Written histories of the nation’s founding “fathers” are often a blend of fact and fiction that better reconcile their biographies and accomplishments with the prevailing myths about America as a land of destiny or a shining city on a hill. American presidents have long extended those myths, adding elements from the popular culture of their day meant to supplement their political rhetoric and to affirm or contest what was being written by journalists and opposing parties. Each president added new layers to the myths, whether to recall humble beginnings in a log cabin, battles with Indians to “win” the West, or adventures oversees to advance a nation clearly on the rise.
Theodore Roosevelt was among the first politicians (later president) to fully utilize the media of his time, tapping into themes and language commonly used in the popular frontier literature of his day, including the description of a “rough rider .” It was a term he borrowed and applied to himself and his men who charged up San Juan Hill in Cuba as part of the Spanish American War—a war many charged was not in the nation’s defense but more about ambition to acquire land beyond the limits of US borders at the time.1 Although Roosevelt did not invent the blending of fact with fiction, he made clear the benefits of doing so. He understood that the cultural references that better resonated with average Americans and helped them better support his actions in Cuba needed to be framed as akin to a frontier adventure rather than actions resembling an imperialist’s land grab. Although Turner’s characterization of the frontier may be more famous, notes Slotkin , it is Roosevelt’s deployment of it as the ideological frame to support global ambitions that has had the most far-reaching consequences,2 frequently resurrected by presidents after him to justify efforts to police the world.
Roosevelt went beyond merely borrowing frontier tales to make over his political reputation. Having been born into considerable privilege, he moved west and discovered a “vigorous manliness,” which he now urged men of his class (and race) to emulate, especially the frontier’s reliance on rugged physicality. Many writers suggest that the late nineteenth century was a moment of an acute crisis for American identities, long before Turner announced a closed frontier, and with industrialization blamed for fomenting an “unmanly” urban subculture, including the demands of middle class, white women for suffrage.3 The centers of the urbanized East also experienced more immediately the effects of recurring cycles of economic boom and bust, which further agitated social conditions among the have-nots growing more desperate with deplorable living and working conditions. The frontier, in reality, was far from closed at this juncture, as those already flush with capital continued buying western lands and developing them for a variety of industries. As a result, their wealth was substantially increased, positioning America’s capitalist class for even greater participation in the unfolding and complex international marketplace of the next century.
To that end, the already mythic frontier was deployed anew and served as the cover story for this development strategy. The myth, then, effectively blurred the present and future with the past by stressing the concept of destiny and the moral clarity of the “civilizing” process. This enabled a generation of investors to claim to be pioneers steering the nation to a greater glory rather than engaging in an unprecedented accumulation of wealth at the expense of the vast majority of Americans—not to mention the impact on native peoples affected by such expansion. The more recognizable threat to the patrician class, to which Roosevelt belonged, was from below, in the form of a “large and alien-born proletariat,” including the immigrant Irish , the “Oriental ,” and the South’s “former Africans.”4
Whiteness (as defined by a northern European or WASP standard at the time) was vital to Roosevelt’s concept of manhood, and here again, frontier mythology proved useful, as the so-called Indian wars enabled several generations of white males to master the art of “wilderness ” skills that would prove useful in ambitious ventures ahead. At the time, adopting those skills did not mean mixing blood lines with Native Americans or African American slaves as that was thought to constitute “race suicide” for whites.5 Like his Rough Riders, Roosevelt envisioned a band of white, re-masculinized warriors who could restore and fulfill America’s promise through specific military campaigns. Roosevelt’s writings reveal a future president who foresees a transnational white brotherhood engaged in a global war with racial inferiors, which would no doubt be violent but essential for preserving the supremacy of Western civilization . “The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages , though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman,” Roosevelt wrote, adding that the “fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him.”6 These match-ups required horrific violence but were deemed necessary showdowns for Western civilization to prosper once these inferiors were vanquished.7 Americans, in Roosevelt’s view, were the vanguard of this global struggle, having out-savaged the savage on the frontier, thus deserving to be the stewards of Western civilization in the name of a new “American race .”
