He Was Some Kind of a Man

Roderick Mcgillis

Description

He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western explores the construction and representation of masculinity in low-budget western movies made from the 1930s to the early 1950s. These films contained some of the mid-twentieth-century’s most familiar names, especially for youngsters: cowboys such as Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, and Red Ryder. The first serious study of a body of films that was central to the youth of two generations, He Was Some Kind of a Man combines the author’s childhood fascination with this genre with an interdisciplinary scholarly exploration of the films influence on modern views of masculinity.

McGillis argues that the masculinity offered by these films is less one-dimensional than it is plural, perhaps contrary to expectations. Their deeply conservative values are edged with transgressive desire, and they construct a male figure who does not fit into binary categories, such as insider/outsider or masculine/feminine. Particularly relevant is the author’s discussion of George W. Bush as a cowboy and how his aspirations to cowboy ideals continue to shape American policy.

This engagingly written book will appeal to the general reader interested in film, westerns, and contemporary culture as well as to scholars in film studies, gender studies, children’s literature, and auto/biography.

Sujets

• Cultural studies
• Children's literature
• Gender studies

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 08 avril 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554587490
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

He Was Some Kind of a Man
Film and Media Studies Series
Film studies is the critical exploration of cinematic texts as art and entertainment , as well as the industries that produce them and the audiences that consume them. Although a medium barely one hundred years old, film is already transformed through the emergence of new media forms. Media studies is an interdisciplinary field that considers the nature and effects of mass media upon individuals and society and analyzes media content and representations. Despite changing modes of consumption-especially the proliferation of individuated viewing technologies-film has retained its cultural dominance into the 21st century, and it is this transformative moment that the WLU Press Film and Media Studies series addresses.
Our Film and Media Studies series includes topics such as identity, gender, sexuality, class, race, visuality, space, music, new media, aesthetics, genre, youth culture, popular culture, consumer culture, regional/national cinemas, film policy, film theory, and film history.
Wilfrid Laurier University Press invites submissions. For further information, please contact the Series editors, all of whom are in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University:
Dr. Philippa Gates
Email: [e-mail]
Department of English and Film Studies
Wilfrid Laurier University
75 University Avenue West
Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5
Canada
Phone: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
Dr. Russell Kilbourn
Email: [e-mail]
Dr. Ute Lischke
Email: [e-mail]
He Was Some Kind of a Man
Masculinities in the B Western
RODERICK MCGILLIS
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
McGillis, Roderick
He was some kind of a man: masculinities in the B western / Roderick McGillis.
(Film and media studies series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55458-059-0
1. Masculinity in motion pictures. 2. Western films-History and criticism. I. Title. II. Title: Masculinities in the B western. III. Series: Film and media studies series
PN1995.9.M46M345 2009 791.43 6278 C2008-907742-3
2009 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada www.wlupress.wlu.ca
Cover image: Monte Hale, from the front cover of the Monte Hale comic book, October 1951. Reproduced with the permission of Monte Hale. Cover design by Blakeley Words+Pictures. Text design by Catharine Bonas-Taylor.

