Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie

I guess I just wasn’t made for these times
- from the song "I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times" written by Brian Wilson


We’re back in the saddle again in the moviehouse. If jazz is America’s music, then the western is our cinema. Regardless of Italian, German or Japanese imitations and revisions, we own the western. It’s a selfish thing, we know. We were, after all, the ones who lived it.

In the three decades that followed the Civil War, the cattle drive was the major economic source in the West. Before the turn of the century, ten million cattle were herded from Southwestern ranches to Midwestern railheads for transport to stockyards in the East, and the cowboy found himself the reluctant iconic image of the American. People worldwide identified the cowhand with an unwavering devotion to work and unquestionable courage, endowing our nation with its most romantic tradition related to any occupation.

Theodore Roosevelt (pictured above in buckskin, 1885) singled out the cowboy in a period of civilization distinct from the sedentary farmer. Roosevelt contended that the manhood personified by the cowboy was essential if the American male was to avoid the softness and rot produced by an easy life in the city.

Which brings us to tonight’s program in the moviehouse - with a few indulgent digressions - the featured presentations reflecting what critic Roger Ebert noted as "a retelling of one of the oldest American themes: the unspoiled country boy comes to the big city and tests his frontier values against the corruption of civilization."

This classic conflict was entertainingly depicted, outside of the western genre, in "Tarzan’s New York Adventure" (1942). This was the sixth "Tarzan" film starring Johnny Weissmuller, an Olympian swimmer who garnered five gold medals and one bronze, along with 52 national championships, and set several world records. As an unschooled actor, he brought a refreshing, primitive naiveté to the role of fiction’s ultimate "unspoiled country boy," endearing himself as the screen’s signature Tarzan.

In his "New York Adventure," Tarzan, along with Jane (portrayed for the sixth and final time by Maureen O’Sullivan, who had grown tired of the role), leaves the African jungles of Hollywood backlots for the "stone jungle" of New York City to rescue adopted son Boy, abducted by an unscrupulous circus owner (played with all the subtlety of Snidely Whiplash by veteran character actor Charles Bickford).

Originally titled "Tarzan Against the World," the movie remains a favorite of fans, particularly for Tarzan’s confused responses to the marvels of modern life. In the book Tarzan of the Movies, author Gabe Essoe wrote, "A certain amount of humor was natural in the Apeman’s struggle to put on his double-breasted suit (‘Tarzan better without clothes,’ he declares) and in his reactions to gadgets like telephones and radios." Listening to an opera performance on the "noisy box" (radio), he exclaims, "Woman sick! Scream for witch doctor!" Critic Leonard Maltin commented, "Tarzan’s first encounter with indoor plumbing is truly memorable." Taking a shower fully dressed, he delivers his famous jungle yell. (According to Weissmuller, that oft-imitated call was actually the result of splicing together the separate recordings of a soprano, an alto and a hog-caller.)

Tarzan insists that various African-Americans working in the city are from assorted tribes back in the jungle. He resolves a courtroom confrontation with a slick lawyer by hoisting the hapless man overhead and tossing him. In the movie’s spectacular highlight, Tarzan eludes policemen by diving off the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River. While some loyal fans maintain that Johnny executed the 100-plus-feet dive himself, other sources matter-of-factly state that a weighted dummy was thrown from the bridge.

Nearly a half-century later, this hook for the fish-out-of-water angle was baited again for the 1989 TV movie "Tarzan in Manhattan," directed by Michael Schultz (of "Car Wash" fame), featuring the character of Jane as a smart-mouthed New York cab driver who befriends Tarzan, who just happens to be in the Big Apple searching for animals captured and taken from his jungle, among them the beloved chimpanzee Cheeta. The 2003 WB series "Tarzan" presented Jane as an NYPD detective, assisted in her cases by Tarzan, who was played by an Australian-born underwear model. The show was mercifully canceled after eight episodes.

As the rubes who blithely ignored the trappings of sophisticated society, Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride (above) confounded city slickers in the series of low-budget but nonetheless popular "Ma and Pa Kettle" comedy films, most notably in "Ma and Pa Kettle Go to Town" (1950), which planted the guileless clan smack dab in the middle of New York City (with Jim Backus as a crook called "Little Joe").

