One sees reflections of this: I often meditate how in the 40’s and 50’s one of most dominant genres on TV and film entertainment was the Western. It is telling to me that this fell by the wayside somewhere in the ’60’s, and if it remained after this, it remained as a celebration of the anti-hero and as a revisionist, cautionary tale suggesting a immoral and hypocrital past. But Westerns, irrespective of the history of the Wild West, were perforce morality tales and of a most American sort: Ruminations on particularly American notions of virtue and honor in uniquely American settings. Something indeed change in our national character.
Well, Mongoose, I think the two phenomena you observe are related — the locale shift of the broad population off the farms & small towns and into the cities, and the fading of the Western as a common & popular entertainment genre. When people have little to no connection to the land, but are instead urbanites, their imagination’s frame of reference is not “great outdoors” but “city.”
Hence the ubiquity of the urban crime drama. Cops & gangsters.
As I have written in previous threads, at heart the Western is about the Frontier vs. Civilization, and the competing values of the two. When thoughtfully done, the urban crime drama is about the same tension — lawbreaking vs. law enforcement. The not-unimportant issues of racism and tribal vendetta violence that you find in Westerns like “The Searchers” are also very much present in urban crime dramas, because we are *still* dealing with ethnic conflict and territorialism lo these many generations later.
I do see, however, at least two things the Westerns have that you don’t get from urban crime dramas, and that is (1) a sense of history (the lesson that human violence goe way back, and that civilization itself was built by the often bloody enforcement of laws – see “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” “High Noon” etc.), and (2) the natural landscape.
So even though the urban crime drama functions very similarly to the Western, the two are not synonymous. The Western is, as you point out, a distinctively American genre (and, as movies, the distinctively American art form). Whereas cities, and the crime stories that go with them, are international.
Also, as I’ve written in other threads, that “celebration of the anti-hero” that you note as taking place during the 1960s is one of the marks of the modern Western (vs. the classic Western). Civilization is rejected, the outlaw (“one man’s bank robber is another man’s freedom fighter” perhaps?) becomes the embodiment of independence & non-conformity, and the frontier, for all its dangers, is preferred over the settlement (farm, town, city).
The modern Western can be very seductive. Look at “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Who doesn’t prefer Newman & Redford to the faceless superposse? And who doesn’t at first want to laugh when Newman says, of Mr. E.H. Harriman of the Union Pacific RR, “If he’d just pay me the money that he’s spendin’ to get me to stop robbin’ him, I’d stop robbin’ him!” Except that this statement is an expression of naked extortion, and if you put it in the mouth of, ohhhh, say, Edward G. Robinson, somehow it’s not so charming anymore.
“Butch & Sundance” is a great movie but an expression of virtue (the kind you would want to teach your kids) it ain’t.
Likewise, “The Godfather.” Which I consider to be the “Butch & Sundance” of crime dramas. It romanticized the outlaw and did so beautifully. And it is also a great movie (two great movies). But again, not an expression of virtue.
The challenge for the audience is not to get seduced by the aesthetics of these movies.
BTW, Scorsese ends “Goodfellas” with a shot of Joe Pesci shooting a gun directly at the audience. That’s a direct reference to the ending shot of “The Great Train Robbery.” I’m neither the first nor the only person to view urban crime dramas as Westerns in modern guise.
