Mark Klavan dissects how Westerns like The Virginian (1929) and Shane (1953) mythologized Teddy Roosevelt’s "modern knights" ideal, blending violence with moral progress. High Noon (1952) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) expose the genre’s tension between legend and reality, while The Searchers (1956) frames frontier savagery as a twisted Christian crusade. Even Logan (2017) revives Shane’s Christ-like heroism, proving Westerns endure as civilization’s foundational "lies"—prioritizing myth over history to justify order through chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
So with the Daily Wire bringing out terror on the prairie and making our own entry into the Western field, I thought this would be a good time to talk about Westerns, which is a genre that I just love.
I mean, I watched it all the time growing up, and I still am always captivated by a great Western.
They don't make them like they used to anymore, so it's great to see terror on the prairie out there, but you know, in the old days, it was just a staple of the movies and of novels because in the old days we actually thought that the past was a good guide to the future, and we wanted to preserve our traditions and our history and our sense, our idealism about the past.
But now we look to the future, a kind of transhuman future, and so we have all these superhero movies that are kind of what we think the world is going to look like in a post-human era.
I'm not so sure that's true, but this is the instinct of the culture.
This is what the culture is talking about.
What I love about the Western, the Western is part of a kind of genre, like the samurai stories, like the Knights in Shining Armor, that takes place on the very border of civilization, which is considered to be, in nostalgia, the pinnacle of manhood.
And the reason it's the pinnacle of manhood is it's the last time that physical strength and violence can be used wholly for the good.
So a man can be a man, he can be tough, he can be violent, he can fight, protect women, and build a civilization where his kind will no longer be needed.
And that's the essential tension of the Western, that the hero is trying to make himself obsolete by getting rid of the violent forces that are out there in humankind.
Essence of the Western00:10:57
A lot of this is traceable back to The Virginian, a wonderful, wonderful novel by Owen Wister.
It's kind of an old-fashioned novel, but still it's terrific.
It was made into a wonderful film, a pre-code film, 1929, with Gary Cooper.
And the movie is great too.
It was remade later on.
It was not as good.
But the old movie is old, but it really is good.
And the interesting thing about this is that Owen Wister was a friend of Teddy Roosevelt's, and he was kind of a, you know, kind of a little scholarly guy.
And when he wrote, when he started talking about writing The Virginian, Roosevelt said to him, Teddy Roosevelt, I should say, said to him, make the Western man a modern knight.
And that is what he did.
And that is where we kind of got this idea of the cowboy as a knight.
And of course, it doesn't have much to do with reality, but it is that sense that we have, that I think all men especially have, that there was a time when men were men, when violence could be used for the good, when might could be used to serve right.
And that was the time to really be a man, and that's what a man really looks like.
And this then becomes this genre in which this tension of civilization and violence are played out in the actions of brave men, usually battling for a town or for a woman.
One of the great classics of this is Shane.
And Shane shaped my life.
I read the novel Shane when I was a little boy five times.
I saw the movie again and again and again, the movie with Alan Ladd.
You know, it's a film directed by the great George Stevens.
It's a film from which we get the famous line, come back, Shane, with a little boy calling after Shane.
And Shane is about the story of a gunfighter.
We don't really know who he is, a mysterious man who rides into town as this family is having a fight with the old cattlemen.
These are the settlers who have come in and they're taking away the land of the cattlemen who need a lot of range to feed their cattle on.
And so the cattle are trying to chase off the settlers and they bring in a gunfighter in the movie played by Jack Palance.
And Shane rides out of the West and he just comes out of the horizon basically and this little boy sees Shane coming and begins to idolize Shane.
And Shane stays with this family, the Starretts, they're called.
And the little boy is sort of torn between, and in fact, his mother as well, torn between these two kinds of men, the father of the family, the Star family, who is a good man, a strong man, a bruiser, but a man who is dedicated to making the land, to being a farmer, to building the land, building the town, building the community, building a family.
And yet he is outmatched by the gunmen brought in by these cattle ranchers who want to run the new world off.
And so there's this kind of tension.
Even the mother of the family, this absolute, you know, beautiful, virtuous woman, is attracted to Shane, who's a gunman.
And of course, that fight has to play out, not just a fight between the gunman and the father, but also, of course, the fight between the good gunman and the bad gunman.
And that's the essence of the Western, right?
That is the essence of the Western, this violent man who has to make the world safe for non-violent men so they can go forward.
This plays out in high noon, just, I think, one of the great Western movies ever made.
And that's Gary Cooper again.
And it's done in real time.
So it's kind of almost experimental.
And it has a kind of liberal background.
It comes out of liberal thought.
And so a lot of conservatives don't like it.
I love it.
It is directed by Fred Zinnemann and the screenplay is by Carl Foreman.
And it's about a sheriff who has sent away the bad guys and he's cleaned up the town.
And now it's time for him to get married and start to become a farmer and raise a family.
And he's getting married to the spectacularly beautiful Grace Kelly, the first woman I ever loved.
And I love her still.
And she is a Quaker.
And she wants the violence to stop.
She wants them to put away the gun and become a farmer.
But just now, at high noon, a train is coming to town.
And on that train is a bad man and his bad guys who the sheriff put away, what's his name, Will Kane.
His name is the sheriff Will Kane put away this bad guy and they're coming for revenge and they're coming to kill him.