This book is printed on Ancient Forest Friendly paper (100% post-consumer recycled).
Printed in Canada
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher s attention will be corrected in future printings.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
For Frances, as always
The western does not age.
-Andr Bazin
Men with guns. Guns as physical objects, and the postures associated with their use, form the visual and emotional center [of the western].
-Robert Warshow
Contents
Preface
1 Introduction: Ride the High Country, or They Went Thataway
2 Cowboy Codes: Straight and Pure and All Boy
3 When We Were Young: Nostalgia and the Cowboy Hero
4 Arms and the Man: The Friendly Gun
5 Give Me My Boots and Saddles: Camp Cowboy
6 Tall in the Saddle: Romance on the Range
7 White Hats and White Heroes: Who Is That Other Guy?
8 Virgin Land: Landscape, Nature, and Masculinity
9 Corporate Cowboys and the Shaping of a Nation
Postscript: The Frontiersman (1938)
List of Films Mentioned
References
Index
Preface
In the Warner Brothers film Casablanca (1941), when the innocent young woman from Bulgaria asks cynical American saloon owner Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) what the prefect of police, Captain Renault (Claude Raines), is like and whether he will keep his word, Rick replies: He s just like any other man, only more so. And at the end of Orson Welles s Touch of Evil (1958), as the prostitute Tanya (Marlene Dietrich) gazes on the bloated body of just-deceased Hank Quinlan (played by Welles), she remarks, He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?
Both Hank Quinlan and Louis Renault are men of exorbitant appetite; such men either learn to control that appetite and become self-denying and state-serving men (as Renault does at the end of Casablanca ) or they die (as Quinlan does). As we see them in the movies, they are aberrations, foiled by the greater heroism, moral commitment, and self-denial of another man-Rick in Casablanca and Vargas (Charlton Heston) in Touch of Evil . What interests us about these other men is that both are models of masculinity devoutly to be imitated by the male viewer, and yet both are clearly outside conventional social structures: when Colonel Strasse (Conrad Veidt) asks Rick what nationality he is, Rick replies that he is a drunkard; Vargas is a Mexican. In other words, both men hail from places the films encourage viewers to associate with darkness and dissolution, places mysterious and strange, places beyond the familiar American towns and cities, liminal places that seem to offer no room for conventional family backgrounds but plenty of room for behaviour rich in libidinous, or at least transgressive, possibility.
What I am touching on here is, of course, the popular mythic notion of the charismatic male invested with the power to take charge, to set things in order, to shoulder responsibility in a world helpless without his skill, determination, and moral authority. This guy can cross the line, even join the bad people for a while, because he is, in the end, strong, reliable, straight, and morally stiff as a two-by-four. I grew up knowing this man as the cowboy. He is the subject of this book-more precisely, the cowboy of the Saturday-afternoon B western, who fashioned my sense of masculinity, is the subject of this book.
Acknowledgements
Obviously, this book has been in the making for a long time-since I regularly went to the movies on Saturday afternoons to see Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and the others. In those days, my sister, Sandra Meyer, rode with me some of the time, and my mother endured hours of simulated shooting and riding inside and outside our house. All that play was early preparation for this study. Thanks to my mother and my sister. More recently, I found impetus in Quentin Tarantino s homage to Roy Rogers in his 2004 film, Kill Bill, Volume 2 . The writing of this book, however, is the work of some half-dozen years, and during that time I have had the good fortune to share ideas and drafts of chapters with several people who are, as it were, pardners in this effort.
Thanks to continuing support from Uli Knoepflmacher, David Kent, Laurent Chabin, Wayne Gearey, Clara Joseph, Barbara Belyea, Jeanne Perreault, Maria Nikolajeva, Kimberly Reynolds, Clare Bradford, Perry Nodelman, Peter Hunt, Thomas Van Der Walt, Dieter Petzold, Keath Fraser, John Kerr, David Rudd, Jan Susina, Sandra Beckett, and Jean Perrot. I owe a debt to my teacher Northrop Frye. Shaobo Xie and Liya Yuen gave me a useful book on the cowboy life. Chris Olbey helped me to reach a better understanding of the black westerns of the 1930s than I could have had without his interest and suggestions. Craig Werner and Karen Sands-O Connor gave me the opportunity to test ideas about nostalgia at the 2001 ChLA Conference in Buffalo, and Rolf Romoren gave me a similar opportunity at the 2003 IRSCL Congress in Kristiansand, Norway. Karen also read individual chapters and made valuable comments, and she also shared a book or two. Nancy Stewart allowed me to read her work on cowboy fiction, and she made valuable suggestions concerning my own work. I exchanged ideas with Ira Wells and Jordan Petty. Jean Webb returned to those yesteryears to share her memories of cowboys in London s East End. John Stephens generously allowed me to ride my hobby horse as a contributor to Ways of Being Male (Routledge, 2002), and some of what appears in that book creeps into chapter 1 of this book. Thanks to Kerry Mallan and Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane for the opportunity to read sections of one chapter to a small but kind audience (including Geraldine and Raylee), and thanks also to Kerry for co-presenting a paper in Norway that has resulted in a co-authored article that contains a reference or two to cowboys. Bob and Tamara Seiler have ridden along with me on this project since before it began; I have benefited from their work on western themes (especially the Calgary Stampede). Mark Palmer generously donated three Roy Rogers novels to spur me along when I began to flag. Vic Ramraj and I won our spurs riding the same territory for many years. John and Carole Moroz (and Jolyene and Frank and Buddy) offered sanctuary from the tra