r/Westerns • u/BeautifulDebate7615 • 23h ago
Discussion Crapping on a classic: The Westerner
I've heard it said that Stagecoach is the first modern Western, if that's the case then The Westerner has to be the last pre-modern Western, because it is very much old-timey, plotless, and full of stereotypes making it a difficult watch today. It reminded me of the slog of sitting through John Wayne's many B Movie serials from his Three Mesquiteer days. But it has Coop and Walter Brennan, Chill Wills and Forrest Tucker, directed by William Wyler score by Dimitri Tiomkin! How could it go wrong?
The answer is that it has almost no plot, and extremely muddled characterizations. Characters exist to perform stereotypical tropey actions in stand alone scenes that have no connection to each other, and make no sense except within a framework of the 1930s Western singing Cowboy kind of ethos. It's a movie that can't decide whether Walter Brennan as Judge Roy Bean is a hero or villain, or whether Gary Cooper is a con man scalawag or a noble protector of the Common Man. The movie doesn't know who it's characters are so how could we be clued in on the secret?
Plus, it has very little action punctuated by long stretches of disconnected boredom. I found it to be greatly inferior to any one of the Jimmy Stewart Anthony Mann westerns made a decade later that I watched in the weeks leading up to this.
Most confusing of all is the performance of Walter Brennan. As Judge Roy Bean, he won his third of three best supporting actor Oscars in just 6 years. And each one for playing the exact same character, a character that he would go on to play in every single other movie that he ever made and for many years on television. It's that of a denture-chewing, dagnabbit, trouser-hitching, lovable old chowder-head. It only varies slightly to the degree in which Brennan plays his chowder-head as either mildly or severely mentally challenged. But really his Judge Roy Bean here is exactly the same character as his Stumpy in Rio Bravo.
I'm confused because I can't see how him playing this one character, or essentially playing himself, was worth three Oscars? My only conclusion is that the first time the public saw it in Come and Get it they thought it was real acting, and it struck them as fresh and original. Two more times and they were still enamored of it, but umpteen times more and finally they'd seen through the charade.
