I love westerns; their expectations and rhythms appeal to me as a storyteller. I've collected a few thoughts on what makes a good western (or pseudo-western) and put them down. Yes, classic westerns are hard to get published now, but there are writers who cram John Wayne into a spacesuit or a suit of armor--or even a Southern Command uniform--and allow him to do his stuff.

The hero is independent, capable, has a code, and a past.

"A man, alone" might sound boring the first time you read the words. What it really does is give you elbow room for storytelling. Most of us have job and family commitments that chart the course of our days and restrict us to a horizon or two. When it comes time to escape into light fiction, the unfettered character allows the writer freedom of movement necessary to a western. Ethan in The Searchers comes to mind, a Confederate home very late from the Civil War with suspiciously new currency as well as the arms he bore in combat. Though it's done subtly, we soon learn that the woman he loved as a youth has married his brother, who stayed at home minding the farm, so to speak. Independence allows for moral dilemmas. An independent character always has a choice between courses of action (usually it’s comfort and safety vs. doing the right thing, but there are wonderful exceptions such as Unforgiven).

The hero also must be capable. Not just at fighting, but in the hundreds of skills that go with frontier life. Lois L'Amour's Hondo Lane instantly recognizes Angie Lowe's lonely homestead as being manless (her shiftless husband is hanging around town), with dozens of little jobs around the house and barn in need of attention, from drainage ditches to loose shingles, and he goes to work right away doing them. Film-maker John Frankenheimer once commented that audiences love seeing men work hard and well, and they liked to see details on how various jobs get done. I concur. Unless I'm watching slapstick, nothing sets my teeth grinding so as to throw sparks as the character I'm supposed to root for flailing about from beginning to end and still winning the day (Jar Jar Binks vs. the Droid Army springs to mind). A superb example of the capable hero is Meryl Streep's Gail in The River Wild. Gail's skill at rafting (gained years ago as a river guide) and the dozens of little duties of river travel camp life, her adventurous courage that turns into the desperate variety as the plot develops, make her a highly appealing character the audience enjoys spending time with.

Often the hero's skill allows him to pick and choose jobs, like Eastwood's "Man with No Name" or the expert swordsman ronin in The Seven Samurai.

If the hero is tied down by anything, it's a code. Western heroes tend to be what scholar Philip Young called a "Hemingway code hero" (Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration). Young identified honor, courage, and endurance as the three main attributes of a Hemingway code hero, and it applies to most westerns. Gary Cooper in High Noon chooses his code (symbolized by his tin star) over his beautiful young bride on his wedding day. The code doesn't have to be regarding his own behavior. In Electric Horseman Robert Redford's character has clearly let himself go, he'll abuse fans, body, and reputation in any number of ways -- the one thing that rouses him to action is the mistreatment of a champion racehorse.

Honor is a frequent feature in Westerns. Sometimes it's doing your duty, as in High Noon, other times it's a reputation ("I must have killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille," says Gene Wilder's drunken "Waco Kid" gunfighter in Blazing Saddles, which succeeded thanks to the same Western-genre conventions that it was supposedly lampooning. "Then one day I hear 'Reach for it, mister.' I spun around, and there I was standing face to face with a six year old kid. Well, I just laid down my guns and walked away. Little bastard shot me in the ass."). It's a given that some men can be goaded into combat by accusations of cowardice (Unforgiven) or even milk drinking (Winchester 73, Westworld).

Courage is exhibited through physical bravery, or sometimes it's courage of the moral variety, exhibited by Shane's willingness to be thought, and called, a coward in order to be true to his resolve to give up gunfighting, or Eastwood’s acceptance of Sheriff Dagget’s barroom abuse in Unforgiven, keeping the promise to live clean he gave his deceased wife. Courage is a shorthand for all kinds of other traits. When Shelly Winters' fiancé abandons her to the pursuing Indians to escape on his horse, though we’ve just met him we can pretty much guess most of his other characteristics.

Endurance, especially of physical pain, is the third code-hero trait. Ethan in The Searchers is a monument to endurance, tracking his niece Debby across the miles and years. Gail’s running “the gauntlet” in The River Wild or Eastwood’s beatdown in A Fistfull of Dollars or Richard Harris’s torture in A Man Called Horse are all testaments to the trials heroes have to endure in classic Campbellesque fashion before their final confrontation and victory.

These admirable traits didn’t appear in a vacuum. The hero developed them in his past. Most Western heroes are fully formed at the beginning of the story. The story is whether they will triumph, survive events, and keep to their code while accomplishing the first two question marks. Their past drives them, whether its Ethan’s love for Martha and her children in The Searchers, or Shalako’s desire to see peace maintained with the Apaches after his experiences fighting them, or Jimmy Stewart’s skill as a rifleman and desire to kill Dutch Henry Brown in Winchester 73. Though they are fully formed, the experiences of the story can still transform them. Big Jake McCallister becomes re-acquainted with his estranged sons while hunting his kidnapped grandson, and hit-man Leon fills the emotional void (which he was probably unaware of) in his life with young Matilda. Ex-soldier and condemned criminal Plissken demands to be called “Snake” in the beginning of Escape from New York, but at the end wants to be Plissken again, showing a change in how he sees himself. Gail rediscovers her love of her husband in a marriage that she believed was falling apart in The River Wild.

