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Dialogue in the Western

If you have to tell a story with words, you’re in trouble.

You’d better try and find another story. One of the things that makes Westerns work is that they’re told by images.

John Sturges, interview in American Cinema, Part 4: The Western (1994)

Sturges is mistaken, I think; Westerns, like all American sound films, rely heavily on their dialogue to communicate their narratives, sketch in their characters, and so on. Yes, Westerns do place great emphasis on their mise-en-scènes—those glorious mountains and deserts and plains—and yes, they commonly include wordless ac-tion sequences of chases on horseback, wagons crossing a river, or pitched gun battles. But the majestic landscape is the background for a human drama, not stories of sagebrush or rabbits, and these action sequences are always bracketed and contextualized by dialogue scenes.

Nevertheless, the question of dialogue here is exceptionally com-plicated, because this genre in particular acts out a paradoxical love/hate relationship with language, which turns out to be integral to the genre’s meaning. “Westerns distrust language,” Jane Tomp-kins writes. “Time and again they set up situations whose message is that words are weak and misleading, only actions count; words are immaterial, only objects are real. But the next thing you know, some-one is using language brilliantly.”¹

As is well known, the Western, as a genre, predates the invention of the cinema. Some historians trace its origins back to the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, and later to the dime novels glorifying

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cowboys and outlaws. From the Great Train Robbery (1902) to the epic scale of The Covered Wagon (1923), Westerns were a staple of the silent era, and they made the transition to sound with The Virginian (1929). The standard story of the evolution of the genre sees the 1930s and 1940s, as the era of classic Westerns, while in the later 1950s, particularly in the films of Anthony Mann, the Western turned darker and more psychological.²During the 1960s and 1970s, films such as Ride the High Country (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969) were self-consciously both nostalgic and revisionist. In the 1980s and 1990s, although periodically an isolated film would appear—Silver-ado (1985), Dances with Wolves (1990), Unforgiven (1992)—Westerns have no longer been produced in sufficient quantities to sustain the genre as a major facet of contemporary culture.

Various typologies of subcategories of the Western have been of-fered. Subject matter (e.g., “railroad,” “outlaw,” “Indian,” “cavalry,”

“marshal”) can be seen as defining. Alternatively, Westerns can be sorted either in terms of budget and prestige (e.g., epics, “B” pic-tures, and serials) or by their interweaving of other genres (e.g., comic Westerns, such as Blazing Saddles; musical Westerns, such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers). However, the most intriguing system of classification has been developed by Will Wright, who identifies what he sees as the “classical plot,” and then defines a “transition theme,” a “vengeance variation” and a “professional plot,” based upon the films’ underlying structural patterns, particularly the hero’s relationship with society as a whole.³

As Will Wright, Robert Warshow, John Cawelti, and others have pointed out, one of the genre’s central concentrations is on the status and character of its mythic creation, the Western hero. This hero is endowed with both exalted skills and an acute sense of his own honor and moral code. Moreover, this hero literally embodies the clashes between civilization and savagery, East versus West, law ver-sus chaos, community verver-sus individualism, weakness verver-sus power that seethe through Westerns. He balances on the knife edge of these contradictions, separated from both sides, from the helpless towns-people or settlers, on the one hand, and from the lawless outlaws or Indians, on the other. John Cawelti states that these heroes “are above all ‘men in the middle,’ that is, they possess many qualities and skills of the savages but are fundamentally committed to the

* Some Westerns give the hero company on his precarious knife edge—that is, the hero is presented as part of an elite group of men, all of whom have special skills and share the same exalted status. Wright labels such films the “professional” variation and points to The Professionals (1966), El Dorado (1967), and The Wild Bunch (1969) as examples. While these films allow for more male camaraderie, they do not essentially change the sense of isolation inherent in the characterization of the Western hero.

townspeople.”⁴Will Wright argues that different variations of the genre resolve the hero’s instability in distinct ways—he may give up his exalted status (and his “savage” side) to join the townspeople, as in The Westerner (1940), where Cole Hardin becomes totally domesti-cated; or, despite his love for a woman or respect for Eastern values, he may choose to remain outside of society, as in Ride Lonesome (1959), where Ben Brigade gives up Mrs. Steele to his rival and literally re-mains in the wilderness. Either way, through the greater part of the film, the hero (or group of heroes) keep some distance from society, community, family, and marriage.*

Often the Western hero’s loneliness is expressed visually—

through all those shots of riders alone in the vastness of the Western landscape. But just as often, Westerns use dialogue to meditate on the hero’s choices. Take, for instance, John Sturges’s own The Magnif-icent Seven (1960), which features numerous discussions of the gun-fighters’ choice and dilemma, including the following, a highly wrought set piece that, in its singsong poetry, penetrates to the heart of the myth of the Western hero.

chico: Your gun has got you everything you have. Isn’t that true?