By Roosevelt’s time, whiteness had evolved from the uncomplicated description ensconced in the 1790 naturalization law (limiting citizenship to “free white persons,” which at the time included only white men), to a more complex view—in part a reaction to the large influx of non-WASP immigrants coming to America.8 More than any other, a Scotch-Irishness emerged as the proper pedigree for the American everyman , and to differentiate this pivotal figure in political rhetoric and popular culture from the Irish Catholic , who was considered a dangerous conflation of race, class, and religion9; the Irish Catholic was unable to “earn” white status until the next century.10 This Scotch-Irish everyman , whom Roosevelt knew to be the foot soldier of the future, stood in stark contrast to the Englishman, given his role as the former colonial master, and rejected for being what Michael Kimmel describes as an “aristocratic gentleman of privilege, often conflated with feminine attributes.”11
The frontier then enables Roosevelt to minimize his own apparent privilege by wrapping himself in the trappings of mythic frontier egalitarianism, and aspire to embody this new everyman —another lesson future presidents will emulate.12 By the turn of the last century, this New Adam , having absorbed the pioneering frontiersman , was now ready to devote himself to moving his nation (and Western civilization ) forward by crossing US borders and participating in transnational versions of the frontier myth (e.g., the Philippine-American War). Such endeavors were infused with a missionary’s sense of higher purpose rather than as a design to covet land or wealth—benefits which accrued nonetheless. The nation, having already completed its divinely inspired Manifest Destiny , absorbed or expanded control of territories that extended to Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and the US Virgin Islands, along with retaining considerable influence over Cuba and the Philippines for decades to come.
The American Adam as Western Cowboy
The frontier heroes that so inspired Roosevelt and much of the American public were largely white characters from a Northeastern perspective, with native peoples targeted as the collective obstacle to the nation’s formational destiny. In such a frame, these so-called Indians are depicted either as ignoble savages who represent the devil’s fortitude or noble savages that symbolize an unspoiled wilderness , which, however virtuous, is wasteful if not made more productive (and profitable). The frontier’s white folk hero is contrasted with (and constructed in opposition to) this Indian —first encountered by New England settlers, then by frontiersmen and pioneers pushing west. Roy Harvey Pearce explains that white America had “hoped to bring [the Indian ] to civilization but saw that civilization would kill him,” or at least destroy his natural “gifts”; however troubled the American conscience was at the death of the individual, “it could make sense of his death only when it understood it as the death of a symbol.”13 This process of dehumanizing the Other also effectively effaces the crime associated with his/her killing at the hands of American warriors, such thinking finding echoes in rhetoric linked to America’s later “frontier” conflicts both at home and abroad.
