Ep. 42: Favorite Films About the West | The American West

Since the 1903 showing of The Great Train Robbery, film has steadily become our primary way to tell the stories of the American West to the larger world. More than a century’s worth of movies and television shows later, in this episode of The American West Dan, Randall, and guest Dr. Sara Dant reveal their favorite films about the West. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 1:30Speaker 02

  The West domination, and more specifically, the frontier West domination of movie and television storytelling for much of the 20th century is one of the truly remarkable features of American film history. That domination began well over a century ago. One of the very first commercial motion pictures was The Great Train Robbery, filmed in New Jersey in 1903 with a runtime of 12 minutes. It not only launched the Western as a genre, it introduced Bronco Billy Anderson, who became the first Western movie star following 1907's Bronco Billy and the Baby.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  During this early period through the conclusion of the silent film era in 1927, the Western also moved west. Thomas Entz's Entzville Studios near Malibu not only specialized in Westerns, it helped relocate the movie industry to California. It was during the Technicolor era from the 1930s through the 1950s, though, that the Western came to develop its principal themes. Its near-single focus was the frontier, often directly translating the nostalgic art of Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell into moving pictures as a kind of tribal history of white

• 2:53Speaker 02

  people and their settlement. Dramatic Western nature was critical, as landscapes played the role of epic backdrops against which cowboy heroes took on the Western wilds. Animals were central characters, but the Western's animals were the saddled horse and the cow, not the bison or wolves, or even wild horses that actual Western history had nearly destroyed. For serious Westerns, the primary lesson was that a civilized society was possible only through the violent intervention of a hero against those forces that were anti-civilization,

• 3:33Speaker 02

  namely natives and outlaws. It was a winning formula. Western film stars became some of America's first movie stars. Bronco Billy was followed by William S. Hart, who did 45 Westerns during the silent film era. Tom Mix became one of the first movie stars to do ad spots, and he bridged the gap to talkies. Then, starting in the 1930s, the epic Western directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, and John Huston made John Wayne, Gregory Peck, Randolph Scott, and eventually Audie Murphy into film superstars. The degree to which Westerns dominated commercial

• 4:17Speaker 02

  films, if not necessarily the award ceremonies, was apparent in 1950, a year when Hollywood made 130 Western films, 34% of all films released that year. As televisions became widely available in American homes, it was Westerns that home audiences got. In 1968, of the top 10 ranked television shows in viewership were Westerns, with Rawhide, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, and Bonanza leading the list. Then came the 1960s, and with the Vietnam War and civil rights upheaval,

• 4:58Speaker 02

  a more critical view of Western stories emerged. In 1965, the number of Western films released was down to 22, only 14% of films released that year. By 1977, a grand total of seven Western films hit the box office, many of those filmed in Spain with Italian cast plus Clint Eastwood. John Wayne blamed the demise of the Western on the negativity of several of the films made in the late 60s and early 70s, particularly Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch of 1969, which rejected heroic sentimentality and anticipating Quentin Tarantino emphasized

• 5:42Speaker 02

  the bloodbath of the West. All in precious slow motion, even. Arthur Penn's 1971 Little Big Man, based on a novel by Thomas Berger, inverted the whole story of the West, portraying George Armstrong Custer as a narcissistic sociopath, and the Lakotas and Cheyennes as the true indomitable heroes of the Western story. Little Big Man was essentially an anti-Vietnam War allegory set in the West. Wayne was wrong that films more critical of the Western experience

• 6:20Speaker 02

  had awaited the late 1960s, though. A shot across the bow of the celebratory Western had been fired in 1961, when Arthur Miller wrote a screenplay for his wife Marilyn Monroe, along with Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach, that was released as the movie The Misfits. Set in the 1950s, The Misfits made two very important points. A Western could be about the West after the frontier, and the destruction of the natural West in this movie in the form

• 6:59Speaker 02

  of wild horses was not something to be celebrated, a point Miller allowed his heroine to make. Taylor Sheridan's mythologizing of the West in Yellowstone and its offshoots is a clear indication that the Western, the classic version, still has traction with audiences. But anymore, the stories can't be the simple parables that once characterized the classic Western, because the truth is, we've become a little too sophisticated for that.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Dan, welcome back. It's always fun to be chatting with you here in the studio. And today, we're talking Western movies, movies about the American West. And we're joined today by a very special guest. If you'd like to introduce her to the audience.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Indeed so. And yeah, good to see you again, Randall. It's great to be here once more. This is actually the last episode of the American West, and I think doing film is a great way to probably end it. But our special guest, sitting next to me on the couch here, is Professor Sarah Dant, who actually happens to be my wife, but that's not why Sarah is here. Professor Dant, Dr. Dant, is actually an expert on the history of the American West and a noted writer and author

• 8:38Speaker 02

  herself, who has recently published a really terrific book called Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West. And she spent most of her career at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, where she was a distinguished professor of history, a very select group at that university. And she also was maybe less happily so, but certainly with a great deal of accomplishment, the department chair of the history department there for several years