Hmmm? Well, isn’t it true?

vin: (bitterly) Yeah, sure, everything. After a while you can call bar-tenders and faro dealers by their first name. Maybe two hun-dred of ’em; rented rooms you live in—five hunhun-dred; meals you eat in hash houses—a thousand. Home? None. Wife?

None. Kids? None. Prospects? Zero. Suppose I left anything out?

chris: Yeah. Places you’re tied down to? None. People with a hold on you? None. Men you step aside for? None.

lee: Insults swallowed? None. Enemies? None.

chris: (slight surprise) No enemies?

lee: (softly) Alive.

Westerns continually offer images of the hero’s solitude, but this discussion of the costs and benefits of his rootless lifestyle provides

39. The Magnificent Seven. Vin counting his ledger.

the viewer with somewhat surprising specifics about rented rooms and hash houses. Moreover, the manner in which each gunslinger picks up the same rhetorical trope illustrates their bond, and their equality, yet the spin that each puts on his contribution differenti-ates them—Vin evinces regret (fig. 39); Chris, pride, independence, and self-sufficiency; Lee, bravado (which we later learn is false). The rhythm of the sentences, with the repeated, definitive “None,” has the power and finality of a moral ledger on Judgment Day.

However, any aficionado of Westerns could make an important addition to Vin’s ledger: “Conversation? None.” In popular percep-tion, taciturnity is a prerequisite for the Western hero—it is part and parcel of his separateness, his loneliness, his superiority. “[T]he la-conic style is commonly associated with the Western hero, particu-larly in the twentieth century when movie stars like Gary Cooper, John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda have vied for the prize as the Western hero who can say the fewest words with the least ex-pression,” Cawelti notes.⁵ This general perception oversimplifies and ignores significant variation: Cooper is tight-lipped in Man of the West (1958) but he plays a masterful verbal trickster in The Westerner (1940). Stewart withholds vital information in The Man from Laramie (1955) but positively babbles in Destry Rides Again (1939) and Two Rode Together (1961). As Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine (1946), Fonda talks at length only to his brother’s grave; however, in Fort Apache (1948), he goes off on tangents about military tacticians. John Wayne, who, as the number one box-office star from 1950 to 1965, may have done more than anyone else to popularize the

stereotypi-* “Contrary to their laconic image, cowboys love to talk. They’re just choosy about who they talk to. Conversations and story-telling offered a welcome relief from often solitary ranch labors,” Richard W. Statta says in The Cowboy Encyclopedia (Santa Bar-bara, Calif.: ABC–Clio, 1994), 192. “On the seething frontier, everything went—the turbulence of life in general was inevitably reflected in language. There was an enor-mous appetite for words, an admiration for words: a man who could bring out a salty phrase or an apt comparison would smash the cracker-barrels,” the language histo-rian Frederic Cassidy argues (“Language on the American Frontier,” in The Frontier in Perspective, ed. Walker Wyman and Clifton Kroeber [Madison: University of Wiscon-sin Press, 1957], 203).

cal close-mouthed hero of the Western, often fits the mold, but Wayne himself is quite garrulous in True Grit (1969). Cawelti might have in-cluded Clint Eastwood in his list, for Eastwood’s marked silence has a menacing air in Hang ’Em High (1968) and in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns. Yet in Unforgiven (1992), Eastwood waxes on in ornate phrases about his dear departed wife. Not surprisingly, these actors’ dialogue styles vary with different characterizations, narra-tives, screenwriters, and directors.

