Saddle Pals

"We’re going to stick together, just like it used to be. When you side with a man, you stay with him!"
William Holden in "The Wild Bunch"


Introduction: The 2005 release of director Ang Lee’s "Brokeback Mountain," starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, prompted Reed Johnson of the Los Angeles Times to comment, "Ah, the Wild West, that rugged, perilous place where the natives were restless, the women were strong and the men were….secretly in love?" Although Johnson conceded, " ‘Brokeback Mountain’ may be the first Hollywood western-set film (albeit the modern west of 1960’s Wyoming) to deal with homoerotic love in such explicit terms, it’s hardly the first to hint at the thorny emotional entanglements that the cowboy way has engendered among men."

In the Old West re-envisioned by director Sergio Leone in "A Fistful of Dollars," "For a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," women seemingly existed only in peripheral sight lines. Leone, according to biographer Christopher Frayling, apparently felt that some of the classic Hollywood westerns were ruined by the likes of Maureen O’Hara, Rhonda Fleming and Grace Kelly. "Even in the greatest westerns," Sergio said, "the woman is imposed on the action, as a star, and is generally destined to be ‘had’ by the male lead. But she does not exist as a woman. If you cut her out of the film…the film becomes much better. In the desert, the essential problem was to survive. Women were an obstacle to survival!" In his "Dollars" trilogy, female roles were restricted to whores, hotel receptionists or silent widows and widows-to-be. Leone saw his films as "a simple world of adventure and of uncomplicated men - a masculine world."

Alex Cox, a British-born director revered by cult movie fans for "Repo Man" (1984) and himself an ardent admirer of Sergio Leone, made what could probably be best described as a punk spaghetti western in 1987 called "Straight to Hell," featuring The Clash frontman Joe Strummer, Courtney Love, Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones and Elvis Costello. Writing in Guardian in 2004, Cox noted, "Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian is often credited as being the template for the western hero. Its hero courts two women, it is true, but at a ‘courtly’ distance. The sincerest scenes are those involving male companionship…The book is a celebration of manly admiration for other men, and this tone - of worship for the self-reliant, efficient, outdoor male, up for a shootout, or a lynchin’ - continues unbroken throughout all the western films that followed it."

And that brings us to our cowboy matinee in the moviehouse, which turns out to be nothing like the afternoons our fathers and grandfathers shared on the range with Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.



"The Wild West of the popular imagination," according to the previously mentioned Reed Johnson, "endures as a masculine crucible of dangerously intensified fear and desires. Particularly in its early untamed phase, the West was mainly a society of men, where guys spent much of their time in the company of other guys (not to mention horses and steers). Sometimes, they were forced to entrust each other with their lives. Like it or not, they had to bond."

Probably not the type of bonding depicted in a couple of comedies from the silent era. "A Wanderer in the West" (1927) opened with a title card introducing "Clarence the Clerk, one of nature’s mistakes, in a country where men were men." The "sissy" was a popular stock character in early comedies, but he was the main character in "Algie the Miner" (1912). Flamboyantly effeminate Algie Almore, portrayed by a silent film comic appropriately named Billy Quirk, has one year to prove he’s a man before his fiancee’s father will allow him to marry her. Algie travels to the wild west, where he immediately kisses a gun-toting cowpoke in greeting, He forms an unlikely friendship with a burly gunslinger called Big Jim. The most obvious innuendo occurs when Big Jim takes away Algie’s embarrassingly tiny pistol and gives him a large six-gun. Interestingly, "Algie the Miner" was directed by Alice Guy, historically regarded as the first woman director in the motion picture industry (as well as the director of the first fiction movie).

"By and large," Reed Johnson wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "the heroes (and antiheroes) of Westerns are undomesticated men who haven’t known the gentling effect of a ‘woman’s touch’ or the burdens of settling down. Westerns were highly popular in the years between World War II and the Korean conflict, when hundreds of thousands of returning GIs had to settle back into dull domesticity, becoming company men and ‘good providers.’ That may explain the Hollywood convention of ‘one last bank robbery’ before the…outlaw hangs up his holster for good…like a stag party with spurs and Colt .45s." Johnson noted, "The classic Hollywood western, like the West itself, celebrated the idealized manly virtues of courage, loyalty, honor, grace under duress and a quick draw. But Hollywood filmmakers also understood that the Old West was an emotional battlefield and spiritual proving ground like no other in American popular culture. In all but a handful of the greatest Westerns, the most passionate relationships are between men. And while the Hays movie production code (enforced from 1934 to 1968) forbade overt references to homosexuality, great directors like (John) Ford and (Howard) Hawks grasped and exploited the inherent psychosexual tensions of cowboy life."