• 9:19Speaker 02

  towards the end of her career. She's retired now, just retired a couple of years ago. But Sarah is here because she is an expert in the subjects that we're taking up, and what we're taking up, of course, is film, the stories of the American West, movies primarily, but also television shows. And so Sarah, we'll start with you. We'll sort of do a round robin with this one, where we go back and forth and sort of offer up our favorite films about the West, but we'll begin with you.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  Well, thank you very much. Thanks for that introduction, Randall. It's always good to see you.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Likewise.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  And I appreciate a little bit of couch time here with you all, especially on this last episode. Want to say congratulations to you on what has been an astonishingly successful and well-curated and thought-out podcast. You know, given the fact that your readership or listenership continues to expand, I hope that maybe that means that after a hiatus to read another book, you decide you want to maybe get yourself back in the ring.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  Get back behind the microphone.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  Do this again.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  Get back on the horse. Okay, so I'm going to cheat on the favorite film thing, and I'm going to do a series, because that way I don't have to pick something narrow. And I decided to start With Deadwood. Because Deadwood is unlike any other Western you could ever see. It was a three-season program on HBO. Each of the seasons had 12 episodes between 2004 and 2006. It's sweaty, it's dirty, it's muddy. And it also has the most epic swearing known to human existence.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  And in particular, there's a fondness in this series for two words, which I know you have teased earlier in your podcast. And it's, I think, important for a girl to just get to say cocksucker and fuck. And one of the things that happens in this program in particular is that those two words come up a lot. In fact, I saw this terrific discussion. Somebody else did this, so I can't take credit for it. But in the first hour-long pilot, there are 43 uses of fuck. You know, the F-bomb in gerund form, as a noun, as an adjective, as a lament.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  It's in there 43 times in the first hour. And somebody went through and counted, if it was a drinking game, you would be dead, the number of times it had happened over the course of this series. And in three years, they said it just under 3,000 times. And so if you're curious, that's 1.56 fucks for every minute of program in Deadwood. So.

• 12:25Speaker 04

  We haven't nearly approached that rate of swearing on this program.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  No, we haven't.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  Maybe save that for season two.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I'm here to help you elevate just a little bit. So this was a, this was a series written by David Milch. He was a graduate and actually taught at Yale University, spent some time under the tulage of Robert Penn Warren. And this is Baroque swearing. It's Shakespearean in its savagery. Almost the entire show is written in iambic pentameter. And you get these characters who will give, you know, the classic Shakespearean soliloquy, completely riddled with F-bombs, to a mirror or a mud puddle.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  It's, it's just an astonishing, it's an astonishing show. And one of the things it does, again, you know, one of the reasons I wanted to pick it is because you have tried in your podcast to push against stereotypic Wild West iconography that, that doesn't really give us depth of understanding about this place that we either love or live in or both. And in particular, this one is pushing against not only sort of the romantic white hat cowboy riding in on a horse to save the day, because a lot of the characters are just, you know,

• 13:57Speaker 03

  they're prostitutes and gamblers and abusers and the abused and, and all of them are dirty. God, they're all dirty. But at the same time, it's an interesting look at this particular moment in American history. It's, Milch did a lot of research, more than two dozen, or almost two dozen of the characters are actually based on real historical figures. Deadwood was a real place. And so you could say it's, it's got historical grounding. It's not necessarily historically accurate. But one of the ideas he wants to get at in this series is to push against the individual,

• 14:41Speaker 03

  the rugged individual of the West. Because the truth is, the only way any of these people is going to survive is by collaboratively working together. It's a large ensemble cast. The two major characters are Al Swearengen, who's the most eloquent swearer and user. He's the prime user of the cocksucking language in this. But that's Ian McShane, who you can hardly see him in anything else and not think of him in this role. And then the foil for him is the sheriff Seth, what's Seth's name? I have it here.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Is it Bullock? Bullock, thank you. Which is Timothy Olyphant. Timothy Olyphant is Seth Bullock, the sheriff in this. And it's, and so it's inspired by history, but it's not historically accurate.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  So there was a three-series arc, and then it just ended abruptly. And everybody was clamoring for more. So in 2019, they did a two-hour film that kind of brought it all to a close, which was fortunate because the writer, David Milch, by that point in time was suffering grievously from Alzheimer's. And there's an absolutely beautiful New Yorker piece with, by the writer Mark Singer, who went and talked to Milch in these last days. And it'll break your heart.

• 16:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that was an incredibly powerful story among many great stories in New Yorker magazine. But man, that one was something because Milch, of course, you can tell from the language in Deadwood, the guy was, he was a marvel with language. And by the time he had reached that point in his life, there were days, apparently, when he could still work on the script for the movie version of Deadwood. But there were days when, as, as he told the interviewer, you know, when I wake up and I know this is not a day I'm going to be able to do anything.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  That day is lost.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've, I've lost this. Yeah, I can't do a thing. So it's a, yeah, it's a really, really moving piece of writing and a sad end for his career. But yeah, what a fantastic show this was. And yeah, I did reference it in an episode several ago. I can't remember which one. It was when I was talking about the end of the frontier and frontier anxiety. And I think I said something like, you know, at some point, cocksuckers will return to the fucking West. And that's what I was referring to.

• 17:43Speaker 04

  Well, am I up here?

• 17:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, Randall, why don't you tell us what your favorite films about the West might be?

• 17:50Speaker 04

  Sure. So this, this first one just falls in the category of my favorite films of all time. So it happens to be set in the West. And that is the 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  Starring Daniel Day-Lewis. It is a Paul Thomas Anderson adaptation of Upton Sinclair's book, Oil.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:13Speaker 04

  And it's not, you could very much watch this film and not think of it as a Western, although it does begin with sort of the lone.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  The plains of West Texas or something.