Getting back on the horse, "A Connecticut Yankee" (1931) cast Will Rogers as a 20th-century handyman who finds himself in King Arthur’s medieval England. Fondly revered as "Oklahoma’s Favorite Son," Rogers was a cowboy, expert roper, humorist, political satirist ("I belong to no organized party," he once said, "I’m a Democrat") and actor.

In fact, by the mid-1930s, Rogers was the highest-paid movie actor in Hollywood. Before his death in a plane crash in 1935, he had appeared in 71 films, 50 silents and 21 talkies. More often than not, his parts were loosely scripted, the filmmakers acquiescing to his flair for ad-libbing. Nobody could play Will Rogers better than himself, and that is exactly what he brought to his role of "Sir Boss" (above) in the update of Mark Twain’s classic tale A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, wherein the Yankee is unmistakably more cowboy than Connecticutian, especially when he wins a joust with his mastery of the lasso.

One of the screen’s most popular cowboys, John Wayne, was actually more comfortable on the ocean in a sailboat than on a horse, but he inevitably played a cowboy in a number of films that weren’t westerns, whether he was an American ambassador to 18th-century Japan in "The Barbarian and the Geisha," a detective in modern-day Seattle in "McQ" or a Chicago cop pursuing a fugitive in London in "Brannigan."

In "Hatari!" (1962), the Duke was a cowboy-in-a-safari-suit as the head wrangler for an outfit of trappers who capture wild animals for zoos. (The animals, filmed on-location in Tanzania, Africa, were indeed wild, a practice thankfully forbidden today over concerns of exhausting and possibly killing the animals.)

"Hatari!" may have been the inspiration for the 1965 movie "Africa: Texas Style!" starring Hugh O’Brian (from the popular TV series "The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp") as a transplanted cowhand who helps Englishman John Mills preserve wild animals. Executive producer Ivan Tors, best known for such family television programming as "Sea Hunt," "Flipper," "Gentle Ben" and "Daktari," brought the project to the small screen with Chuck Connors (TV’s "The Rifleman") in "Cowboy in Africa" (below) a series that lasted a single season in 1967.

In 1974, James Garner, in one of two movies he made for the Disney studio, starred as "The Castaway Cowboy," a Texan who gets shanghaied in San Francisco, jumps ship and is washed ashore on the island of Kauai, where he helps a widow (Vera Miles) and her son start a cattle ranch, while fending off the evil land-grabbing banker (Robert Culp).

Historically, a man named John Palmer Parker (1790-1868) (below) was 19 when he jumped ship off the island of Hawaii. He eventually assisted King Kamehameha I in ridding the island of wild bulls and was granted a large area of land, which he established as a cattle ranch in 1847.

One of the oldest working ranches in the U.S., Parker Ranch predated several mainland ranches in the Southwest by more than 30 years. Spreading across 135,000 acres, Parker Ranch (where a cowboy is called a "paniolo," which is the Hawaiian pronunciation of "Espanol," because the first cowhands there were Spanish-speaking immigrants from California) remains one of the country’s largest cattle ranches.

The farfetched premise of the 1986 TV movie "Outlaws" (above) transported a sheriff and four outlaws from 1886 through time to 1986 Houston, Texas, where they set up shop as a detective agency to fight crime in the big city. Aging 1960s leading man Rod Taylor ("The Time Machine") starred, with Richard Roundtree (the screen’s original "Shaft") and Charles Napier ("Rambo: First Blood Part II"). "The whole idea," Taylor (below) later said, "is for us to bring everything from the 1880s with us. The clothes, the horses, our attitudes, our way of doing business. You bring that to the computer age and it becomes what they call contrapuntal. The humor comes from out of the contrasts and contradictions."

In the subsequent, short-lived series, the displaced westerners, with their antiquated six guns, would, without fail, out-shoot bad guys armed with automatic weapons. "It was funny as hell. We’d face a band of 50 terrorists," Taylor recalled, "but a pop-up toaster would scare the daylights out of us."

"Battle Beyond the Stars" (1980) gave our theme a science-fiction twist by casting George Peppard (above; soon-to-be star of the series "The A-Team") as the appropriately-dressed character called "Cowboy" in producer Roger Corman’s futuristic version of "The Magnificent Seven." The cult favorite even had Robert Vaughn reprising, more or less, his gunfighter role from "The Magnificent Seven."

