In the landscape of the traditional Western, the simple, masculine values that the Westerner stood for were ancient and noble. He was the hero of our mass-culture folk art; for the whole world, this mythic hero symbolized American democracy and virtue and justice. If he was part of a reverie, it was a reverie about what was best in this country, and Westerns made us nostalgic for the imagined simplicities of our country’s past, and for the naïveté of our own childhood, when we had innocently believed in faultless protector-heroes. Riding to the rescue, the cowboy hero fought fair and punished the guilty. The hero might himself be an outlaw (as in John Ford’s Stagecoach), but he was a good man. The theme was always good against evil, and the iconography — the horses, the hats, the spurs and leather vests, the sunsets and cactus and cattle — was a reminder of an unspoiled country that the hero was fighting to keep from being destroyed. The villains were spoilers of the American dream. Between the villains and the hero were the farmers or townspeople — ordinary people, who stood up to the villains and lost, or who accommodated to evil because they were defenseless or too scared to fight. They were in the same position as most of us in the audience, but we were not asked to identify with their ineffectiveness, or with their partial victories, either. In the midst of a legend, why consider the actual world? Our hearts rode with the protector. The hero was a natural leader — the American knight. He won because he was physically stronger than the villains; his fists and his gun represented Justice. We didn’t worry about his assumption of authority or about his use of force. The story was formal and remote, a ritualized dream of the past that we clung to. It had no direct application; the Westerner’s ability to outfight the spoilers was part of our inspirational mythology. The landscape itself — the immensity of deserts and plains that the hero rode through — distanced the Westerns; and horses, with their patrician beauty, were natural carriers of deities.
A few more Westerns may still straggle in, but the Western is dead. Nobody’s making even those last-gasp Westerns anymore — the ones about the lonely last cowboy, or the semi-spoofs featuring heavy old movie stars falling off their horses or kinky cowboys going to Mexico or farther south (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). There’s been nothing since Jeremiah Johnson and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, in 1972, and nothing appears to be scheduled. It’s the end of a movie era. But the Western cowboy hero hasn’t disappeared; he’s moved from the mythological purity of the wide-open spaces into the corrupt modern cities and towns (Dirty Harry), and on paved streets he’s an inflammatory figure. When Buford Pusser (Joe Don Baker), the hero of Walking Tall, trims the bark off a stout hickory limb and starts swinging this skull-breaking club against the spoilers who are operating a wide-open Sin City strip near his birthplace in Tennessee, mythology and realism are joined.
Walking Tall is a volcano of a movie — and in full eruption — loosely based on the life of a man who has become a legendary figure through ballads celebrating his exploits. (Johnny Mathis sings an excruciating Walking Tall ballad at the close.) From Bonnie and Clyde on, our recent powerful, big-box-office hits have mostly questioned the old movie myths, turning them inside out and indicating that the bad guys often win. Walking Tall goes right back to Beowulf and stays on course. The actual Buford Pusser is a six-foot-six-inch former professional wrestler. As the movie tells it, he returns to Tennessee after several years on the road, and when he complains because a friend of his has been cheated in a dice game at a state-line gambling casino he is beaten, slashed, and left to die. A man of prodigious strength, Pusser recovers, and since the sheriff refuses to prosecute his assailants, he takes a club, goes back to the casino, and fractures the crooked gamblers’ arms. On trial, he defends his act of revenge as a man’s natural right, tearing off his shirt and showing his knife-scarred chest as evidence. Acquitted, he enters the race for sheriff against the incumbent, Al Thurman (Gene Evans), who had refused to help him, and Thurman, trying to run him off a bridge, is killed — though Pusser tries valiantly to save him and does succeed in rescuing Thurman’s deputy. Elected sheriff, Pusser proceeds to clean up the area, though at terrible cost to himself and his family. Buford Pusser’s inspirational ordeal is like a small-town version of Dirty Harry, but it isn’t snide or deliberately right-wing, like Dirty Harry. Walking Tall appears to be pre-political, as the traditional Westerns were. It is solemnly, unself-consciously square — a celebration of the same virtues that the Westerns always stood for, but, unlike those Westerns, not distanced. Those Westerns weren’t rabble-rousing; Walking Tall is.
