Abstract
Westerns have long been associated with a very specific spatial terrain of vast, open landscapes, and these expansive spaces have been the subject of much critical attention. Andr é Bazin has argued of Westerns, “Transformation into an epic is evident in the set-up of the shots, with their predilection for vast horizons.”1 For Bazin, it is precisely the images of open landscape that create the mythic properties of Westerns. Scott Simmon claims that it was through the genre’s shift from its early origins in the east to films made in the west that the “wide, bright, harsh, ‘empty’ landscape of the west was constructed.”2 Similarly, in his analysis of masculinity and the genre, Lee Clark Mitchell asserts that the Western hero is “inelucta-bly a part” of the wide-open spaces and landscape that characterize the films.3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
André Bazin, What Is Cinema? Vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (repr., Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2005 [1971]), 147.
Scott Simmon, The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 45.
Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3.
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, 20th anniversary ed. (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1970), 3.
Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War (Baltimore, MD, and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), 48.
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1958), 48.
Linda Hall and Don Coerver, Revolution on the Border: The United States and Mexico, 1910–1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 12.
John A. Britton, Revolution and Ideology: Images of the Mexican Revolution in the United States (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995), 6.
The premise is based loosely on historical events as the Mexican government did establish free zones along the borderline in the late nineteenth century. Writing in 1892, Mexican minister to the United States, M. Romero tried to assuage US antagonisms about these measures. M. Romero, “The Free Zone in Mexico,” The North American Review 154 (425) (1892): 459–71.
Camilla Fojas, Border Bandits: Hollywood on the Southern Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 29.
Fox goes on to explain, “In the 1911 battle of Juarez, for example, four US spectators were killed, and nine were wounded.” Claire F. Fox, The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the U.S.Mexico Border (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 81.
Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narrative, Postmodernism and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1995).
John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 41–4.
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 22.
See, for example, Odd Arne Westad, “The Cold War and the International History of the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Volume 1: Origins, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 8–11.
Kitty Calavita, Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the INS (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 49.
Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1–18.
See J. Brian Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton with an Introduction by J. H. Andrews (Baltimore, MD, and London: John Hopkins University Press, 2001)
Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007)
Karen Piper, Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race and Identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 94 (1) (2004): 175. See also chapter 3 of this book for a discussion of the overwriting of landscape and colonialism.
Caterina Albano, “Visible Bodies: Cartography and Anatomy,” in Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, ed. Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 101.
For example, French has argued that there are just “two kinds of women” in traditional Westerns: “On the one hand there is the unsullied pioneer heroine: virtuous wife, rancher’s virginal daughter, schoolteacher, etc.; on the other hand there is the saloon girl with her entourage of dancers.” Philip French, Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre and Westerns Revisited (Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2005), 38.
Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” in Visual and Other Pleasures, by Laura Mulvey (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 35–6.
Charles Ramirez Berg, Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 66.
Clara E. Rodriguez, Heroes, Lovers and Others: The Story of Latinos in Hollywood (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 104.
Peter Stanfield, Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2001), 30. Further, in other films of the period where American men travel south of the border, although they may desire Mexican women, they only form relationships with Americans. In Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947), Borderline (Seiter, 1950), His Kind of Woman (Farrow, 1951), and The Treasure ofPancho Villa (Sherman, 1955), the male Americans in Mexico always meet and fall in love with American women, despite admiring Mexican women along the way.
Stanfield, Westerns, 38. For examples of studies of the Westerns focused on masculinity, see Mitchell, Westerns, and Roderick McGillis, He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009).
Alfred Charles Richard Jr., Censorship and Hollywood’s Hispanic Image: An Interpretive Filmoßraphy, 1936–1955 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 479.
Quoted in Jimmie Hicks, “Joel McCrea,” Films in Review 42 (11–12) (1991): 392–404.
See also Robert Nott, Last of the Cowboy Heroes: The Westerns of Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, and Andy Murphy, foreword by Butt Boetticher (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., Inc., Publishers, 2000).
Interview with Joel McCrea, May 24, 1970, in Will Rogers, Will Rogers Scrapbook, ed. Bryan B. Sterling (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1976), 117 Quoted in Lary May, The Hiß Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 46.
Copyright information
© 2015 Stephanie Fuller
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fuller, S. (2015). Territory, Colonialism, and Gender at the American Frontier. In: The US-Mexico Border in American Cold War Film. Screening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137535603_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137535603_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57856-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-53560-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)