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THE WESTERN
Wrath, dealt with the empty and unglamorous lives of touring professional rodeo riders. Three Young Texans by Delmar Daves and John Sturges' Bad Day at Black Rock dealt with problems in the contemporary West. John Huston's somewhat loose and ambiguous The Misfits often achieved real poignancy in its commentary on a disappearing way of life and on a fading breed of men. Cowboy, directed by Elmo Williams, was an excellent documentary on the cowboy's everyday life; Williams kept it generally realistic, but the use of ballads tended at times to romanticize the subject, and certain scenes appeared too patently staged.
The ultimate in the application of The Method to the West in performance, writing, and direction belongs to Paul Newman, the star, and to the writer and director of The Left Handed Gun, perhaps the most bizarre Western of them all, with The Method being employed at one point in a near-surrealist sequence that could have been borrowed bodily from Jean Vigo's ^ero de Conduite. Another application of The Method, in a strikingly personal style, was the long and expensive One Eyed Jacks, directed and acted by Marlon Brando, a fascinatingly discontinuous film superbly photographed, in which the Western theme is implemented by a utilization of the sea as if it were the prairie of a more conventional horse opera. But let us not forget that Ince especially, and also George O'Brien, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and others had made use of these same seascapes. One Eyed Jacks is not to be considered merely a Western, since it contains so much of Brando's fiery desire to express his personal philosophy; the formula of the Western genre has served him only as a springboard for his own rendering of the West and the Western hero.
The enduring beauty of the West, free of restrictions and devoid of billboard advertising, will continue to appeal to a public that is increasingly hemmed in by the tensions and curtailments of modern living.