And Will Kane starts going to the townspeople and saying, you know, this is like four or five guys coming into town to blow me away.
I need some help.
And nobody will help him.
Nobody will help him.
And his wife just wants him to run away.
She says, yeah, I do not approve of violence.
I will not let there be violence.
You cannot stay.
And he says, you know, I cannot walk away.
I can't walk away.
And all of it is done.
It's an hour and a half long.
If you've never seen this Western, it is one of the great movies of all time.
It's an hour and a half long, and it starts an hour and a half away from high noon.
And then the clock ticks down and you can see it ticking on the screen.
And it takes place in real time.
The ending is incredibly moving.
The gunfight that obviously the whole thing leads up to is really exciting.
And again, it is about this man who wants to become the new man.
He wants to become the peaceful man, the farmer, the husband, the father.
But a man's got to do what he's got to do.
And it's still that moment in the Western history when the bad guys are coming and you have to make a stand.
The one that becomes, the film that becomes the conscious expression of this.
I mean, it's always conscious, but it becomes just an openly about this fact, about the new world coming in, is the man who shot Liberty Valence.
John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, just an absolutely terrific, terrific film.
It's directed by the great John Ford, the great Western director, real artist in his field.
And this is about John Wayne is kind of the tough guy, but the lawyer comes to town.
Jimmy Stewart comes to town.
He's a lawyer, and he wants to civilize the town.
But before any civilization comes to town, somebody's got to deal with Liberty Valence.
And Liberty Valence is played by the great Lee Marvin, a genuine real-life tough guy, a Marine who is just terrorizing this town.
And John Wayne is the only guy who can handle him.
But Liberty Valence sees Jimmy Stewart.
He does not want Law to come to this place because he's cleaning up.
And he starts to just goad Jimmy Stewart into a gunfight.
And the man who shot Liberty Valence is all told in retrospect.
And it's where we get the great line.
I'm quoting it from memory, but the newspaper man says, when the facts conflict with the legend, print the legend.
And that's essentially what this movie is about.
The movie is about a legend coming to life.
And that legend of men, you know, strong men beating bad men is the legend on which the nation and the future will be built.
And so it's basically saying that the legend that we're telling in the movies is civilizing.
And the last two films I want to deal with deal with the Indians and their role and the fact that they have to be destroyed in order for this new civilization to come in and that there's a nobility to them.
And John Wayne made two wonderful films about this.
One is called Hondo, and it's 70 minutes long.
Hondo is 70 minutes long.
It's based on a Louis Lemour novel.
Louis Lemour was the kind of very prolific Western novelist.
And Hondo is just a, you know, anytime you hear people say, oh, John Wayne, he made these films hating on the Indians.
He did not.
This film is about, is Shane.
It's basically Louis Lemour's version of Shane.
It's about the guy who comes in, he's an Indian fighter, comes into a family where, and before he gets to this family, he gets in a gunfight with a bad man, kills the bad man, and the bad man turns out to be this family's father.
And so he comes and he starts to romance this woman, and this child, the woman's child, starts to idolize him, but doesn't know that he killed his father.
And the story is about lying.
The story is about how a civilization needs lies in order to live.
And it is contrasted to the world of the Indians.
I believe it's the Apaches who don't lie.
They never lie.
And so they can't survive and they can't build the kind of civilization that the white man can build because the white man knows how to lie.
It's a very complicated vision.
And basically, Hondo says, you know, the culture of the Apache was a good culture, but it's over.
Its time is done.
And now modernity is coming.
And the other one is the searchers.
The searchers is half.
Half of the searchers is one of the greatest Westerns ever made.
The other half is domestic comedy.
It doesn't fit.
It's not very good.
It's always annoying when it comes on because the other part of the movie is so great.
The searchers is John Wayne goes off to find a kidnapped white girl who is taken away by the Indians, and he's going to kill her.
He has to kill her because she's now been raped.
She's been made into a squaw, and he's going to destroy her before she has to live that horrific life.
And as it plays out, it is just a beautiful, beautiful Christian parable based, I believe, on the parable of the woman taken in adultery.
And it's John Wayne sort of going to do this horrible, horrible thing.
And yet you watch him and you see why he's so angry and so furious at the Indians, who to him are just savages, and his role in bringing a family together and yet not being allowed to get into the family.
And one last film that I'll mention is just the film Logan, the superhero movie about Wolverine, which is based on these films.
And I wrote about this when it came out, and the director actually wrote to me and thanked me for James Mangold, who wrote to me, thanked me for my review of it.
Logan is based on Shane, and it basically makes the argument that Shane is the image of Christ, which is true.
He is a Christ figure in the novel, Shane and in the movie, and that Logan, the Wolverine, is the image of Shane.
And so it's basically saying that the Christ story has traveled through the Western story into the superhero story, which I'm not sure is true, except at least in Logan, in which it is true.
And one of the final scenes in Logan, somebody takes the cross that is put on a grave and turns it over, and it becomes the X of the X-Men.
Wolverine is one of the X-Men.
And so the Western is said to continue in these superhero movies.
I'll leave it to you to decide whether that's true or not.
The Western remains one of the great, great genres.
It is a legend.
It is not a truth, but it is the legend we print because it's the lie on which we build a civilization, the lie of good men defeating the forces of evil and starting to build a peaceful world in which men and women can live together.
Just great stuff.
And Terror on the Prairie is our latest entry from the Daily Wire.