196
PARTISAN REVIEW
story is also a tragedy-in certain formal ways more clearly a tragedy
than the Westerner's-but it is a romantic tragedy, based on a hero
whose defeat springs with almost mechanical inevitability from the out–
rageous presumption of his demands: the gangster is
bound
to go on
until he is killed. The Westerner is a more classical figure, self-contained
and limited to begin with, seeking not to extend his dominion but only
to assert his personal value, and his tragedy lies in the fact that even
this circumscribed demand cannot be fully realized. Since the Westerner
is not a murderer but (most of the time) a man of virtue, and since
he is always prepared for defeat, he retains his inner invulnerability and
his story need not end with his death (and usually does not) ; but what
we finally respond to is not his victory but his defeat.
Up to a point, it is plain that the deeper seriousness of the good
Western films comes from the introduction of a realism, both physical
and psychological, that was missing with Tom Mix and William S. Hart.
As lines of age have come into Gary Cooper's face since
The Virginian,
so the outlines of the Western movie in general have become less smooth,
its background more drab. The sun still beats upon the town, but the
camera is likely now to take advantage of this illumination to seek out
more closely the shabbiness of buildings and furniture, the loose, worn
hang of clothing, the wrinkles and dirt of the faces. Once it has been
discovered that the true theme of the Western movie is not the freedom
and expansiveness of frontier life, but its limitations, its material bare–
ness, the pressures of obligation, then even the landscape itself ceases
to be quite the arena of free movement it once was, but becomes in–
stead a great empty waste, cutting down more often than it exaggerates
the stature of the horseman who rides across it. Weare more likely now
to see the Westerner struggling against the obstacles of the physical
world (as in the wonderful scenes on the desert and among the rocks
in
The Last Posse)
than carelessly surmounting them. Even the horses,
no longer the "friends" of man or the inspired chargers of knight–
errantry, have lost much of the moral significance that once seemed
to belong to them in their careering across the screen. It seems to me
the horses grow tired and stumble more often than they did, and that
we see them less frequently at the gallop.
In
The Gunfighter,
a remarkable film of a couple of years ago, the
landscape has virtually disappeared. Most of the action takes place in–
doors, in a cheerless saloon where a tired "bad man" (Gregory Peck)
contemplates the waste of his life, to be senselessly killed at the end by
a vicious youngster setting off on the same futile path. The movie is