Howard Hawks’ name usually comes up when mention is made of "The Outlaw" (1941). Hawks worked on the script with the film’s producer, Howard Hughes, and was slated to direct but, in his own words, left the production for the opportunity to make the far better "Sergeant York" (which boasted an Oscar-winning performance by Gary Cooper), despite a popular story that Hawks was fed up with Hughes’ obsession with immortalizing starlet Jane Russell’s bosom and either stormed off the set or was fired by Hughes. The fact is that Hughes himself ill-advisedly took over as director for a cheesy western that, because of censorship battles and manipulative publicity, became one of the most notorious movies of the 1940s. "The Outlaw" was shelved for two years, released in limited showings in 1943, withdrawn again on objections from the Hays Code censors, and finally granted a general release in 1950.

The movie’s historically fanciful premise presented a love-hate friendship between Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday as they bicker over horses and a shared lover (Ms. Russell, playing a tempestuous "half-breed" named Rio), with horses coming out on top in the film’s twisted misogyny. Newcomer Jack Buetel, a former insurance clerk, turned in a stiff portrayal of Billy, made all the more wooden by the over-the-top depiction of Doc Holliday by Walter Huston, father of legendary director John Huston. Thrown into the stew of seething passion is Billy’s nemesis, Sheriff Pat Garrett, played by Thomas Mitchell. Best known to film buffs as the tipsy Doc Boone in John Ford’s "Stagecoach," the bumbling Uncle Billy in Frank Capra’s "It’s a Wonderful Life" and Scarlett O’Hara’s father in "Gone with the Wind," Mitchell looked ill-at-ease in a big cowboy hat and more than less came across as a repressed closet case who grows increasingly jealous over the relationship between his old friend Holliday and the Kid.

Coincidentally or not, the climactic showdown in Howard Hawks’ "Red River" (1948) was an uncanny re-creation of the one between Billy and Holliday in "The Outlaw." ("Red River" was actually filmed in 1946 but was held up by legal action by Howard Hughes, claiming it was too similar to "The Outlaw.") The stirring saga of an unprecedented cattle drive from Texas to Kansas, starring John Wayne as a hard-nosed ranch baron and Montgomery Clift as an orphan adopted in childhood by Wayne, transplanted the classic high-sea tale of "Mutiny on the Bounty" into the dusty frontier of the Old West.

In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich (reprinted in the 1997 book Who the Devil Made It), Hawks described Wayne’s character as "a man who made a big mistake and lost the girl he really loved because of his ambition and his great desire to have land of his own." Wayne "should have taken the girl with him. And because she died, that would stay with him all the rest of his life. Actually, his love turned to the boy (Clift) because of her." That affection is betrayed when Clift wrests control of the drive from the increasingly harsh Wayne, who duly swears deadly retribution. The inevitable showdown erupts into dusty fisticuffs, prompting Wayne’s longstanding sidekick Walter Brennan to gleefully announce, "Everything’s gonna be all right!" In one of cinema’s wimpiest defusings of two hours’ worth of pent-up tension, Joanne Dru (as Clift’s romantic interest) breaks up the brawl with the declaration, "You love each other!"

Hawks distinguished himself as a savvy observer of the fickle bonds between the sexes in such sophisticated comedies as "Bringing up Baby" and "His Girl Friday," but in a 1973 series of TV specials called "The Men Who Made the Movies," he related to host Richard Schickel, "I’ve particularly noticed friendship between men….I think it’s a good thing. I learned it a long time ago when Victor Fleming made a picture called ‘Captains Courageous’ with Spencer Tracy…I saw it again in a picture that was done on the desert about the Foreign Legion. I became interested in the relationship of men. I saw how good it can be and how you’re not getting into any mawkish thing, you’re getting into something that is kind of fun."