• 18:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, and he's got the mule and the pick.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:29Speaker 04

  And he falls, he falls in the well and breaks his leg and comes crawling out. Sort of one of the most startling opening scenes to him and the, you know, the tension of the ladder under, under strain as he's trying to climb out. But it tells the story of Daniel Plainview, who's played by Daniel Day-Lewis, and his rise as an oil tycoon, baron. To the, the end of the film, it's set in this vast sprawling mansion, which he's got his bowling alley and his butler.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  Another great final scene, some of the like most repeated lines from the film are, you know, I'd drink your milkshake, I'd drink it up, or the, I'm finished is what it is. I think that's the final line in the film is I'm finished.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  But it, it, it is very much a Western in the sense that it's all about land. And it's a, what he's doing is just trying to control land and gobble up land. And it fits into a discussion of Western history in that.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  I think a lot of people, when they think of the West in this, in this old sort of frontier narrative, it's capitalism and industrialization are eastern things. And as you move west, you sort of break free of the capitalist structure, right? And it's just an individual in the ground, but, um, you know, ranching, farming, what have you. But, um, if you read Western history and you study it, um, corporations have a tremendous amount of power in the West. The law as sort of an instrument of power in the West, it's, it's not a place

• 20:32Speaker 04

  of just bandits and lawmen and sort of this, this, there's an absence, you know, in the common imagination, there's sort of an absence of institutions and control. But in fact, you see this play out again and again in the West where an opportunist can use the law and can use sort of corporate structures to build up vast fortune and, and sort of vacuum up, um, fortunes that rival or exceed those that you'd think of the Carnegie's and the, those sorts of folks in the other part of the country. But, um, there's just

• 21:11Speaker 04

  so many scenes in this that I, it's, it's hard to pick one. Um, but, you know, it is firmly grounded in the West. There's the scenes through at the railroad depot or, um,

• 21:26Speaker 02

  His fights with Paul Dano.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  His fights with Paul Dano.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Man.

• 21:30Speaker 04

  Right. And, and sort of, uh, would Paul Dano, you never quite are clear on the theology of, of his sect.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  He's some sort of minister though.

• 21:40Speaker 04

  But he's some sort of minister that has tremendous control over his congregation and thereby has tremendous control over this land, which is also something that sort of you see in Western history, especially when you're talking about Utah. But there's, there's all number of other stories where there's sort of sectarian communities that break off and perhaps start anew. And that's the sense you get from the Paul Dano side of things. Um, but again, it's, it's gritty. It's, it's about ambition. It's about people being nasty to one another. Um, and it's, it's also a, a movie that's very much centered

• 22:22Speaker 04

  around people and the landscape, whether it's, um, you know, the guy crawling out of the, crawling out of the well, or when he's swimming on the coast or, um, hunting with his, with his boy under the, under the auspices of hunting, they're really sort of scouting for potential oil leases. But, um, again, it's about like, he's at, at the very core of the movie, it's about him dominating the landscape. And by dominating the landscape, he's dominating other people. And there's sort of a control of resources is inextricably linked to control over his fellow man. And so that's how I would make

• 23:05Speaker 04

  the argument that this is a film about the American West. But it's also just an amazing movie with an unbelievable, two unbelievable performances by Paul Dano and Daniel Day-Lewis. And it's just dark and funny. And, um, it's a movie I can watch again and again.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, that one I will admit was on my shortlist too, for a lot of the very reasons you point out. I mean, you know, one of the things that Western film historians always say about the West is that the landscape is a character in Westerns. Uh, not necessarily true in a lot of other films about different places, but in the West, the landscape is so awesome and so overwhelming that it's always a character. And, and it's true, uh, in this particular film as well. And it's true in the one I want to, uh, I'll pick up on one of mine.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  I just wanted to say one thing about that too, which is that I think that's a great choice for a Western in part because it really picks up on a lot of the themes you've talked about over the course of your, your podcast where the past doesn't stay in the past. And it's a good reminder that that extractive, exploitive, you know, take from the land is very much a 19th century phenomenon, but also a 20th century phenomenon. And this does a nice job. That film does a nice job in, in such a compelling way of, of bridging that time period and, and reminding us that we're not just talking about a, a

• 24:41Speaker 03

  Wild West and Old West, but in fact, today's West. And those are many of the same issues that with fracking and things like that, that we're seeing right now. And so it's both a past homage, but also very contemporary.

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• 27:38Speaker 02

  Okay. There Will Be Blood, and that's a terrific one. So I'm going to take us in a different direction and this will, uh, if nothing else, as we've gone around the circle, indicate how varied the topics are, uh, that fall into the category of Western films. But this one, I think everybody would agree is a Western. It's the 1990 film by Kevin Costner, Dances with Wolves, which was only the second Western. Uh, and all the Westerns that were being made in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, in particular, when they began to tail off, this was only the second Western that ever won the Academy