So what sort of challenges do these Western Heroes face? Nothing less than the world.

The hero is up against the status quo in some way.

Western heroes tend to be transformative figures, with a plotline as old as David v. Goliath. The farmer and the cowman should be friends, but they often aren't, and someone needs to get into Dodge to clean up the place so white women can walk the streets in safety. From the Earps in My Darling Clementine to James Garner's gentle lawman in Support Your Local Sheriff, establishing rule of law is a great foundation for a story. High Noon, notably, turns that on its head, the hard work of squashing the troublemakers was done years ago and the only person who is transformed is the Quaker bride, who realizes that being the price of being civilized means having to defend it once in a while.

The status quo is occasionally something that must just be survived, as the river is in The River Wild, or the encroachment of civilization in Dances With Wolves, which cleverly turned the American Dream that so many others in westerns were fighting for into the enemy by looking at it through the Indians point-of-view (though why Costner felt that this message would only be valid if conveyed through a white man's eyes is a bit beyond me).

The hero riding in and fixing what's broke can be anything from an utter scoundrel that may or may not be some kind of hell-bent revenant (High Plains Drifter) to a heaven-sent preacher (Pale Rider), but it's almost always in the form of wanderers of one kind or another (Silverado). In his later years John Wayne made the status quo modernity, and characters such as Big Jake(very good movie) and McQ(you have to be a serious Wayne fan to like this one) applied old-time solutions to their problems. Sometimes there's a more obvious sociological conflict, as in the egalitarian Shalako's encounter with the blue-blooded hunting party. The hero can even be bull-headedly wrong, like Henry Fonda's combination of Gen. Custer/Captain William Fetterman in Fort Apache, get himself and his troop massacred, and wind up a transformative hero nonetheless in the newspapers. Lawbreakers are popular as well, as long as they're the charismatic Robin Hood types of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Commancheros, and Hollywood's brief 60s-70s flirtation with the murderous Billy the Kid shows that sometimes they're not too careful in source material.

The classic western-in-space "hero against the status quo" example is Planet of the Apes, but it's also used in various post-apocalyptic settings like Road Warrior and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and The Postman.

Check your pedigree at the door.

The West, especially in the writings of Louis L'Amour, is a place where Everyman can go for a clean break and a fresh start, though movies such as Far and Away carry this message explicitly too. Who you were or what you did back east doesn't matter, as Jimmy Stewart painfully learned in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The elegant bluebloods of Shalako come from a world where laws are for the little people, they're so used to their birth guaranteeing their status that they think their titles are a magical shield against danger even if they break a treaty with "savages." Even race is somewhat less of a problem in the West, though movies like Blazing Saddles and Shanghai Noon mostly use race for humorous purposes.

When Western social anarchy bleeds over into SF, you get anything from Escape From New York, where all convicts are equal but some are more equal than others, to Zombie movies, which are more of an example of the West moving into your neighborhood. One of the appeals of the zombie apocalypse is the reset button, everyone is back to zero.

Faith identifies and defines the community.

Westerns have more to say about community and the hero's role in it than they are generally given credit for. The most common way for community to be established in the Western is through an expression of faith. High Noon begins, appropriately enough, in a church. Early in True Grit we witness a hanging, with throngs of the law-abiding faithful singing Amazing Grace as they wait for the gruesome ceremony to be carried out on the lawbreakers. Communities quietly rally in the cemetery after a tragedy ("Put an 'amen' to it," Ethan rasps in The Searchers as his brother and former sweetheart are buried, and when that doesn't move the reverend along, he hollers 'amen' and leaves, but then Ethan's not really a part of the community).

The faith uniting the community doesn't always have to be religious. It can be a faith in military tradition (Fort Apache and the others of John Ford's "Cavalry Trilogy"), education and the press (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), law (Rio Bravo), or even the requirements of their agricultural product (rice in The Seven Samurai).

Often, the hero's actions in saving the community sever him from it at the same time. Explicitly in films like The Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven or Shane and implicitly -- elevating them like Jimmy Stewarts Ransom Stoddard character or forgetting them in the case of John Wayne's Tom Donovan in Liberty Valance. Unpleasant jobs require unpleasant men, as Maureen O'Hara observes in Big Jake. These unpleasant men must either live apart until needed again or be re-civilized out their violent creed-- indeed, the brooding, lonely superhero archetype owes its existence to the western.