This frontiersman of literature was adapted for the budding film industry that developed in the early twentieth century, and which represented the newest form of popular culture to seize the nation’s attention. More specifically, it is the cowboy, especially when armed and skilled as a gunfighter , who carries on the spirit of the western frontier as adapted for the “moving pictures.” The functions and characteristics that define the western as a genre, besides being situated in the nineteenth century frontier, also include a focus on the line between law and lawlessness, order and chaos, and civilization and nature. More often than not, in its first iterations, the western and its cowboy/gunfighter hero represent the positive resolution of these conflicts, affirming the idea of American optimism and the progression of the West, and by extension, Western civilization . The western espouses “no less than a national world-view … the genre’s celebration of America, of the contrasting images of Garden and Desert, as national myth.”14
As noted above, this myth centers on a particular performance of masculinity —one specifically defined by toughness and epitomized by the gunfighter , a professionally violent man prized for his frontier battles and unchecked autonomy, with the ability to deploy his special skills when he deems it necessary. This character’s toughness—whether a performance or an internalized quality—is difficult to define, although Rupert Wilkinson finds that most tough guys in popular culture celebrate action and are not afraid to “face down rivals and aggressors,” imagining nearly everyone as “a potential adversary.”15 Toughness as a virtue and violence as one of its expressions is largely reserved for white men in westerns; violence by Native Americans is viewed as proof of their savagery rather than framed as a defensive response. Such ideas were already omnipresent in nineteenth century frontier literature , Wild West shows , tabloid journalism , and political rhetoric, which Hollywood tapped and reworked for the classical western . The novels of James Fenimore Cooper , for example, showcase the white man’s superiority; Fenimore wrote that although “God made us all,” he gave “each race its gifts,” and the “white man’s gifts are Christianized, while a redskin’s are more for the wilderness .”16
Within decades, the Motion Picture Production Code was instituted in 1934 to control the depiction of violence, mostly within crime films (discussed below), while western violence got a pass because of its links to “evil usages of a bygone age” and “not subject to the same critical examination as modern ways and customs,” further noting that “historic and older classical subjects possess a certain quality of distance and unreality.”17 Violence as a methodology (or as spectacle) is not restricted to American society and its cultural products. However, what is distinctively American, notes Slotkin , is the “mythic significance” Americans have given in amount and variance, along with “forms of symbolic violence we imagine or invent, and the political uses to which we put that symbolism.”18 Thus, as a mythical and highly stylized realm, the western—and its code of violence—is performative in its ability to supplant history as well as to influence what constitutes the West in the American imagination, along with its related heroes and villains. The disconnect with historical reality is well-documented, as the cinematic West is rarely an accurate geographical location and “instead an ideological terrain reinvented with each generation of fears and hopes.”19
It is also logical to assume that the Native American , as the frontier’s Other, would figure prominently in the western, yet there are few native characters as “individuals with a personal history and a point of view.”20 Adding insult to injury, if a speaking role for a native character did exist in a traditional western, it was often played by a white actor in “redface.” Although the landscape of the western is vital to its appeal, taking place at Turner’s “frontier line ,” it is the story about the individual cowboy’s transformation within such an environment that makes it such an allegory for the nation. The individual’s fate (rather than the community’s) is on display, with the hero riding off into the sunset—ceaselessly heading west—and with urban life, capitalist development, and a taming domesticity following close behind. For the forty years of the western’s peak popularity, Will Wright suggests the marked changes to its hero say more about his representation of an evolving nation over the course of the twentieth century than to any notion of historical accuracy.
The hero of the “classical” western is typically depicted as a “lone stranger who rides into a troubled town and cleans it up, winning the respect of the townsfolk and the love of the schoolmarm,” with variations from film to film.21 There are also basic “oppositions” or binaries in play, among them, “good versus bad” and “inside versus outside,” contrasting an unsettled existence with a domesticated life; another is “weak versus strong,” with the gunfighter viewed as the strongest member of the society as compared to those who “seldom carry guns and have no fighting skill.”22
Finally, there is the opposition between wilderness and civilization , with the East largely “associated with weakness, cowardice, selfishness, or arrogance.”23 Most important to the classical plot is the need for the hero to isolate himself as an autonomous individual as a way to achieve respect; Wright concludes that this trait mimics the skills needed to succeed in a market economy as well. Given the post-war disillusionment about manhood in an increasingly corporatized society (the image of men in gray flannel suits), the 1950s western hero began to define himself in opposition to society.
In such a “transitional” western as High Noon (1952), the cowboy hero in the end throws his badge in the dirt “to let the town know he has won, they haven’t.”24 More tellingly, the town is not shown to be particularly corrupt but typical, implying the system itself is flawed, an early indicator of the idealized lawman as not a representative of state authority but one who stands “outside” it—even in opposition to the larger society he serves. This is a much more stinging critique than found in earlier westerns; it also hints of a dangerous conflict that will be encoded into the later rogue crimefighter . He will retain the western hero ’s sense of purpose (like that of the nation he personifies), yet, once an entity is revealed to be inept or corrupt, only the rogue will know what is best for the community at large. By celebrating the isolated wisdom of a lone enforcer, as in High Noon and the plethora of later films and television programs under review, the focus on the individual helps mask the system’s flaws and any inherent hypocrisy; instead, it points to an American preference for dispatching a benevolent rogue as the quintessential American loner hero to both embrace and to blame.