• 28:19Speaker 02

  Award for Best Picture. Uh, in fact, it won seven different Academy Awards. Uh, so it was a huge success when it came out. Uh, and if you haven't seen it in a while, uh, it's well worth watching still because it was kind of a breakthrough film in a lot of ways. It wasn't the first film that sort of took the, the native point of view so that we inverted the classic Western story where the native people are the other and they're the outsiders, uh, and the focus is, uh, completely on white settlers. Uh, there was a film called Broken Arrow done in the 1950s that sort of did the same thing.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  But this film, I think, captured the imaginations of a lot of people and it still captures my imagination because it for one thing was set on the Great Plains, which in fact is where much of classic Western history took place. Uh, didn't happen, everything in Monument Valley. Uh, a great deal of stuff happened out on, on the plains. It was really the focus of many of the classic Western stories. And this film was filmed in South Dakota. So you got to see, uh, really beautiful Great Plains landscapes. But it also is a film that takes up the subject of not only native people, uh, as primary protagonists. I mean, Graham Greene's role.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  As Chief Tinbear, for example, or Rodney Grant's role as Wind in His Hair. Those were really powerful performances. But it also talks about the destruction of wildlife, in particular, the massive destruction of bison, which of course were critical to the Lakota people who are the main tribal entity in this film. But it takes up the story of wolves for the first time, showing a wolf character not trying to eat the main protagonist of the film.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  I mean, even Jeremiah Johnson's film on the mountain men had a scene, and I think Robert Redford always regretted this, but it had a scene where wolves attack his character, Jeremiah Johnson, in the film. And that film, of course, was only made about 15 years before Dances with Wolves. But the wolf character, whose name is Two Socks, because he has two white front paws, is given a major role, and it's a portrayal of a wolf that's not only not a bloodthirsty monster, but he's playful, and he not only endears himself to the Kevin Costner character,

• 31:08Speaker 02

  who is a former Union soldier sent out to a post in the West. The post has been abandoned. He ends up spending most of his time with the nearby Lakota people. And much of the film, in fact, is in English subtitles because it's spoken in Lakota by many of the actors. But as I said, the bison and the wolf in this film sort of represent, well, for one thing, they represent what I've been trying to talk about a lot in this podcast, a sort of an American West that we don't really get in the classic Western stories, or Western history even.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  But they are completely, they're amenable to a kind of a benevolent treatment in the film. The bison are beautiful. There's that wonderful scene that we've never seen in film before, that I know captivated moviegoers and probably the voters for the Academy Awards, where there's actually a bison hunt where native people, native hunters using bows, ride horses bareback after bison. And of course, one of the stories that was told about the filming of all that was that the native women who were on the scene absolutely fell in love with all these guys who were

• 32:35Speaker 02

  on horses, riding into these running buffalo herds. But it has these great scenes with the wolf Two Socks, whom Kevin is playing with, and that's the reason he gets the name from the Lakota, Dances with Wolves. So that's a, that's a film that I really like because of the beauty of it. The story historically, and I, you know, I mean, historians tend to pick films apart, and you can look at this film and say, okay, this is set in the Civil War period, and we're actually showing Lakotas who don't know what coffee and sugar is?

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Come on, they've been engaged in trade with white traders since the 1820s, so they for damn sure know what coffee is and what sugar is. But Kevin in the film introduces them to these marvelous bits of advancing American culture. And you can also sort of say, doesn't it sort of present the one primary white figure, the white male figure? There is a captured white woman among the Lakotas. Doesn't it present the one white male figure who's the protagonist as the sort of savior of, of the Lakotas and doesn't really allow the Lakotas to save themselves?

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Those are viable criticisms, but the, the detail with which the film was done in trying to replicate period correct Lakota clothing, cultural traditions, coffee and sugar aside, and the use of the Lakota language in the film is really pretty winning. So that's my number one choice.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  Well, and, and talk a little bit about, in some ways, that, that sensibility really informed the Ken Burns American Buffalo two-part documentary that you were involved with. I talked about in the book podcast, Rosalind Lepierre is one of them.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  And you were, and you were in it too.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, and I was in it too.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Steve.

• 34:52Speaker 03

  Steve, Ranella was in it, yeah.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  Steve was in it, that's right.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  So, I mean, talk a little bit about how that sort of modern sensibility evolved out of things like Dances with Wolves.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  I think, I think that very much happened, in part because the primary writer for the Ken Burns American Buffalo documentary of 2023 was Dayton Duncan. And I know from talking with Dayton about that, about Dances with Wolves, that he was very much taken with it. And in his journeys around the West, he would go to tribal communities and had several good friends, Gerard Baker, who's Mandan Hadatza, was a good friend and is a good friend of Dayton's today.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  And I think that film very much influenced how, how Dayton wanted to present the American Buffalo film and how he wrote it. And that's one of the reasons it has, I think, so many native people in it, like Rosalind, a whole host of people. There are more native people who, who speak and are sort of the talking heads of that Buffalo film than there are people who aren't native. So I think, yeah, this was a sort of ushered in a new sensibility for a lot of people. I mean, the one group that comes off poorly in that film are the Pawnees. And some people have said, you know, so this is the result of the particular screenplay that it was based on.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  It was based on a novel by a guy named Michael Blake, and the novel is actually about the Comanches and Texas. And the captured white woman, or she's actually just been raised among the native people, is based on Cynthia Ann Parker, the famous white young adolescent who was captured by the Comanches and raised among the Comanches. And the Pawnees were a particular foil for the Comanches. And so in this film, the Pawnees become the bad guys. Wes Studi is the leader of Pawnees. He's the bad Pawnee, as he's often described in this film.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  But anyway, I, I think that is a film that stands the test of time and certainly ushered in, as you just mentioned, a kind of a new, more appreciative treatment of, of native people. And at least finally, we get to talk some about wolves and bison in the original Beast Area of the West.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I, and I would say too, one of the things that, that Ken Burns did really well with that American Buffalo program was he not only brought in, obviously, a lot of native perspectives, writers, producers, all of that, but he got those of us who were behind the scenes as historians, he was very receptive to us saying, that's not what the interpretation is anymore, this is where scholarship is now.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  And so I felt like it was a very fair and up, right up to date treatment historically.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  And sort of building on that, my second one, which again, I'm going to cheat and just go straight to a series because it's so terrific, but it absolutely, I think, again, is built on that foundation that Dances with Wolves established, and that's the series Dark Winds. Dark Winds is, it may be one of my favorite things on television. It's current, so it premiered on AMC in 2002. It just finished its fourth.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  2022, right?

