“The western is always the same, which gives the director tremendous freedom,” Jean Renoir, a director who never made a western, once opined. In this regard, the classical American western film, which reached its fullest peak of maturity and creativity in the 1950s, represents one of the greatest playgrounds that cinema was ever offered. Many of Hollywood’s key artists worked in the genre: Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Howard Hawks, John Ford, even Fritz Lang and Jacques Tourneur — for auteurists and those who care about great American filmmakers, it remains an extremely rich body of work. And if this body of work could be boiled down to one overarching thematic or moral principle, it would in my view be the notion of redemption.

Many classical western narratives focus on a lone man stubbornly clinging to vengeance, violence, and a kind of lonely self-sufficiency; in the westerns of Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher (two of the genre’s key specialists), this bitterness often stems from the loss of a former wife or lover. Almost invariably, the body of the film works to gradually corrode the protagonist’s morally dubious position, allowing room for such alternatives as growth and forgiveness to emerge. Generally speaking, the main thrust of the classical western is to move away from vengeance and toward a new chapter of one’s life. In the hands of a great filmmaker like Mann or Tourneur, this movement toward redemption, maturity, and a kind of serene objectivity can be stunningly powerful and moving. (more…)