Definitely more grounded in black-and-white reality was "Lonely Are the Brave" (1962), which boasted a starkly honest script by Dalton Trumbo (the most famous of "The Hollywood Ten," writers who were blacklisted as Communists in the 1950s) and a sincere, understated performance by Kirk Douglas (above), as a fugitive modern-day cowboy-on-horseback, pursued by a sympathetic sheriff (Walter Matthau) and a sadistic deputy (George Kennedy). "I’m a loner, clear down to my guts," Douglas explains to another character. "Know what a loner is? He’s a born cripple. He’s a cripple because the only person he can live with is himself. It’s his life, the way he wants to live."

In 1990, Tom Selleck starred in "Quigley Down Under" as an American cowboy and expert rifle marksman whose favorite firearm is an 1874 Sharps Buffalo Rifle with an extended barrel. "It’s marked up to twelve hundred yards," he says. "This one shoots a mite further." Alan Rickman (below), who excelled at the time playing scene-stealing villains ("Die Hard," "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves"), added another charismatic rogue to his gallery as an Australian rancher who hires Quigley to aid in ridding the Outback of Aborigines.

Along with actor Sam Elliott, Tom Selleck could effortlessly personify the iconic cowboy of the American West. The two were memorably paired in a couple of TV productions based on Louis L’Amour’s novels, The Sacketts and The Shadow Riders. So we all know that an honest cowpoke the likes of Selleck would never cotton to Rickman’s despicable campaign of "pacification by force," setting the stage for the inevitable showdown. Fascinated by tales of Old West gunfighters, Rickman claims he was born not in the wrong time but on the wrong continent. "This ain’t Dodge City," Quigley replies grimly, "and you ain’t Bill Hickock."

Costarring the underrated Laura San Giacomo (best known for her role in the sitcom "Just Shoot Me"), "Quigley Down Under," directed by Simon Wincer ("Lonesome Dove," "Comanche Moon"), was originally intended for Steve McQueen a decade earlier but was suspended after the star became ill.

"Hidalgo" (2004), as pointed out by Roger Ebert, is a "completely fictionalized account" of a chapter in the life of an actual cowboy named Frank Hopkins (below). Although he was acknowledged as an accomplished distance rider and an activist for the preservation of the Mustang horses, Hopkins was also known to state a number of disputed claims, including his participation in a 3000-mile horse race in Arabia in 1890, most of which were dismissed as tall tales. John Fusco, who wrote the movie’s screenplay, admitted he "heightened the ‘Based On’ story to create an entertaining theatrical film."

However, Ebert noted, "Let us assume, as the movie does, that Hopkins was a half-Indian who bonded with an uncommonly talented Mustang pony named Hidalgo. And that after he grew drunk and morose while laboring in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, he risked everything to travel to the Saudi desert and enter the ‘Ocean of Fire,’ a legendary race across the sands for a $10,000 prize."
Viggo Mortensen (above), in the wake of his star-making performance in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, portrayed Hopkins "as a bronzed, lean loner," in Ebert’s words, in "a throwback to a more innocent time when heroes and their horses risked everything just because life was so damned boring in the slow lane."

When Roger Ebert made the comment about the unspoiled country boy in corrupt civilization, he was reviewing 1968’s "Coogan’s Bluff," undoubtedly the best of the displaced cowboy films. Clint Eastwood, the former costar of TV’s "Rawhide," had recently returned from his roles overseas in the trilogy of so-called "Man With No Name" Italian Westerns and had just starred in "Hang ‘Em High," an American-made western with more than a passing resemblance to his European movies. "Coogan’s Bluff," the first picture made by Eastwood’s production company, Malpaso, cast him as a modern-day deputy sheriff in Piute County, Arizona, sent to New York City to extradite a suspect (Don Stroud) wanted for murder in Arizona.