God gets a guest-starring role now and then. The tornadoes of Twister were labeled the "finger of God" and treated with the same sort of musical cues that the Ten Commandments or Himself got in de Mille's pictures. In Twister's cosmology, science-for-science's sake was the faith of the holy community--Paxton sacrifices material comfort after material comfort as he comes back into the fold, science-for-money's sake was the faith of the fallen.

When God doesn’t explicitly appear, He implicitly does in the landscape. Westerns tend to cover a lot of ground, often shot so as to dwarf man by the titanic creations of nature, whether they‘re mountains, canyons, or the monoliths of John Ford’s beloved Monument Valley in Utah. It’s God’s country, giving the Man Alone a companion other than his horse and gun.

The hero is kind to women and children.

Another shorthand for sorting out who you're going to root for in the Western-style story is basic kindness to women and children (though "kindness" can involve some rough handling in the interest of teaching how the world works, as when Hondo Lane tells the Lowe boy not to pet his dog. When the boy pets him anyway, Hondo keeps silent until the dog bites the boy and tells the kid "maybe you'll listen to me next time"). Marshall Cogburn in True Grit tries to discourage and then lose his 14-year-old female employer once or twice to spare her the dangers and miseries of hunting her father's murderer, though once she proves she carries sand equal to the ponderous lawman he becomes kindly enough, going so far as to respect her abilities, something the Texas Ranger is loathe to do even after she's proved herself.

The quickest way to upset an audience is through cruelty to women or children. Sometimes this is used to good effect, as in our doubts about John Wayne's intentions toward the now-teenaged Debbie in The Searchers. When Clint Eastwood rapes the town Jezebel in High Plains Drifter, for the rest of the film the audience is a bit unsettled. If that's what he does in the first ten minutes, what's the rest going to be like? Sometimes it destroys sympathy entirely, as when Costner throws the girl overboard to conserve supplies in Waterworld. Costner should have learned to imitate Road Warrior emotionally, not just in art design -- Max is kind enough to the feral kid but keeps his distance for reasons of his own.

(Kevin Costner aside: what weird psychological ego trip is Costner exploring in his sf films where he makes the most valuable product in post-apocalyptic worlds Kevin Costner sperm? Watch Waterworld and Postman and tell me that ain't true.)

Before resorting to violence, the hero must be pushed past the point at which most reasonable people would act.

Shane is the most classic instance of this particular ethic. Other examples abound: the big rancher in Rio Lobo who has lawman Wayne boxed in to his jail cell because Wayne has thrown his murderous brother into jail; in Silverado the heroes don't act until the little boy is kidnapped despite the violence and manifest evils going on in and around the town; Clint Eastwood is thoroughly stomped by Little Bill in Unforgiven but doesn't unleash the evil of his former self until his friend Ned is decorating a pimp's porch.

This reluctance to start a fight is true in most "classic" westerns, the hyper-violent films exemplified by spaghetti westerns and the Sam Peckinpah-school as seen in Wild Bunch (an excellent film) are an exception -- though it's not so much a matter of date as of mindset, for there were films like Chisum contemporary to Peckinpah that stuck to the old way of escalating the violence. Even Mel Gibson's Road Warrior didn't set himself against the loathsome Humungus gang until they destroyed his car and killed his only friend, a dog.

The better film-makers played with this expectation, as in Winchester 73, where James Stewart, shown again and again to be a good and kindly man, is dead set on hunting down and killing Dutch Henry Brown -- the event that pushed Stewart over the brink occurred long before the film began, and we don't find out what it was for a while, though a few hints are dropped.

Western weaknesses.

The genre has its shortcomings, too. Women tend to be defined by the men (or lack of men, or oversupply of men) in their lives. Grace Kelly's Quaker bride in High Noon and Kim Darby's Mattie Ross in True Grit are exceptions, but all too often their roles are so limited one wonders why they were given names beyond "sister" "wife" "mother" "whore" or "love interest." Meaty roles for non-Caucasians are rare (and when it comes time to play someone Mexican or part-Indian, Burt Lancaster and John Wayne get cast anyway), but beyond being kept at an emotional distance they are generally handled respectfully, more so than those who refuse to watch or dismiss westerns would have you believe.

Best Westerns
The Searchers
Unforgiven
Winchester '73
True Grit
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
High Noon
Silverado
Fort Apache
Shane
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Rio Bravo
Pale Rider
Electric Horseman
Blazing Saddles
Support Your Local Sheriff

Almost any of the books by Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, or Elmore Leonard‘s stories.

Best Pseudo-Westerns
The Seven Samurai
The Road Warrior
The River Wild
Twister
Leon: The Professional
Escape From New York
Westworld
Mad Max
Planet of the Apes
Near Dark
Zulu

Robert Heinlein, Keith Laumer, H. Beam Piper, David Gemmell.