Shane, Come Back!

摘要

As this hard-fought, high-stakes presidential campaign reaches its closing crescendo, one question insistently nags: What does today's scarcity of cowboy movies tell us about the nation that, 50 years ago, could not get enough of them?The question is prompted by the hoof beats of the new movie "Appaloosa," which is welcome evidence that the Western genre is not facedownin the dusty streets of Laredo, wrapped in white linen and cold as the clay. But "Appaloosa," although semi-boffo at the box office, is being trounced by a movie about a Chihuahua, which is an honest-to-Randolph Scott outrage. (For whippersnappers too young to remember, Scott-strong jaw; a crooked smile but straight teeth; crow's-feet from squinting into sunsets-starred inmany horse operas, back in pre-"Brokeback Mountain" days, when it was rumored that he was a gay cowboy.) The Western as a literary genre was invented in 1902 by Owen Wister, a well-born Philadelphian and Harvard graduate whose friend and hero was the Manhattan-born and Harvard-educated cowboy-Teddy Roosevelt had ranched in Dakota territory-then in the White House. Wister's novel "The Virginian," about a Wyoming cattleman, was a best seller for six years and put into American parlance a sentence-"When you call me that, smile!"-that someone has said should be on the Great Seal of the United States.