Hawks’ adolescent, boys’ clubhouse mentality came to its overripe fruition in "Rio Bravo," a 1959 western that boils down to a standoff between the foursome of stalwart lawman John Wayne, town drunk Dean Martin, cocky fast-draw Ricky Nelson and ornery jailer Walter Brennan, and a nondescript lineup of interchangeable outlaws. Brennan cackles at Wayne like a worrisome hen, while the Duke looms over Dino as a substance-abuser sponsor and Ricky as a surrogate father. Despite weak denials otherwise, Hawks milked the "Rio Bravo" cash cow for two more, very similar westerns, both starring John Wayne, "El Dorado" (1966) and "Rio Lobo" (1970). In "El Dorado," a young James Caan got the Ricky Nelson role, and Robert Mitchum played the drunk (driven to the bottle by a wayward woman, of course). Mitchum and Wayne peck and scratch at each other like an old married couple, while bewhiskered character actor Arthur Hunnicutt replaces Brennan as the jailer who plays doting house-mother to the aging stars. In one uncomfortably sticky exchange, Mitchum tells Hunnicutt, "I need you."

Returning to the topic of Billy the Kid (alias William Bonney, born Henry McCarty in 1859), who was referred to by one critic as "probably America’s most constantly celebrated juvenile delinquent," there must be something inherent in the saga of his brief, violent life that invited speculation about his sexual nature. Seventeen years after the aforementioned "The Outlaw" posited a skewed four-sided romance, Paul Newman, still in the obvious trappings of being schooled in Method acting, brooded, mumbled and raged as Billy in "The Left-Handed Gun," based on Gore Vidal’s 1955 teleplay "The Death of Billy the Kid" (which also starred Newman). The film role was originally intended for James Dean, who died before production.

Billy was, in fact, right-handed. The notion otherwise came from a popular portrait, which was ultimately proven to be a reverse print of the original tintype photograph. Aside from that, there is, for whatever reason steeped in forgotten lore, an enduring notion that left-handedness is associated with homosexuality. Coupled with the lifestyle of original author Vidal, that prejudice gave "The Left-Handed Gun" a reputation it might not deserve. In 1989, Vidal revisited the legend with the TV movie "Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid," starring Val Kilmer. The "Young Guns" films of the late 1980s, featuring Emilio Estevez in arguably one of the screen’s most historically accurate portrayals of the Kid, emphasized the importance of "pals," however, in the first movie, bad guy Jack Palance cast snide aspersions regarding the sexual tastes of Billy’s mentor, played by British actor Terence Stamp.

A decade following "The Left-Handed Gun," Paul Newman, now comfortably saddled into an effortlessly relaxed style of screen acting, starred in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." As noted by Reed Johnson, "Though Katharine Ross plays the share love interest…the real, if subliminal, flirtation occurs between Paul Newman’s Butch and (Robert) Redford’s Sundance, with their constant teasing competitiveness and affectionate ribbing."

"Lonesome Cowboys" (1968), deemed by filmmaker Alex Cox as "the first officially gay cowboy movie," was credited to Andy Warhol, although it was actually written and directed by Warhol protégé Paul Morrissey. Orginally envisioned as a western version of Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet," entitled "Ramona and Lulian," the end result, starring Andy’s "Factory" players Joe Dallesandro and Viva, was described by Reed Johnson as "a typically Warholian grab bag of social satire and erotic fabulousness" in which Warhol "spoofed mannered macho behavior while suggesting that those strong, silent dudes on the frontier weren’t always as butch as they pretended to be." Prior to its London showing, Warhol reportedly said, "Well, of course, the cowboys were all gay. There was nothing else to do out there on the range, except for wrangling cows and su**ing and fu**ing!"

"We’re going to stick together, just like it used to be," William Holden barks to his band of over-the-hill desperadoes in director Sam Peckinpah’s "The Wild Bunch" (1969). "When you side with a man, you stay with him! And if you can’t do that, you’re like some animal, you’re finished." In Peckinpah’s West, where women were either whores or back-shooting adulteresses, Holden and Ernest Borgnine share an intimate campfire chat, agreeing that a life outside the law is worth all the trouble. "In truth," Reed Johnson observed, "the enforced mutual dependence of the trail turned many cowboys into each other’s surrogate spouses."

Regarding "surrogate spouses," 1971’s "Zachariah," advertised as the "First Electric Western," was an obvious reworking of Herman Hesse’s allegorical novel Siddhartha, with a thinly veiled homoerotic current running through the relationship of a pair of would-be gunslingers. The outlaw fledglings were portrayed by John Rubinstein, a Tony Award-winning actor (son of concert pianist Arthur Rubinstein) who created the title role in the Broadway musical "Pippin," and Don Johnson, 12 years before "Miami Vice." The supporting cast included members of Country Joe and the Fish (best known for their Vietnam War protest anthem "I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag") as a gang of inept outlaws who would rather make music than rob banks, along with the James Gang (featuring Joe Walsh) and Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw. When the two muchachos go their separate ways, a teary-eyed Johnson cries, "How can I make it without you?" Members of the surreal comedy troupe The Firesign Theatre wrote the heady screenplay, which ultimately finds the reunited saddle pals realizing that a life of quiet, contemplative pacifism is preferable to a life of violence as they ride off side by side into the sunset.