Maybe, during all those years of watching Westerns, though we didn’t believe in them we wanted to. The child in us wanted to, and maybe the Westerns softened us up for primitivism in the guise of realism. Walking Tall appeals to a deep-seated belief in a simple kind of justice — perfect, swift, Biblical justice. It returns us to the moral landscape of the Western, yet the picture is more crude in its appeal than the Westerns, because it works almost totally on the blood-and-guts level of emotionally charged violence. Buford’s union of force and righteous wrath has the drive of a crusade against corruption — a crusade for a fundamentalist politics. When Buford began to clobber the bad guys, people in the audience cried out, “Get ’em, get ’em!” — and they weren’t kidding. Walking Tall has just opened in New York, but it has been playing around the country for the past year, and is said to have already grossed close to thirty-five million dollars. I’m told that in parts of the South it is a ritual that at the end audiences stand in homage and cheer; in New York, audiences scream and shout their assent to each act of vengeance that the towering hero takes upon his enemies. I’ve heard of people who have already seen it twice and are going back.
Born in 1908, the director, Phil Karlson, has been working in Hollywood since 1932. He made low-budget Westerns and routine pictures until the mid-fifties, when he made the sleeper Tight Spot and won recognition for the Alabama-set The Phenix City Story, about a crusading candidate for Attorney General and his son who did battle against an earlier Sin City vice operation. Later, Karlson directed the intelligent action melodrama Hell to Eternity, and such films as The Young Doctors, Rampage, the popular Matt Helm The Silencers and The Wrecking Crew, and, recently, Ben. He has a veteran low-budget action director’s skills, and these are what he brings to bear on Walking Tall: he doesn’t over-prepare a scene; he makes his points and moves on. Karlson pushes and punches, but he’s good at it. He can dredge up emotion; he can make the battle of virtuous force against organized evil seem primordial. He has a tawdry streak (there’s an exploitation sequence with a nude prostitute being whipped), and he’s careless (a scene involving a jewelry salesman is a decrepit mess), but in the onrush of the story the viewer is overwhelmed. Walking Tall isn’t afraid to pull out all the stops of classical cheapie melodrama, right down to the murder of the Pusser family dog and the weeping face of a bereaved child. One would be tempted to echo Thelma Ritter in All About Eve — “Everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end” — but some of the suffering has a basis in fact. Mrs. Pusser, played by Elizabeth Hartman, was actually ambushed and killed in 1967. The film is a heartbreaker as well as a gut-cruncher. Elizabeth Hartman is a gifted actress who appears too seldom; a delicate-featured redhead with a beautifully modeled brow, she has the appealing quality that the young Janet Gaynor had. You want to reach right out to her; she’s huggable. Karlson uses her for as much tearjerking potential as he dares. Brenda Benet (she has lazy, hot eyes, like Gail Russell’s) plays a Vietnam widow turned whore, a good-bad temptress who makes overtures to Buford; Rosemary Murphy is a lively dragonlady whore-mistress; and Ed Call, as Lutie, Buford’s old high-school chum, practically oozes Southernness — which is right for his role. The cast is frowzily passable; that is, the frowziness passes for authentic (although, as Buford’s father, Noah Beery appears to think that he can be Southern by acting Hollywood-cornpone sweet). The pink, freckled faces without makeup carry a message of “truth,” the same way the rundown bars do. (The film was shot in Tennessee, partly in McNairy County, where the actual Pusser served three two-year terms as sheriff, from 1964 to 1970.) Even the crummy cinematography gets by, because the picture’s very crudeness makes it seem innocently honest. Walking Tall doesn’t seem a sell, as a movie with a slicker surface might. All of it works to give the audience an exultant sense of the triumph of the heroic common man — his victory over “the system.”