• 38:47Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, 22, yeah, you know, I dropped a couple of decades there. In 2022 is when it premiered. They just finished the fourth season. They've been renewed for a fifth season, so there will be a new series. They usually do now eight episodes in a series. But it follows these two novel, Navajo tribal police officers that originally appeared in Tony Hillerman novels, and add a third tribal police officer that Tony Hillerman's daughter, Anne Hillerman, continues to write about to this day. So you have the Leeporn and Chi novels from Tony Hillerman, and then she adds a third

• 39:32Speaker 03

  character, a woman, Bernadette Manuelito. And so it follows these three tribal police officers on the Navajo Reservation in the 1970s. So again, this is the idea that the West is not just something in the past, but it is very much in the present, plus it's just downright groovy to get to talk about the 70s. And it's set in the Four Corners area of the Southwest. It's gritty, it's, it's bold, it's authentic, it's visually stunning. And the executive, two of the executive producers on this are George R.R. Martin of Game of Thrones fame, and Robert Redford. Rest in peace, Robert.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  In fact, you get to see Redford's last few moments on film are in a cameo with him and George R.R. Martin playing chess or checkers through the bars of a jail cell. I mean, it's just absolutely terrific, and they're uncredited, but it's totally, it's totally worth it. And to me, again, this gets at many of the ideas that you've been working on here with your podcast about how the West is not just great white tails and great white males chasing great white whales. It really has a, a depth of character, and in particular, I think, for a lot of native people, there's a real frustration now that.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  Indians were only somehow a 19th century phenomenon and then they just kind of disappeared into the landscape when white people showed up. And that's so problematic for so many reasons. They, you know, in that classic sort of Frederick Jackson Turner telling of the West, the whole point of Indians is to act as the thing against which white people struggle to become Americans. And that's problematic for so, so many reasons. And so this series, I think, is, is, is important because it, it blends kind of a film noir,

• 41:35Speaker 03

  crime detective program with very thoughtful Navajo cultural tradition and practice. They speak Navajo, many of the characters do. Most of the actors on the show portray Navajo characters, although not many of them are actually Navajo, but many of them, they're all native people, many of them enrolled. And so it, it very much feels like a reminder to Americans that, that native peoples have always been a part of the West and they remain

• 42:16Speaker 03

  so, and they remain a really essential part of the West, too. And the main character is Joe Leeporn. He's the lieutenant of the Navajo Police. It's played by Zon McLaren, who is one of the executive producers. They've really made sure to bring in many Navajo writers. They, they've just done a spectacular job of, of making this authentic and culturally accurate and correct. Kyle Gordon plays Jim Chi, who is sort of the apprentice coming

• 42:56Speaker 03

  on. And then Jessica Matten plays Bernadette Manuelito, who's this strong, charismatic, always fighting for justice kind of woman. But I would say the fourth major character in this film is the landscape again, because when you read a Hillerman novel, or when you watch this show, you don't escape the fact that the landscape, the setting for where all of this is taking place is really critical. And, I mean, and, and I will add one other thing, because this seems to be so of the moment. There's enough of a, sort

• 43:36Speaker 03

  of a supernatural aspect to this that borders a little bit on horror, that it just is perfect for all audiences.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a great series. And so it's on AMC. And as Sarah says, it's about to go into its fifth season of filming. This is, it's actually a Santa Fe, New Mexico production. George R.R. Martin and Robert Redford both lived in Santa Fe. Redford lived there for most of the remainder of his life before passing just recently. And George R.R. Martin has been in Santa Fe since the 1980s, actually. And much of the

• 44:23Speaker 02

  film work is done around Santa Fe, although there are, you know, the Navajo Reservation, there's a Navajo Reservation in New Mexico, but it's called the Checkerboard Reservation, but the primary reservation is in Arizona. So they do have quite a number of shots of Monument Valley and of Arizona. But it's a, pretty much a local production out of Santa Fe. So one of the things that's been kind of fun is, I mean, we actually saw Jessica Matten just a couple of weeks ago in town for a Santa Fe Magazine Festival. And she

• 45:03Speaker 02

  was there. And I haven't run into Zon McLaren yet, but, you know, I mean, as he says in an interview he did with Santa Fe Magazine, and he says, you know, so I'm not Brad Pitt. Nobody is chasing me around with cars and stuff. So I just get to kind of walk through the streets of town and go to restaurants. And people will occasionally say hello, but they don't really, you know, make any sort of big deal out of me. So I'm hoping we get to see Zon in the Santa Cafe or something at some point.

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• 48:16Speaker 04

  I'm going to take a hard pivot from the road we're going down here. So my number two film is The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which is 2018. And I kind of knew coming into this that I would choose a Coen Brothers film, because they're always funny. And the dialogue is just lively, keeps you on your toes. You never know where it's going. And they've done a lot of work in the West. Like No Country for Old Men.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Raising Arizona.

• 48:56Speaker 04

  Raising Arizona.

• 48:57Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, yes.

