Stagecoach - 1939

"The Stage to Lourdsburg"

William S. Hart had pioneered the "adult Western."

Link to John Wayne poster archive.

Red River - 1948

Gunfight as Cockfight

The psychosexual tension between Dunson and Garth mounts from their first scene together, in which Dunson smacks the shell-shocked boy to the ground and steals his gun in one practiced move ("Don't ever try to take it away from me again," Garth says after the weapon's return). The deadly seriousness with which the leading male characters in Red River regard their guns as tangible expressions of their masculinity recalls Arthur Schnitzler's 1901 novella Leutnant Gustl, in which a rigidly honor-conscious Austrian officer commits himself to death by duel with a man who lays his hand on Gustl's saber at the opera house. Then again, to paraphrase Grouch Marx, sometimes a gun is just a gun.




Going Native in the West

Story for Red River by Borden Chase (anti-Communist, also wrote for Anthony Mann)
1948 story "The Chisholm Trail" (in the Saturday Evening Post) and later novel Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail

Joseph Conrad's 1899 Heart of Darkness (journey through a wilderness, commander slowly going unhinged)
Werner Herzog's 1972 Aguirre: The Wrath of God (Herzog on Westerns? Howard Hawks? John Ford?)
-Klaus Kinski as Herzog's John Wayne
Quotes from a Werner Herzog Q&A:
"I've never seen a Howard Hawks film and I've only seen one John Ford film."
"The Searchers wasn't very good." (Source)

Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalpyse Now (Western set in Vietnam)
-Coppola wanted to create a Bayreuth in Kansas to screen AN, and only it!
Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 feature There Will Be Blood
(separate post on this, especially vis-a-vis Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1953 Wages of Fear, imagery of burning oil derrick the biggest comparison)