And yet the impression that the Western hero must be taciturn is so much a part of the cinematic record, and so embraced by general cultural expectations, that it overwhelms any evidence to the con-trary. What accounts for this steadfast impression? Historians and linguists argue that cowboys, were not, in actuality, particularly quiet; on the contrary, tall-tale telling and verbal play were more characteristic of Western speech.* Nor are cowboys particularly taci-turn in early fictional accounts such as Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales. The rule that the cowboy must be silent is a twentieth-century invention.

Jane Tompkins seeks to explain the association of fictional West-erners with terseness, and her discussion echoes our earlier findings.

Westerners believe in doing, not talking. “Language is gratuitous at best; at worst it is deceptive.” The Westerner must be silent to en-hance his status as a masculine archetype, to prove and enforce his superiority over women. “For a man to speak of his inner feelings not only admits parity with the person he is talking to, but it jeop-ardizes his status as potent being, for talk dissipates presence, takes away the mystery of an ineffable self which silence preserves. . . . Si-lence is a sign of mastery, and goes along with a gun in the hand. . . . In Westerns, silence, sexual potency, and integrity go together.”⁶Ed Buscombe concurs: “Terseness is a tradition in the Western, in which loquaciousness is often associated with effeminacy.”⁷

Tompkins supports her argument by reference to a scene in Hawks’s Red River (1948) that is so blatant in its association of loqua-ciousness with femininity as to be worth quoting in full. Tess Millay has caught up with Matthew Garth in an Abilene hotel. She is very distressed because she knows that Tom Dunson has vowed to kill Matt for assuming control of his cattle herd.

tess: He’s, he’s . . . he’s camped two or three miles outside of town. He says he’ll be here just after sun-up. He says he’s going to kill you. What’s the matter? Is something . . . ? Oh . . . oh, I must look like I’m in mourning. I didn’t mean it that way . . . I . . . or I wouldn’t . . . No, no, Matthew, I know you’ve only a few hours, but, but listen for just a minute, that’s all, and, and . . . then I won’t talk about it anymore, just a minute. He, he hasn’t changed his mind, Matthew.

matthew: I didn’t think he would.

tess: We saw the railroad and I thought . . . I thought it might make a difference, but it didn’t. Nothing would. He’s . . . he’s like something you can’t move. Even I’ve gotten to be-lieve it’s got to happen, you meeting him. I was gonna ask you to run, but . . . no I’m not, I’m not, it, it wouldn’t do any good. You’re too much like him. Oh, stop me, Matthew, stop me . . .

Matthew covers her mouth with his hand.

tess: (whispering) God bless you, Matthew.

matthew: (kisses Tess)

Under stress, Tess resorts to blabbering and stammering. She speaks nearly a hundred and fifty words, while Matt speaks five.

There is no point in discussing Dunson’s plans; Matt is so wise he al-ready knows them, and he also knows that what Tess really needs (to calm her down about this situation, and in general), is for him to take charge of her, to silence her, and to bed her.

As the most macho man in town, the Western hero must be per-ceived, by other characters, and by the viewer, as the least talkative.

This doesn’t mean that Westerns really avoid dialogue; they can’t—

like every narrative film, they need to explain why these people are in these situations, what is at stake, when the deadline elapses, who is evil, and who is good. But Westerns deliberately create an imbal-ance; they shift as many of the dialogue functions as possible away

from the hero to other characters, and in a classic case of ingratitude, the films go on to condemn these secondary characters for their talk-ativeness. (Tess is the one, above, who communicates to the viewer that Dunson is unwavering in his wrath, that the duel is now in-evitable, and so on.) The shift is enacted because the hero’s compar-ative silence will only be noticeable if everyone else talks too much.

Many women are portrayed as chatterboxes—Calamity Jane in The Plainsman (1936), Emma in Johnny Guitar (1954), Mattie in True Grit (1969)—but it is not only women who can’t keep their tongues still.

Inferior men also talk too much. This is true of the professional men, the doctors, lawyers, and newspapermen, who are talkers rather than men of action and whose dialogue frequently imparts impor-tant plot information. This is certainly true of cowards, punks, and would-be challengers, such as Hunt Bromley in The Gunfighter (1950); the punks shoot off their mouths, they brag and posture to cover up their inadequacies. Conversely, the most fearsome antago-nists, such as Frank Miller in High Noon and Scar in The Searchers, match the Westerner’s terseness.