• 48:58Speaker 04

  True Grit. Like, these are all films that, they have a certain feel to them. There's a lot of surprises. No Country for Old Men certainly.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:08Speaker 04

  The Big Lebowski. The Big Lebowski, right. There's just moments where the whole story flips on its head. And The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, I don't even know sort of how to explain. I don't know that I want to get into the individual stories, but there's, it's, it's unlike 99% of the movies out there in that it's a series of short stories. It's an anthology of short stories in a feature-length film. There's six stories in total. And they all have different characters, different, you know, it's like picking up a book, right? But you sort of

• 49:50Speaker 04

  enter these stories in the middle of things. And you think it's going one way and it goes another way. But throughout the movie, sort of the two through lines, I would say, are that they're playing with all of these conventions of the Western film, right? There's all these set pieces that are sort of classic. There's, there's a guy who's going to get hanged. There's a singing cowboy like Roy Rogers. There's, there's trains. There's a, there's

• 50:25Speaker 04

  a prospector, right? And all of the stories are just sort of thematically, it's just, there's no real meaning to anything. Ever, like life, like life and death and tragedy, it's all arbitrary. There's an absurd quality to it, to it all. There's sort of an inevitability of death. And you don't really know where death is coming from. Whereas in, in the conventions of Western filmmaking, you know, the hero does one thing and the villain does another, and the hero triumphs over the villain, and they ride off into the sunset

• 51:10Speaker 04

  together. And this is not really a film in which any of the characters live out the fates to which they'd be entitled in a classic Western. So it's very funny. It's dark. It's comic. It's.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  It's Coen Brothers.

• 51:26Speaker 04

  It's Coen Brothers. Yeah. And so I, you know, it's, it's, I need to re-watch it, having just thought about it for the past 24 hours. It's been a little while, but just a film that you sit down and it, it plays with you. And then you walk away and you think, that was, that was something very different.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  I've always loved how the Coen Brothers have sort of gone around from region to region in America and done this, you know, oh, brother, of course, is the South. Fargo is, you know, the Upper Midwest, Northern Plains, you know, the Big Lebowski, of course, you know, SoCal.

• 52:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  I mean, so they've always, and Raising Arizona, which is, I mean, to me, that's one of, you know, and when we were-

• 52:19Speaker 04

  That was a huge oversight on my part.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  Well, I mean-

• 52:21Speaker 04

  Thinking about this.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, Raising Arizona is a tremendous, and of course, it's a Western, but it's a 20th century modern Western, and very much like Milch's language in Deadwood, I mean, I've always loved about Raising Arizona, the language, particularly the language that they have, you know, what does he label himself as, you know, the son of pioneers and hunters? I'm, you know, I've got a long genealogy of people who were hunters and pioneers and-

• 52:56Speaker 03

  And her womb was a barren and rocky place upon which no seed could find purchase.

• 53:03Speaker 02

  Upon which my seed could find no purchase, yeah. So that kind of language, you know, it's just kind of incredible, but that's a feature of Coen Brothers films. That's the way they write them. I love that stuff.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  And they did the, um, the Audie Murphy-like singing cowboy in Hail Caesar, which was just, and he's the hero of that movie.

• 53:22Speaker 04

  Right, and but, and they're just endlessly rewatchable movies, because there's so many layers to them and the language, too. It's like you're hearing it for the first time every time because they're so playful and skillful with it.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. The dude abides.

• 53:39Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. The dude abides. Okay, so let me do, you know, I'm, I'm with Sarah on Dark Winds, that's kind of a choice for me, but I'll do one other movie and I'll explain why this one in particular, because this is another movie from the 1990s, it's actually from 1993, um, and it's the film adaptation, once again, by Robert Redford, who we've talked quite a bit about, of Norman McLean's little novella, A River Runs Through It. And the reason I, I think I'm drawn to that particular film as a favorite, and I'll admit

• 54:24Speaker 02

  I haven't, well, I watched it probably six or eight months ago, it was the last time I watched it and was captivated by it again, is that it makes a point that I kept trying to make throughout the podcast, and I wanted at least one film that I talked about to make, which is that the West, uh, in contrast to what classic Western films wanted us to believe, the West didn't end with the end of the frontier. We're all in the West, uh, in Bozeman, Montana, right now, and so, and the 20th century West, as I tried to argue in a bunch of the podcast episodes, is, is simply fascinating and equally as interesting as the 19th century frontier, uh, because all sorts of remarkable things

• 55:09Speaker 02

  happened with the creation of the public lands and national parks and, I mean, on and on and on, attempts to rewild the West. This film is set in the period of the 1920s and 1930s, it's set during prohibition, uh, and it's set in Missoula, Montana, uh, which is where Norman McLean had grown up. Norman McLean, uh, was a professor, a longtime professor of English and English literature at the University of Chicago, and he only wrote a couple of books, and he wrote these books really at his retirement and after, uh, and this one was the first one, and it's actually a collection of three stories.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Um, A River Runs Through It is the longest one, it's kind of a novella, and the other two that are added to it are short stories, and the other two are not really that great, not very memorable. A River Runs Through It, though, is an extremely powerful story, and it's actually about something that happened to his family, uh, and his brother. And so Robert Redford got the film rights to it, they were owned at the time by Bill Kittredge and Onyx Smith, and Redford managed to get them to surrender the film rights to it as long as they could be pulled in as executive producers. And when I've asked Bill and Onyx about it, uh, in the years after the film came out,