Another much studied example of a similarly conflicted and revelatory western is The Searchers (1956), whose central character, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne ), struggles to fit into a changing society. His hatred of Native Americans , even assimilated “half breeds,” is so nakedly racist that it renders him a symbol of intense moral confusion and the chief obstacle to the racial healing necessary for the nation to move forward—referring to both the film’s post-Civil War period and the twentieth century timing of the film’s premier. In the end, Edwards “does the right thing,” choosing not to kill his niece, whom he has rescued—and despite having spent most of the story doggedly pursuing her and her captors, vowing to kill her for the sake of her honor and for failing to no longer be white after living with savages . In one scene, after searching among rescued white women for Debbie, one of Edwards ’s companions is shocked at their appearance and apparent madness in the wake of their captivity, noting how hard it is to believe they are white, prompting a disgusted Edwards to note, “not anymore,” confirming in his view their racial pollution after contact with such savages .
John Wayne as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. Screen shot from the official 1956 trailer
The Searchers ends with Edwards no longer at ease in a “civilized” and integrated frontier, but which could not have prospered without a gunfighter like him—and by extension, without an “uncivilized” frontier to tame, he cannot survive either. Yet, he adapts enough to sustain the focus and moral conflict at the heart of the story; like the hero in High Noon , Edwards remains the enduring mythical and sustainable outsider. The final scene shows him unable to join the family indoors, standing outside the doorway, captured in silhouette and backlit by the Western vista, where as a rogue he is doomed to roam—being both out of place and disturbingly at home. As a director and an actor who helped define the genre, director John Ford and John Wayne were well versed in the western’s mythological embrace, especially its ability to transcend the politics of the moment. Rather than consciously attempt to celebrate (or disturb) the frontier myth , they aggressively deployed it, including its inherent duplicity: the need to be a savage to defeat savagery , which also runs the risk of becoming the savage . It is a conflict intrinsic to the myth—and the nation that hides behind it—and that haunts the rogue crimefighter to this day.
The Classical Western’s Last Stand
For a post-war America , the Hollywood western was “well-suited to convey important ideological rationales … including the inevitability of American expansion and the strategies for hegemony .”26 By the 1960s, the western became overstressed trying to accommodate increasingly troubled heroes and being situated in a bygone era no longer able to speak to contemporary concerns.
The Wild Bunch (1969), which Michael Coyne calls a Richard Nixon western27 and Steve Neale labels a “Vietnam Western,” presents a sharp departure from the usual depiction of the frontier, now framed as a depleted terrain with gunfighters adrift and searching for purpose. Leonard Quart and Albert Auster note that director Sam Peckinpah ’s “orgiastic massacre” reflected the mood of many films of the era, which used the liberal license of the post-Code period to evoke “a portrait of a world gone awry.”28 The film remains a disturbing portrait of gunfighters severed from the myths that once sanctioned their actions, presenting their participation in the Mexican Revolution , if not a justifiable excuse, then an explanation for their violent behavior. The film aptly captures the era’s conflict over the Vietnam War , which increasingly forced the nation to configure political justifications for continuing to dispatch warriors to the Southeast Asian frontier .