The oft-told and frequently-filmed legend of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and the gunfight at the OK Corral received the cynical 1970s makeover by renowned New York City journalist Pete Hamill and director Frank Perry ("Mommie Dearest") in "Doc" (1971), a sour revisionist western starring Stacy Keach as Holliday, whose relationship with prostitute Kate Fisher (played by the reliably overacting Faye Dunaway) is a constant source of irritation for best friend Wyatt. In the book Western Films, author Brian Garfield pointed out that although Earp was "an oft-married ladies’ man, Harris Yulin (best known as the ill-fated crooked cop in ‘Scarface’) plays him as a mincing closet queen."

The less-than-traditional aspect of the Earp-Holliday friendship had earlier been hinted at in 1959’s "Warlock," a fictionalized reshaping of the Earp myth, based on the novel by Oakley Hall, with Henry Fonda as a hired gunfighter-lawman and Anthony Quinn as his idolizing, albeit homicidal, gambler-sidekick.

It should be pointed out that there is a distaff side to our tale, and it’s a doozy. "Johnny Guitar" (1959), directed by Nicholas Ray ("Rebel Without a Cause"), pitted saloon owner Joan Crawford against vindictive cattle queen Mercedes McCambridge. Brian Garfield described it as a "fabulously melodramatic…overwrought fantasy, fierce and Freudian," a "mesmerizing experience, one of the great good-bad movies."

Worth mentioning as a curious footnote is the singular portrayal of a gay Indian in the sprawling seriocomic epic "Little Big Man," starring Dustin Hoffman and directed by Arthur Penn in 1970, when homosexuals were obligatory comic relief in Hollywood. Although a minor character, Little Horse, described as a "two-feather," makes a memorable impression when he offers to become Hoffman’s wife.

Homosexuality was played for laughs in Mel Brooks’ "Blazing Saddles" (1974) when, after the subdued, hulking Mongo (Alex Karras) confesses a fondness for Sheriff Bart (Cleavon Little), Gene Wilder’s Waco Kid chides, "Uh-oh, Bart, I think Mongo here’s taken a liking to you," in response to which an embarrassed Mongo gushes, "Naw, Mongo straight!"

John C. McGinley, familiar to TV viewers as the cynical Dr. Cox in the series "Scrubs," played a gay bookseller named Julian in "Wagons East" (1994), noteworthy as John Candy’s last movie and as one of his worst movies, an alleged comedy about a group of whining settlers who, fed up with frontier life, form a wagon train and head back East. When a local yokel buys an edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to use as toilet paper, McGinley’s Julian promptly packs up his cappuccino maker in a prairie schooner and joins the wagon train. His funniest line comes when he is taunted by a hired gunslinger as "sissy boy," responding, "Sissy boy? Oh, please, that is so Dodge City!"

Gene Hackman added new kinks to the western movie stock character of the crooked town boss as Herod in "The Quick and the Dead" (1995), a frenetic homage to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, directed by Sam Raimi (the filmmaker behind the popular "Spider-Man" trilogy), that transforms the cliched showdown into an over-the-top fast-draw elimination competition. When it comes down to the inevitable shootout between Herod and the reticent gunman-turned-preacher played by Russell Crowe, Hackman excitedly says, "How do you feel? I’m nervous. I’ve always wanted to fight you," he adds, as if addressing a bed partner, "ever since the first time I saw you. Just this itch I had to scratch!"

Conclusion: "From the silents to ‘Stagecoach’ to ‘Once Upon a Time in the West,’ " Alex Cox observed, "the most a woman in a western can aspire to is to be static and to end up being saved." To be fair, however, it should be noted that it was in "Once Upon a Time in the West," Sergio Leone’s penultimate masterpiece, that he finally elevated a woman, front and center, as the central character, nothing less than a mortal embodiment of the mythic, nurturing Earth Mother in the voluptuously awesome presence of Claudia Cardinale.