When I was growing up, my dad liked two types of films: war movies and westerns, especially spaghetti westerns, and especially spaghetti westerns with Clint Eastwood.
The war thing is definitely in my genes. As a kid, I loved comics like Eagle and Commando, and my favourite films were The Guns of Navarone, A Bridge Too Far, The Great Escape (which I’ve seen maybe 30 times and could more-or-less recite as a 12-year-old) and The 633 Squadron. When I got older I saw The Longest Day, and then of course came the likes of Saving Private Ryan and the peerless Band of Brothers, I even lapped up stuff like When Trumpets Fade.
But westerns? Forget it. My dad’s favourite film of all time is The Outlaw Josey Wales. When I was a kid, I used to tape stuff on TV and get up early in the morning to watch it while everyone else was still in bed. This is how I saw Commando (which I knew, for a fact, was the pinnacle of filmmaking genius) and Josey Wales. It’s the perfect environment for enjoying movies as a kid – there was something illicit and daring about it (okay, so it felt like there was) but I hated Josey Wales with a passion that put me off the genre for years.
In retrospect, I think it was the first stirrings of a lifelong problem with Clint Eastwood. It wasn’t long after Josey Wales that I saw Dirty Harry for the first time. Now, I can recognise the post-Watergate, Nixon-era nihilism of it, but back then, I just knew that there was something cruel and ugly about Clint. He didn’t do humour or mercy or personality or empathy, or any of the things that I think I prize in films. He was just a blunt instrument – a brute force in a brutish world that couldn’t, and probably shouldn’t, resonate with a 12-year-old.
Because of Clint, I gave up on westerns and never really went back. There was the odd one here or there – ironically enough, the low lights of the genre for aficionados – Apache with Burt Lancaster, George Sherman’s Comanche Territory, hell, even Silverado. These were epic stories of good and bad that you could watch for an hour then carry on in your bedroom with a replica rifle and six shooter. It didn’t help that I saw The Searchers as a kid too, and saw the same ugliness in John Wayne as Clint Eastwood. Another mental barrier went up.
But it’s time for a rethink. It started 12 months ago with Red River. Howard Hawks’ western is an epic psychological duel between an ageing cattle baron and his upstart protégé (the mesmeric Montgomery Clift) as they travel a harsh, treacherous trail to take their meat to the far-off markets. It unpicked almost all the assumptions that the spaghetti westerns had entrenched up in my head: that the genre as a whole was dated and lazy and irrelevant and incurious. Sounds obvious, but I was totally wrong. Rio Bravo confirmed it – yes, it’s broad and dissonantly comic, but it’s also about flawed heroism in an age of mythology; it’s about America and the roots of identity, and I loved it.
So this is a mea culpa. I’ve got an entire genre to discover. I’ve seen it in fragments here or there: clips of High Noon, bits of Liberty Valance on the telly. But I’m quite excited about joining the dots of all these films, even if I’ve come embarrassingly late to the party.
And I was wondering – am I the only one? Has anybody held a prejudice for so long that it seemed normal? Anybody else ready to do some backtracking and admit that they were wrong? Or is it just me?