As a relevant mode of expression the western did not entirely fade away after the 1960s, but never again matched its former prominence. Meanwhile, the era also celebrated films that framed outlaws as folk heroes (e.g., Bonnie and Clyde ) and epic tales of gangsters that challenged the portrait of America as an immigrant ’s promised land (e.g., The Godfather ).29
Television westerns until the late 1960s utilized most of the tried-and-true formulas of their film counterparts, except to differ in key ways. First, given the restraints imposed on broadcast television at the time, any violence depicted had to be somewhat sanitized and made as family friendly as possible. Second, shows such as The Rifleman , Bonanza , and Gunsmoke , to name just a few of the era’s dozens of similar programs, supposedly took place during the same nineteenth century era and locales, but differ from films by depicting the frontier as more or less stripped of its most menacing elements. That left most plots and scripted conflicts to include disputes over land, cattle rustling, and the occasional unsavory stranger who wanders into town to start trouble. These conflicts also enabled white heroes to battle mostly white villains, with Native Americans rendered as symbolic reminders of a bygone era rather than a terrifying threat that still justified their removal or eradication. Finally, unlike film westerns, the heroes with guns who populate these TV shows are rarely depicted as ambiguous about their roles. The Rifleman (1958–1963) featured a homesteader with a deadly aim but who only uses those skills when he absolutely must defend what is good and right. Bonanza (1959–1973) featured another widowed father, this time with three grown sons who first and foremost protect their sprawling ranch then settle other townspeople’s problems, especially given the family patriarch’s innate sense of justice. Gunsmoke (1955–1975), which defied the disappearance of other westerns in a post-1960s television landscape, rarely experimented with moral ambiguity, which perhaps accounts for its unusually long run.30 While films such as The Searchers may have absorbed the era’s uneasiness about how the West was “won,” Gunsmoke steadily relied on its winning formula of a sure-shot Marshal Matt Dillon who preferred restraint over showmanship, presenting a sharp contrast with his brethren in films.
Although the classical Hollywood western never regained its previous dominance after the cultural and political ruptures of the 1960s, it resurfaces in what are now called “revisionist” westerns (still holding the originals as the benchmark, with these newcomers considered “alternative” narratives). Several have won acclaim for their more realistic depictions of nineteenth century hardships, being darker and less celebratory about the fabled West. The Unforgiven (1992) tells the tale of a former gunfighter , portrayed by Clint Eastwood , who is enlisted to help a lawman but whose talents, once unleashed, cannot be contained until vengeance is served.31
There are several remakes of classical westerns that take advantage of a contemporary tolerance for dialed-up violence, while leaving the tropes about manhood and gunplay intact (e.g., Young Guns ). In the 2016 remake of the 1960 film, The Magnificent Seven , one character even remarks about the diverse crew of hired guns being assembled, “What a merry band we are. Me a gray, Chisolm a blue, Billy, a mysterious man of the Orient, a drunk Irishman, a Texican, a female and her gentleman caller.”32
Still other neo-Westerns showcase the Other as a key character in an attempt to showcase perspectives suppressed during the classical era, including Dances with Wolves (1990) and Hostiles (2017), which both include Native American perspectives although remaining largely concerned with the white man’s ordeal. The Quick and the Dead (1987) offers the rare glimpse of a female gunslinger who avenges the murder of her marshal father, and Brokeback Mountain (2005), which explores the consequences of a homosexual relationship between two Wyoming ranchers over a twenty-year period starting in 1963. The film was as critically acclaimed as it was controversial and several scholars suggest it marks a turning point for gay-themed stories in Hollywood.33
Two westerns from Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained (2012) and The Hateful Eight (2015), make an investment in prominent black characters , especially in the former, as Django, a former slave, sets out to rescue his wife from an abusive plantation owner. Both Tarantino films also rely on his signature use of graphic violence, most notably in The Hateful Eight , which discards the western’s usual morality play, whether classically optimistic or contemporarily bleak. Like Eastwood ’s neo-western, The Hateful Eight also utilizes the gunfighter ’s acumen for revenge rather than justice, but with Tarantino portraying the West as a dystopic wasteland with little use for any type of law and order.