But the most common talkative foil for the Western hero is his

“sidekick,” a desexualized old-timer who speaks for the hero so that he doesn’t have to. The sidekick appears as early as the silent film; he reappears memorably as Buck in Stagecoach, Groot in Red River, Stumpy in Rio Bravo, Bull in El Dorado, and so on. The actor George Hayes, who was cast as a sidekick in some 150 Westerns, was reveal-ingly nicknamed “Gabby.” In Anthony Mann’s The Far Country (1955), the gabbiness of Walter Brennan’s Ben becomes a major plot point, because he inadvertently lets slip Jeff’s plan to leave the min-ing town, causmin-ing them to be ambushed by the bad guys.

The lesson that the filmgoer is to learn from many Westerns is that talk is futile, only action will avail. As Will Kane says to Amy in High Noon, “If you don’t know I can’t tell you.” Several of the films men-tioned above as offering exceptionally talkative heroes actually enact this parable: for instance, Destry Rides Again offers an unusual story about a young deputy who initially tries to resolve problems through reasoning and storytelling. After his friend is shot in the back, however, he realizes that the time for talking is over; he must strap on his guns to defeat the villains.

However, as soon as one buys into the claim that the Western deval-ues language, a major paradox appears: of all American film genres, it

is the Western that repeatedly, insistently stresses the sanctity of words, the importance of verbal promises. Western heroes are he-roes, not only because of their speed with a gun, but because of their moral integrity. “The Westerner is the last gentleman, and the movies which over and over again tell his story are probably the last art form in which the concept of honor retains its strength,” Robert Warshow observes.⁸ Time and time again, their plots revolve around the sanctity of “keeping one’s word.” In Michael Curtiz’s The Comancheros (1961), John Wayne, as a Texas Ranger named Jake Cutter, finds himself in a difficult position—he feels gratitude to his prisoner, Paul Regret, who has just saved a ranch house from an In-dian attack, but Cutter is still determined to deliver Regret to the au-thorities.

jake: [I] can’t let [you] run. [I] swore an oath when they put that badge on [me].

regret: And that’s important to you?

jake: I said I swore an oath.

regret: Words.

jake: Mon sewer. Words are what men live by. Words they say and mean. You musta had a real careless upbringing.

The issue of being honor-bound by one’s word comes up again and again and again in Westerns. In Ford’s Fort Apache, Captain York is aghast that Colonel Thursday has tricked Cochise into returning to American soil. He protests,

york: Colonel Thursday, I gave my word to Cochise. No man is gonna to make a liar outta me, sir.

In Richard Brooks’s The Professionals, Rico holds Bill to his promise to rescue the wife of Grant, a rich businessman.

rico: Our word. We gave our word to bring the woman back.

bill: Our word to Grant ain’t worth a plug nickel.

rico: You gave your word to me.

In Red River, Dunson holds the cowhands to their pledge to finish the cattle drive. In Ride the High Country, Steve Judd insists that his group keep faith with the bankers who have employed them. No matter how circumstances change, pledging oneself verbally is

viewed as a moral action in Westerns, and the guarantee of the hero’s integrity is his keeping of his troth. “Words are what men live by.

Words they say and mean.”

Additional evidence of the Western’s deadly seriousness about language is the weight given to insults and slurs upon one’s honor.

In other genres, a villain trying to taunt a hero is liable to be met with disdainful laughter or a sassy retort—can you imagine Indiana Jones, James Bond, or Captain Kirk being mortally offended by a slur? But in the cinematic West, everyone is deeply offended by in-sults. Antagonists taunt the heroes of Westerns constantly, and if gunplay is averted, it is by the narrowest of margins. In Owen Wis-ter’s original novel The Virginian, considered the popularizer of the Western formula, the first altercation between the hero and Trampas arises from the latter calling the former a “son of a bitch.” The motif is repeated in the film Shane when Calloway provokes Shane: “New sod-buster, huh? Thought I smelled pigs.”

So we are left with several paradoxes: the heroes of Westerns are taciturn—except when they are loquacious; words in Westerns are

So we are left with several paradoxes: the heroes of Westerns are taciturn—except when they are loquacious; words in Westerns are