In the movie, Pusser as a wrestler is known as Buford the Wild Bull; this name must have been the key for Joe Don Baker’s performance. Baker plays Buford as a soft-drawling, peace-loving man who, enraged by injustice, becomes a maddened fighting bull. Astonishingly, even when pummeling an adversary with body blows that are amplified so that they sound as if a tractor were being driven into flesh, he has the dignity of a wounded bull. At six feet two, Baker is a good deal smaller than the actual Pusser, but he looks enormous enough; he comes from Texas via the Actors Studio and TV (Mongo’s Back in Town, That Certain Summer) and films (Junior Bonner), and he seems Southern redneck — a common man who works outdoors in the sun — to the soul. He has that heavy, flaccid look that Southern white men often get early in life; it goes with a physical relaxation that can fool Northerners like me, who don’t always recognize the power hidden in the flab. As Baker plays him, Buford is a nonreflective hero who, when angered, tramples on his enemies uncontrollably. This brute obsessiveness may easily be the result of the moviemakers’ desire to show plenty of beatings, but Baker almost makes us believe that Buford fights back because he has to. Baker’s Buford has the mighty stature of a classic hero; he seems like a giant from the earth. This Buford is a primitive folk hero worthy of the tales of an earlier era — though actually he’s the hero of a modern tall tale.
When Baker, as Buford, says to his little son, “There’s nothing wrong with a gun in the right hands,” and promises him a rifle when he’s nine, the bit of dialogue comes from the same homiletic Hollywood as Clint Eastwood’s speeches in Magnum Force. Actually, although Mrs. Pusser had two children by a previous marriage, Pusser has only one child — a daughter — but you can see why the fictional son has been added: so that later, when he comes to the hospital to see his injured father, the child can walk down the corridor crying but clutching his rifle. It’s the little prince taking up his fallen king’s mission, and the audience gasps at the raw power of a device that pre-dates D. W. Griffith. The script, by the producer, Mort Briskin, who first heard of Pusser’s heroic ordeal when Roger Mudd did a ten-minute report on him on C.B.S. in 1969, may appear authentic just because it’s so shameless and tacky. Briskin’s previous credits as a writer are strictly small-time (A Man Alone, The Magic Face), but this script didn’t require literary talent. Briskin, the producer of such TV series as Sheriff of Cochise, U.S. Marshal, and The Texan, is also a producer for Bing Crosby Productions,* for whom he has done Willard, Ben, and Walking Tall. In Buford Pusser, Briskin found a hero whose story embodied the values of the conventional Westerns; Briskin embroidered it, but basically the pattern was already there, shaped by Pusser himself (he had made a deputy sheriff of the man who wrote the first ballad about him), and Karlson knew just how to bring it out. The street Western is a corruption of the Western, an attempt to apply the Western’s mythology to actual problems — and since it doesn’t apply, the movies (and other forms of pop culture, and politics, too) fabricate situations that are just like those in Westerns so that the mythology will apply.
The actual Buford Pusser (not known as Buford the Wild Bull) was beaten up in 1957 in a brawl in a casino over money he himself had lost. Almost three years later, the casino operator was robbed and beaten, and Pusser and two of his friends were charged with armed robbery. At the trial, Pusser didn’t defend his right to assault the gambler; he and the two others were acquitted because they had an airtight alibi. Pusser got into police work in 1962, when his father, who was chief of police in Adamsville, retired, having arranged for his son to succeed him. When Pusser ran for sheriff in 1964, the incumbent sheriff was killed in an auto crash, but there was no connection between that crash and Pusser, who in fact defeated the dead man, whose name was still on the ballot, by only three hundred votes. Aside from Mrs. Pusser’s murder in 1967 — which was what really started the legend of Buford Pusser — and the extraordinary amount of physical punishment that Pusser took and also dished out, there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of factual support for the movie. The first new deputy he appointed was not a black buddy, as in the film, but his father. And as for the amazing incident, in the movie, of Buford’s magically quick apprehension of the murderers of eight civil-rights workers (only to have the case dismissed on a technicality), I can find no mention of it even in Buford’s romantic authorized biography of 1971. As for the powerhouse scenes when Buford rises from his hospital bed, his head swathed in bandages (like the