Contemporary television, especially with the expansion of cable and streaming services, has offered some further experiments using many enduring western motifs, including the popular 1989 mini-series, Lonesome Dove , based on the novels by Larry McMurtry , which tracks the adventures of two former Texas rangers—the series lauded as both a throwback to the classical western but also contemporary in its presentation of complex motivations and richer characterizations. Others largely reproduce the same revisionist and violent tendencies discussed above, including the critically acclaimed HBO series, Deadwood (2004–2006), named after the infamous nineteenth century frontier town; a feature-length film by the same creators is due out in 2019.
Justified (2010–2015) was a successful FX Network show that showcased a cowboy-like federal marshal with a “lightning-fast draw [and] John Wayne -like strut” working in modern-day Kentucky to take on “white supremacists , corrupt cops, moonshiners, the Dixie mafia and [a] cunning backwoods con man.”34 Finally, Netflix launched the original mini-series Godless in 2017, which earned rave reviews for exposing “the dark mythology embedded in the Western genre .”35 For the most part, though, the above programs, despite their contemporary timing, merely perpetuate rather than alter Turner’s frame of the frontier as the line between civilization and savagery , with some challenges presented by the Other but largely still the domain of white male (and straight) gunfighters and lawmen still trying their best to civilize the Wild West.
Lawlessness and the Crime Film
The crime film is as old as the western and equally as revelatory about American myths although usually from a much darker perspective. While the western focuses on the hero and how America ought to be, the crime film more often portrays the dark side of American society and what it fears it might be. Those crime stories richest in cultural clues are those in which the characters crisscross the line, whether to pursue the uplift necessary for redemption , or to descend from being a knight of the mean streets to another of society’s predators. Here again, the display of violence is an integral part of a crime film’s mode of expression, but functions in more complex ways than in most westerns, capable of representing both the criminal’s pathology as well as the crimefighter’s sense of restorative justice —and, on occasion, provocatively depicting the dire consequences when the two are dangerously intertwined. Moreover, crime stories, on the whole, are usually understood as purposefully mired in the contemporary world and especially proliferate during times of intense social strain.
The Depression provided such a setting and produced a rash of folk heroes who, despite their criminality , captured the nation’s attention. Historical echoes that linked such Depression-era bank robbers as “Pretty Boy” Floyd , Bonnie and Clyde , and John Dillinger to nineteenth century frontier outlaws had already permeated journalism accounts of their exploits. The New York Times specifically described Dillinger as being “true to the old frontier types” such as Jesse James .36 For those who watched as banks repossessed their homesteads, such outlaw bank robbers may have appeared as daring “avengers of injustice.”37 Press stories from the era even noted their thoughtfulness in burning mortgages while fleeing bank robberies,38 in keeping with mythology that likens them to one of history’s most celebrated outlaws : Robin Hood .
The era’s stories and films about gangsters, though, insinuate the taint of foreignness by accentuating the gangster’s ethnicity or contingent whiteness , as well as focusing on his unsavory membership in gangs, mobs, and organized crime syndicates—certainly antithetical to the “lone” status of the Dillinger -type (and mostly rural) outlaws . The most popular screen gangsters are shown overcoming these “collective” handicaps by demonstrating their individual ambition and pursuit of the American dream , even if through criminal means.
Regardless of whether the criminal was an outlaw or a gangster, the crimefighters charged with taming or arresting them too often appeared one-dimensional and ineffectual by comparison. Before Dirty Harry few crime films featured a law enforcement figure that could match the criminal’s charisma and audacity—that is, without having the crimefighter break the rules and go rogue.
