining. One New England ancestor of mine, name of Manassa Sprague, had brothers named Hiram and Cyrenius, and another rejoicing in the full name of Governor Galusha Sprague. Another ancestor had a brother named Independence, while some of the more interesting women’s names I’ve spotted included Alpha and Czarina. How a woman born in New Hampshire around 1800 (Independence’s sister, by the way) was given a name that is Russian for “empress” is a curious question in and of itself.

Irish names, on the other hand, present a challenge to the researcher in that they’re all the same. If you’re looking for an ancestor named William or Edward, chances are there’ll be at least five Williams or Edwards sharing his surname in any given city.

Historical fiction writers, have you explored your family history? How has it influenced your writing?