• 56:37Speaker 02

  I said, so what was your role as executive producers? And they said, oh, a couple of times we went and sat on the river and, uh, drank beer and watched them shoot a scene, but they evidently didn't really make very many contributions, in part because the, the book and the events that are described are not filmed in the place where the movie is set. The movie is set, and the, the little novella is set in Missoula, and the river is the Blackfoot River, uh, but in filming A River Runs Through It, Redford decided that he wanted to actually film over east of the Continental Divide, uh, in the area around

• 57:22Speaker 02

  Bozeman and Livingston, and primarily on the Gardner River, although they did go down to Wyoming and film a, a particular waterfall scene that was in the film. So it was actually filmed over, uh, east of the Continental Divide in Montana, uh, in the area around Bozeman and Livingston, but it's about Missoula, uh, uh, and it's about the, the Blackfoot River, and, uh, it's, uh, as everyone, I think, has seen this film and remembers, for one thing, uh, and it won an Academy Award for cinematography, it is a remarkably gorgeous film. I mean, Montana has never looked so wonderful in all the films made about Montana, I think,

• 58:04Speaker 02

  uh, the portrayal of the Rocky Mountain setting is done, and of course, the trout stream and the, the fishing scenes with Brad Pitt.

• 58:14Speaker 03

  And Brad Pitt.

• 58:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Brad Pitt is, he's young at this time, he's-

• 58:18Speaker 03

  Let, let, let's just, you know, if we're going to talk about things that look really great in this movie.

• 58:23Speaker 04

  Well, and it's, it's the Yellowstone before Yellowstone.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:28Speaker 04

  As far as it's credited in a lot of ways by a lot of observers with triggering one of Montana's real estate land rushes, right?

• 58:38Speaker 02

  Indeed, it did, yeah. Immediately in the wake of that film, particularly Hollywood stars began buying up ranches, uh, in the Paradise Valley, south of where you live, and, uh, and some of them over in the area around Missoula and the Bitterroot, uh, Andy McDowell, uh, had a ranch just west of, of Missoula that she bought in the wake of that film. So, yeah, it triggered a, a land rush, one of the early land rushes into Montana, uh, and it's, uh, it's a really moving story, uh, it's a true story, uh, the younger brother,

• 59:17Speaker 02

  played by Brad Pitt, um, does get killed, he's a newspaper writer, and although it, his death actually happened in Chicago rather than in low, low Montana, but, uh, he does get, uh, lose his life, and the father, who's a Presbyterian minister, mourns him, of course, and as does Craig Schaefer, plays Norman McLean, uh, in the, in the film. Uh, so it's a, it makes the point about as well as any film I've ever seen makes it, that the West is a continuing, the West is not the phase called the frontier, which

• 59:58Speaker 02

  of course, happens all across America in terms of white settlement of America, it's about a specific part of North America, and it's the part west of the Great Plains, in this case, in the Northern Rocky Mountains.

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  Well, and not all of the West has cactus and tumbleweeds and desert in it.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it, it, in some ways, its role, or its connection to Western history is not-

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  Like it is itself an artifact of Western history, sort of the harbinger of the amenity West and the fly fishing. I mean, it put Bozeman on the map as a fly fishing Mecca, even though it's not set in Bozeman. But it's, it is itself a historical agent in terms of changing this place.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  Old West to New West.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a New West film, and that's an important point to make. It's, it's, there's little reference to the frontier. I mean, although Brad Pitt, of course, does have a girlfriend who is a native girlfriend, and there are all those great scenes where they can't get into a speakeasy because she's native and they won't let her in. And Brad, nonetheless, gets her in, of course.

• 1:01:19Speaker 04

  Can do anything.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So what else do you have?

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  Well, so I like this idea of being both serious, but also fun. And so my final pick is A Million Ways to Die in the West by Seth MacFarlane, because that 2014 Western comedy is an absolute send up of all the stereotypes that you can possibly come up with. And I will say about Seth MacFarlane, he was actually a history major, and he really knows his history. And he also is a huge fan of Western films. And so when you watch A Million Ways to Die in the West, there are all these Easter eggs hidden throughout

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  the, if, so if you are a big fan of Western movies, you can find, oh, there's a reference to Shane, and there's a reference to this. And you can also find a little homage to Back to the Future, because evidently MacFarlane owns the DeLorean from Back to the Future, and it shows up in this movie, which of course you would expect in old stump Arizona. They have pot cookies and snakes and tumbleweeds. There's, he sings the Tarzan Boy by Baltimore. Oh, yeah, he does that. And Django shows up very briefly. So, I mean,

• 1:02:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:52Speaker 03

  It's, and so it's, it's this classic send up of a lot of Western iconography. There's tumbleweeds, the wolves haul off the mayor who's been dead for a week.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. My favorite scenes.

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. But, but, and, and the whole refrain, because I thought, you know, I would bookend it with the F word today. The whole refrain of this movie is, I hate the fucking West, because there are a million ways to die in the West. And, and Seth is Albert Stark, a sheep farmer, and he's a bad sheep farmer, a bad sheep, sorry, he's bad sheep farmer. And so he's already set himself up as one of the lowest of the Western icons already.