One example is the famous G-man , Elliot Ness , who has been featured in numerous films and TV shows since the real Ness ’s Prohibition era context. One of the more notable reincarnations was the 1987 film, The Untouchables , which shows Ness catching Al Capone using rogue tactics, including shoving the uncooperative Capone henchman, Frank Nitti , off a rooftop to his death39—acts that never actually happened. In another memorable scene, veteran cowboy cop Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery ) offers Ness advice on how to beat Capone , instructing, “He pulls knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way.” Although such a rogue mentality is in keeping with prevailing myths, the real Ness prosecuted Capone for tax evasion, with the story ending in a courtroom rather than in a violent street fight, which certainly short-circuits the usual mythic (and cathartic) showdown required between Hollywood lawmen and the lawless.
No matter in what guise, though, most crime stories that focus on crimefighters are also hampered by having to represent the state’s interests. Rather than resembling the self-reliant American Adam , their allegiance to serve as government functionaries somewhat diminishes their ability to embody lone heroes. Moreover, if the crimefighter is presented as a district attorney, his occupation also reeks of class privilege as a college-educated professional, and if someone with political ambitions, further distances him from representing an everyman type of hero.
Law enforcement characters in crime films and in television programs most often work in an urban milieu that also seems better suited to the criminal’s survival skills, as they are born to an environment in which law and order is deteriorating. This stands in stark contrast to the realm of the western hero , who is in charge of creating law and order in a new land not yet sullied or compromised by the realities of twentieth century life. This urban quality, until well past mid-twentieth century, also ran counter to the idealized image of America as a spacious place rooted in rural landscapes and small town ideals; even during the post-World War II period, the newly emerging suburbs fed off the image of open land, where reinvention was possible and plenty of space existed to reenact a revamped version of the frontier—one Kenneth Jackson dubs the “Crabgrass Frontier.”40 In contrast, the imagery of the American city is often inextricably linked to poverty and deterioration, serving as a rude reminder for mainstream white America that the nation also includes the non-white, the non-privileged, the non-native born, and perhaps the unpatriotic who wish to challenge the status quo.
Moreover, unlike the defeat of disorder and/or criminality at the heart of a western, a crime film exploits the criminal’s potential to unravel society rather than society’s ability to eliminate the conditions that produced him. The Production Code was put in play in 1934 above all to curtail the excesses of the era’s widely popular crime films such as Little Caesar and Scarface. The code specifies that “revenge in modern times shall not be justified,” which, as mentioned earlier, left westerns unscathed because of their historical context; the code also warned that the “police must not be presented as incompetent, corrupt, cruel or ridiculous.”41
After the code took effect, Hollywood’s need to create audacious crimefighters was accomplished in one noteworthy case by casting James Cagney in the role of a government agent. In “G” Men (1935), Cagney ’s character relies heavily on Cagney ’s existing persona and box office appeal largely earned playing some of the era’s most memorable screen gangsters. In effect, notes one reviewer, Cagney ’s FBI agent , Brick Davis, is “fairly indistinguishable from Tom Powers,” referring to the pugnacious gangster in Public Enemy (1931) that first made Cagney a star. In “G” Men, Davis is an underutilized attorney who joins the FBI after gangsters kill his friend, also an agent. Having been born to the streets, Davis uses his urban skills to hunt down his friend’s killers—such “street” smarts becoming an essential feature of the later rogue crimefighter . The film also includes the FBI’s appeals to Washington at the time to carry guns like the criminals the Bureau was fighting. One character’s rousing speech to a Congressional committee reveals a logic that also gets absorbed into the later rogue when he urges, “Arm your agents … give your special agents machine guns, shotguns, tear gas, everything else. This is war.”42