Invisible Man), to attend his wife’s funeral and to wreak vengeance once again, and then, Job-like, rests upon his great hickory stick, using it as a cane — pure invention, of course. As sheriff, Pusser had in fact become partial to the less photogenic head cracker the gun. He has boasted that in his first term he “wore out more pistol barrels banging mean drunks over the head than the county would pay for.” The movie’s basic premise — that Buford Pusser became sheriff so that he could rid the community of vice and corruption — seems shaky. And although he piled up a big number of arrests by busting drunks and raiding moonshiners, the state-line dives operate as usual, and when Pusser ran for sheriff again in 1972 — while the movie was being shot — he was defeated. The man who won explained his victory (in an interview in the Nashville Tennessean Sunday Magazine) by saying, “If either man had to arrest your son, which would you prefer? I just don’t think the people here cared for killing and beating up on people. They just didn’t think that was necessary to enforce the law.” The brutalities and killings, including the murder of Mrs. Pusser, seem to have been a chain of reprisals. Pusser, who now does promotional work for supermarkets, Jaycee gatherings, mobile homes, and automobile dealers (he gives away autographed sticks to those who buy cars), has authorized a glorifying industry about himself, as well as this movie (he owns seven per cent). The only complaint he has been known to make about the film is that it isn’t violent enough. There is some talk of his running for governor or for Congress. How does one define corruption?
The moral setup in this street Western is a direct carry-over from the myths of the wide-open spaces. No matter how high the odds against him, the virtuous man wins out. And the virtuous man always knows whom to clobber. He can be trusted with his fists, his stick, and his gun because he has absolute knowledge of innocence and guilt. In Walking Tall, the forces of corruption are just as easily recognizable as in any early Western; they’re basically the same forces — mean crooks. Buford says that he quit wrestling because of the system and he’s not going to let the system wreck his town. To put it in the way the audience at Walking Tall perceives it: because of the system, the honest small guy doesn’t stand a chance, but Buford — the man who cares about what’s right — bucks the system. The movie’s simplistic outlook is commercial genius: the only serious problems in the community are the problems created by the vice lords — the system is represented by the prostitutes and crooked gamblers and their confederates in the police department and on the bench. The solution is the same as in a Western: kill them or drive them out of town. In Walking Tall, as in Dirty Harry, the hero could never mistakenly injure an innocent person, or the whole structure of the morality play would collapse. He’s a one-man lynch mob, but with the judgment of a god. Buford’s sad, sick look in the eyes after he’s forced to shoot an evil woman is knightly chivalry modern style.
After a decade of hip but often numbingly cynical movies, the country is on a regression trip — watching the Waltons and the Apples and cheering Walking Tall. Breaking a few arms has a basic demagogic appeal; it makes audiences feel that there is a direct, fast way to solve problems. There’s a deliberate appeal to the vigilante spirit at the (miserably staged) end: the townspeople make a bonfire of the gamblers’ equipment. But vigilantes need to be on horses; vigilantes who arrive in a procession of cars don’t jibe with the picture’s brute power. It’s no accident that the director lingers on those tractor punches that Buford delivers. When the nostalgic dream morality of cowboy movies is imposed on an actual modern town, it becomes a demand for bloodletting. Early on, Karlson showed us the bloody Buford, a red mass of wounds, lying in the road; in the movie’s terms, there is only one answer to that. His enemies’ blood must flow. And the audience is worked up to believe that bloodletting is necessary, that that is what does the job. In a sense, this is also what Dirty Harry said, and the same message is embedded in the new police thrillers that feature cops who are really cowboy heroes. The blood-pounding excitement that most of the street Westerns aim for is simply box-office excitement, but in Walking Tall it is integral to the fundamentalist politics that probably all of us carry inside us at some primitive level — even those of us who watch this picture appalled. Buford has a galvanic effect on the audience because he incarnates the blood rage that can so easily be worked up in frustrated people. The visceral impact of this shrewd, humble film makes one know how crowds must feel when they’re being swayed by demagogues.
[February 25, 1974]