"This is Coogan’s first visit to the city, and there are a lot of things he doesn’t know," Ebert noted, "but he does know his own mind," and that comes in handy, from dealing with a greedy cab driver to legal wrangling with a wise-cracking police detective (a smartly cast Lee J. Cobb, who reminds Eastwood that New York City isn’t the OK Corral), to romantic diversions with a dedicated social worker (Susan Clark), to a violent double-cross by the fugitive’s hippie girlfriend (played by Tisha Sterling, below, daughter of actress Ann Sothern), and finally, a thrilling motorcycle chase through Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park.

"Originally, they were playing (Coogan) as much more of a bumbling type," Eastwood recalled in a 1976 interview, "being taken by all the people in the big city. Well, I thought that had been done a lot in the past, with James Stewart and a lot of guys." He added, "Just because he’s not a New Yorker doesn’t mean he’s a clod. Plus the fact that his kind of prairie cunning might work well for him against a big city background."

"Coogan’s Bluff" was the first collaboration between Eastwood and director Don Siegel. Together, they made five films together (not counting Siegel’s cameo as Murphy the bartender in Eastwood’s directing debut, 1971’s "Play Misty for Me"), including the benchmark cop thriller "Dirty Harry" and ending with the grim but entertaining "Escape from Alcatraz."

Before "Coogan’s Bluff," Siegel was probably best known as the director of the original sci-fi classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956). In his 1996 biography of Clint Eastwood, author Richard Schickel called Siegel "Clint’s kind of director, a decisive filmmaker who didn’t waste time, words or film on the set, mostly because he was about as grounded in his craft as it is possible to be." In his review of "Coogan’s Bluff," Roger Ebert said that Siegel "is thoroughly at home in this sort of movie…Siegel knows what he wants and gets it."

A man named Herman Miller was given story credit for "Coogan’s Bluff." He was also involved in the early script developments. He went on to create "McCloud," the popular but increasingly implausible TV series about a New Mexico law officer (Dennis Weaver, above) on "special assignment" with the New York Police Department, which lasted seven seasons. The show was famous for its opening title footage of Weaver, in his western regalia, riding a horse on the streets of the Big Apple - something Deputy Sheriff Coogan would never have done.

The premise underwent a fair-dinkum makeover in 1986 when Paul Hogan (above), an Australian commercial actor and TV sketch comedian, starred in "Crocodile Dundee" as a laid-back crocodile hunter invited by a female reporter (Linda Kozlowski, who would become Hogan’s real-life wife) to visit New York City. Like Tarzan before him, Dundee reacts awkwardly to the unfamiliar surroundings, dodging the bottom of an escalator, doing his laundry in a bathtub, asking an African-American limo driver his tribal background. What fans remember most is the confrontation with a punk wielding a switchblade. "That’s not a knife," Dundee says with a chuckle, pulling out his enormous Bowie blade. "That’s a knife!"

Fifteen years later, Hogan attempted to rework the fish-out-of-water story on the west coast, with screen wife and son in tow, in "Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles."

In 1994’s "The Cowboy Way," a low-key Kiefer Sutherland and a shamelessly mugging Woody Harrelson (in a role supposedly meant for Kevin Costner) played rodeo partners who journey from New Mexico to New York to search for their Cuban buddy and his daughter, who disappeared in an immigrant smuggling scheme. Scripted by Bill Wittliff, who adapted Lonesome Dove into the successful miniseries, the comedy-adventure featured a chase on horseback through downtown gridlock and was dismissed by critics as "a weak rehashing of the ‘Crocodile Dundee’ gimmick" and "a really crummy rip-off of ‘Crocodile Dundee.’"

Afterword

As for the real West, William "Buffalo Bill" Cody (1846-1917) took his Wild West show to England in 1887, toured Europe in 1889 and met Pope Leo XIII in 1890.

William Barclay "Bat" Masterson (above) was a buffalo hunter, army scout, gambler, saloon owner, law officer, gunfighter (responsible for the shooting deaths of at least two adversaries), sportsman and boxing promoter before he became a sports journalist for the New York Morning Telegraph. On October 25, 1921, he collapsed from a heart attack while writing his column at his desk, dead at the age of 67.

We give Bat the last word on what the big city really meant to a true westerner, an individual who rolled high through a number of frontier boomtowns, from Dodge City to Tombstone. He commented, "New York is the biggest boobtown there is. They will buy any damned thing here."