Movies set under western skies go back to The Great Train Robbery¸ which mesmerized viewers in 1903. Unlike many in my generation, I didn’t grow up obsessed with cowboys-and-Indians flicks. But I learned early on that films that call upon our collective vision of the rugged western states can have a lot to say about our lives here and now. John Ford’s 1939 Stagecoach conveyed some important lessons about the relationship of the individual and the community. William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1942) powerfully explored social justice and the mentality of a lynch mob. In 1952, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon focused on the courage to stand alone, even when times are tough. A decade later, Lonely Are The Brave featured Kirk Douglas as a cowboy who can’t find a way to adjust to the modern world.
Westerns tend to go in and out of fashion. Though the early career of Clint Eastwood was heavily dependent on Old West sagas (notably the wild-and-wooly spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone), the name I most associate with westerns of all stripes is writer Larry McMurtry, who left us March 25 at the age of 84. McMurtry, who was born and died a Texan, loved chronicling his native soil in novels and screenplays that displayed a wide range. His 1962 novel Horseman, Pass By became an Oscar-winning 1963 film, Hud, about the hard-scrabble life on a cattle ranch. In 1971, he adapted his own The Last Picture Show, bringing to the screen an indelible portrait of a dying Texas town and its people. Once again actors (Cloris Leachman, Ben Johnson) took home trophies for conveying the joys and constraints of western living.
McMurtry’s most enduring gift to television was Lonesome Dove, a Pulitzer-winning 1985 novel that became a four-part mini-series starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones as two former Texas Rangers who join a cattle drive. Its wild popularity among viewers and critics alike resuscitated the western genre, and led to a TV series as well as other spinoffs. But McMurtry received his highest Hollywood accolades for helping to adapt the writing of someone else. In 2005, he and longtime collaborator Diana Ossana won Oscars for turning a very short, very spare story by Annie Proulx into a landmark film, Brokeback Mountain. Their sensitive depiction of two gay cowboys in the modern west prompted impassioned national conversation about gender roles and machismo in today’s society.
Even in death McMurtry will surely be much discussed. Terms of Endearment, the 1983 hit film that won Shirley MacLaine her Oscar, is currently being remade by Lee Daniels, with Oprah Winfrey in the role of a Houston mom with a dying daughter. It’s based on yet another McMurtry novel, one without cowboys (though it does have a memorable astronaut character, played in 1983 by Jack Nicholson, who – yes – also walked off with a gold statuette). No question that McMurtry loved the movies, and they love him right back.
Also on March 25 we lost another great writer. Beverly Cleary was known for Beezus and Ramona, Runaway Ralph and other books for young readers. Her warm-hearted stories of middle-class kids are fun to read, but also seem to reflect the daily lives of genuine kids. Having a pesky younger sister of my own, I was sure that Cleary had grown up in a household much like mine. In fact, she was an only child struggling to survive an emotionally damaged mother and other serious challenges. But talent will out, I guess. Cleary, who lived to be 104, clearly came to appreciate happy families and their often-hilarious interactions.