The film finds closure using two plot devices. The first is Davis’ impending marriage to a colleague’s sister, signaling his full incorporation into society and his switch from consorting with compromised women like his former moll—a domestication that will be roundly rejected by the modern rogue. The other plot device infuses the story with the necessary degree of violent spectacle, which provided a justification that satisfied the censors at the time, but also taps into an essential ingredient of the frontier myth : to end the criminals’ reign of terror Davis must behave violently, out-savaging the urban savages to restore law and order. The badge serves as a moral shield that empowers Davis to use a greater degree of ferocity than his previous gangster characters were permitted. “G” Men’s ending features one of the most protracted shoot-outs to that point in film history; yet, it not only received the seal of approval from the Hays Office, but also “the semiofficial blessing of J. Edgar Hoover in a prologue” for its 1949 re-release.43
Many similarly violent pro-police films followed in the mid 1930s, in which Hollywood rewrote history again, as law enforcement’s culpability during Prohibition is well-documented as often being paid partners in the burgeoning bootlegging industry. Although the rural outlaws and public enemies of the era had been spectacularly gunned down, the government was impotent in curbing the rising crime syndicates that emerged in the post-Prohibition period, as profits from bootlegging were successfully invested in more complex criminal operations that controlled the American underworld for decades to come. By the early 1950s, Hoover and his FBI were still denying the existence of organized crime , focusing instead on suspected communists as the most dangerous threat to American society.44
The Pessimism and Critical Promise of Film Noir
Many of the 1940s American crime films , later identified as film noir (or dark cinema) by French film scholars, were lauded for their haunting depiction of crime and thriving on the very elements that Hoover and others were trying to chill. Noir’s stylistic features, which arguably describe a mood or attitude in filmmaking more than a specific genre classification, include a particular mise en scène (oblique angles, stark and meaningful lighting, irregular characters). It also sends “a sense of people trapped … in webs of paranoia and fear, unable to tell guilt from innocence, true identity from false … and the survival of good remains troubled and ambiguous.”45
What is pertinent to this study is how noir—and its morally conflicted detective—challenged the codes embedded in most conventional Hollywood narratives at the time, which opened up space for the rogue cop archetype to later inhabit and further exploit. Like the western, noir stories relied on popular literature for inspiration, transforming the “hard-boiled” detective heroes in novels by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett into screen heroes.46 Thus, the noir detective carried forward a thread of the western hero ’s need for individual reckoning and a sense of duty that involves what Frank Krutnik calls noir’s “battered concept of integrity and professionalism.”47 Also echoing the frontier struggle of the western hero , the noir detective “seeks to prove his masculine professionalism by outwitting his criminal adversaries.”48 Such a white male hero also demands a “paradoxical” combination of rights: “to be completely detached from society and … be allowed total access to every part of it … He holds himself external to and above specific class, domestic and institutional relations in order not to be marked by any specificity … [and] affirms the right of the Democratic Everyman to go anywhere as a matter of principle.”49 The noir detective is then another portrait of a self-directed man who enjoys considerable autonomy, which however jeopardized, is his to lose.
A combination of factors explains noir’s short life amid the chilly climate of a Cold War America—one that perhaps lacked a tolerance for noir’s obscuring the difference between good and evil, enabling its cops, criminals, and victims to share the same pliable morality.50 The stylistic features that gave noir its uniqueness also undermined its ability to resonate with larger audiences.51 At the same time, its frequent abstraction of violence, preferring “compositional tension” over “physical action,”52 disqualifies its use of violence as a form of regeneration—so vital to the frontier myth in Slotkin ’s view. The noir detective is also frequently privately employed, which as discussed in the introduction makes his use of deadly force an intimate act and incongruous as a manner of public catharsis.
Although many recent films embrace noir’s elements of style (e.g., L.A. Confidential ), noir’s essential frame has proven too murky a view of American society to be acceptable as a national allegory by mainstream audiences . For a nation that thrives on looking forward and taking definitive action—even at the expense of learning from an interrogated past—noir proved far too pessimistic during its original run and to the present day to have mass appeal or to successfully tap into the mainstream psyche. Still, as much as the western cowboy , the noir detective produced a legacy of self-reliance, obsession, moral pliability, and a taste for violence that complicated Hollywood’s portrait of an American hero, and which the rogue crimefighter will later inherit and redeploy, earning more widespread acceptance from mainstream audiences .