• 1:03:38Speaker 02

  He's not even wealthy enough to have a mustache.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  No, and he can't afford a mustache. And so he gets ridiculed. But he nevertheless catches the eye of the girl who is Charlize Theron, having so much fun being a bad girl. And they eat pot cookies and have a trip out in the desert. And at some point, he gets captured by Indians and drinks way too much of the medicine that they're passing around and has a hallucinogenic experience. And Wes Studi is playing Cochise. I mean, it's just too priceless. And at one point, and I want to make sure I get this right, Wes

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  Studi says, there is an ancient proverb among my people, sometimes the only way for a man to find true happiness is to take drugs in a group. And so, I mean, you know, just those kinds of, of, just complete poke you in the eye. At one point Charlize Theron, she and Albert Stark are at the fair, and he's talking about how deadly fairs are, people die at the fair. And he said, you know, last year, there was a huge Indian raid. And she says, and this is again, a classic way that he's sending up Western, traditional

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  Western history. She says, why are the Indians so mad? I mean, we basically split this country with them 50 50. And so just that, that, that fun, ironic way of, of sending up a lot of the mythology of the West that is in fact so unhelpful for understanding the, the real current West, I think is, is a fun way to get at nevertheless, some of the themes that you talked about.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. One of my favorite scenes in that movie, and there are a bunch of them. And for one thing, I love that they do a cardboard cutout prop up of Monument Valley out at the edge of one of the scenes.

• 1:05:50Speaker 03

  The mittens are like everywhere.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  The mittens you put up as cardboard cutouts out on the edge. But there's a scene where Charlize gives him this poor sheep farmer who can't afford to have a mustache, she gives him a present, and it's a photograph. And it's a photograph, like these old Western photographs from the 1880s, of two people smiling. And he says, no way. There is not a single photograph. How did you find this? There are no photographs of people in the West smiling.

• 1:06:26Speaker 03

  They wouldn't be smiling for one thing.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  They hate the fucking West.

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  So it's a

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  And if you look at the fair scene, one of the reasons it's particularly fun for us is because it was filmed right near where we lived. And especially in the scene at the fair, when they pull back the camera, if, if you could then zoom in, in the background a little bit, you could see our house.

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's filmed at a place called Movie Ranch, South Santa Fe.

• 1:06:58Speaker 03

  And they use the old Bonanza sets. I mean, so Seth, yeah. So Seth was very much trying to be true to self here.

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  That's a fun one to watch. So what's your last one then?

• 1:07:10Speaker 04

  Well, now you're making me regret not choosing Blazing Saddles. There's a lot of, or, or any, I did, I did debate Tarantino's Django or Hateful Eight, right? But I went with, I went with Killers of the Flower Moon.

• 1:07:31Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Serious one then.

• 1:07:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, 2023 Martin Scorsese.

• 1:07:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:36Speaker 04

  It's based off of a book by David Grand, who's been on the Meat Eater Podcast. And it's a story about, it's based on a true story about, said in Oklahoma in the 1920s after World War One. And it's, it follows this sort of plot by white people on the reservation who are marrying members of the Osage tribe and then killing them in order to steal their, their entitlements to the, the, the money that the tribe has made through

• 1:08:18Speaker 04

  oil production. And at the time, the Osage tribe is very wealthy because of their mineral rights on the reservation. And Leonardo DiCaprio plays this scumbag guy, sort of the lead, Robert De Niro's in it. I mean, it's an incredible cast.

• 1:08:39Speaker 03

  Lily Gladstone.

• 1:08:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it, did it win Best Picture? It was nominated for a lot of Academy Awards, but she won, Lily Gladstone won. And, and the reason I chose this is, one, it's a, it's an unbelievable movie. It's a long movie, but it's Scorsese. And I think it tells this, it's, it's the rare that a movie can get into a subject like tribal resources and sort of the arcane arbitrary ways in which the relationship between the federal government

• 1:09:21Speaker 04

  and tribal nations across the West has either denied access to resources to which they're entitled, or, or somehow, you know, like, if you've studied Western history, if you've studied the history of Native America, you know that a big part of the story from throughout the reservation era up to the present has to do with dispossessing Native people of their wealth. And I'm like, this is a movie, a feature film, an award winning film that gets to the heart of that truism, that through line throughout Western history. And it does so in a way that's compelling. And it's a horrific story. I mean, it's a story that it's almost too

• 1:10:06Speaker 04

  You don't want it to be a real story, but it is. And it gets to these questions of the legal framework around which tribal resources are divided among individuals and attempts by outsiders to separate them from those resources. So it's, one, it's a compelling film, but two, it gets to a question or a theme in Western history that is very, I feel like, very hard to crack into in a way that's accessible to a larger audience.

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a, that's a hell of a choice. I mean, the truth is, I mean, these have all been great choices of films. There are so many out there, of course, we could have started over and done a completely different set and probably had quality at the same level. But I want to say this actually brings the American West podcast to a close. This is the last episode of 42.

• 1:11:09Speaker 02

  It's a podcast that Stephen Rinella talked me into doing, I will say, and I appreciate that he did. I appreciate you doing this with me, Randall. I mean, it was like, you know, our old times over

• 1:11:24Speaker 04

  It's been fun.

• 1:11:25Speaker 02

  At the University of Montana, talking about some of the same things. I mean, this podcast has been unusual, I know, because it's been scripted and what it's been based on primarily is readings from my books and articles and columns and essays, primarily, many of them from a book called Wild New World and one called American Serengeti and a couple of pieces from Coyote Americas, the last three books I've done. But it's been an attempt to offer up a different look at the West. Sarah and I have talked about this an awful lot. And so that was the idea in the very beginning.

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  And I hope people have enjoyed listening and watching and I hope they feel smarter about the West as a result of listening and watching. And there's a line that I've used a couple of times in the podcast and I'll use it again here at the end. I hope this podcast has rearranged the furniture in your head about the American West.

• 1:12:31Speaker 03

  Bravo.

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:12:34Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:12:53Speaker 00

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