DVD Review: When Cowboys Were King - History Channel (2006)

The story of the movie Western, tracing its roots from early film right up through John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.

In this History Channel documentary, you learn of the popularity of silent Westerns as A-picture, suddenly killed by the talkies and their sensitive early sound equipment. Poverty Row studios adopted the genre and created the B-Western for a market of youngsters who couldn't get enough. Ernest Borgnine tells how he and his buddies brought their capguns to the theater and shot at the screen throughout the movie, until the theater owner took to disarming them at the door like Wyatt Earp enforcing Tombstone's gun laws.

Poverty Row producers simply could not pass up the opportunity presented. Early sound Westerns were that era's independently produced horror movie. For B-Westerns, you didn't need fancy sets, big name actors, dancers or singers, or even much of a script to appeal to your youth market. To film a Western, as the documentary says, all you needed was a camera, hire some actors, rent a couple horses, go out to Vasquez Rocks or into the Hollywood Hills and start shooting.

The simplest solution to over-sensitive and non-mobile early microphones that doomed the A Western was to shoot the movie silent, then let actors and what became known as Foley artists supply the audio track later. As the technology improved, the movies got better technologically. Yhe A-picture industry continued to ignore them, but marginal movie makers thrived. Gene Autry arrived, Roy Rogers followed.

Then B-movie veteran John Wayne found himself in Stagecoach. Westerns started looking good again to the big studios while Wayne, who would become the poster boy for movie Westerns, saw quick though not instant improvement in his career untill he was ain A movie regular.

Hopalong Cassidy went from B-movie cowboy to television after Bill Boyd hocked all he had to buy up the rights to his old movies. He shot some more, even created a TV show, and became rich on television's ground floor along with Uncle Miltie, Sid Ceasar, and Steve Allen.

John Wayne loomed over Cowboy Hollywood, creating a singular character no one else has ever been able to measure up to. He believed the legend as much as anyone, as Bruce Dern says when discussing how he killed off Wayne in The Cowboys. Wayne tells Dern that this is the first time he's ever gotten killed off on-screen in a one-to-one fashion and he's not happy about it, but that's the way it is. He comes in the next day drunk but does the scene perfectly, leaving Dern to think "he really believes this stuff." (Similarly, Kirk Douglas mentions in his autobiography how Wayne objected to Douglas for being in movies like the one about artist Vincent Van Gogh. There's few of us left, says Wayne, and Kirk replies it was a great role. Besides we're just actors. You're not really John Wayne.)

Nevertheless, even dead these many years, John Wayne still lives, remembered as a Western star, not for the war movies he did or the private eye movies or any of the rest. He's still all-time batting champion among Western heroes. Personally I love Big Jake and the Quincannon trilogy.

There was a big change to the Western with the arrival of Clint Eastwoood and the spaghetti Western, reflecting the modern American self-loathing which makes fictional characters acceptable who can't be identified as good or bad (was I the only one with difficulty deciding who was the Good in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly?).

The documentary features comments from Carroll Baker, John Ritter (whose father Tex Ritter was a movie cowboy), Ricardo Montalban, and Tom Selleck.

A wonderful behind-the-scenes tale. Western fans shouldn't miss it. (Used copies available cheap at Amazon at last check.)