The Infinite Underworld of B-Westerns

Lately I've spent many hours with the westerns that have been abandoned by time -- before it became a prestigious genre with John Ford's Stagecoach and Cecil B. Demille's Union Pacific, the vast majority of westerns were either serials or B-pictures pumped out by the studios and sustaining the reputation of various stars who could handle the physical stress of producing four, six, eight, even ten movies per-year. This was the reliable 'product' that the studios block-booked into their theatres to ensure there was always something on the bottom-half of every bill, and it is no coincidence that when television arrived, the B-western stars either jumped ship to the new medium -- like William Boyd and Gene Autry -- or simply stopped making films entirely. B-pictures were the predecessor to television, they embodied an episodic, low-budget, no-frills storytelling that today survives in cable programmer crime shows and soap operas.

The prospect of watching these films is a monumental undertaking, to say the least. You have workhorse directors like Joseph Kane, Sam Newfield and Lambert Hillyer, semi-anonymous men who made hundreds of films and who have not been reclaimed by any auteurist critics, directors who represent the base unconscious of contemporary cinema, who can only be compared today to those who direct Christmas or DTV action movies every year. It is hard to imagine how such men could be so prolific, but back then there was an entire studio assembly line that not only trained them for that job, but gave them the tools and means to do it. That system collapsed in the 50s and will never return again -- directors today are lucky if they manage to make five films or work on a few TV series, that's how radically the economic space has shifted.

I watch some of the B-Westens starring Tim Holt, an actor known only today for his roles in John Ford, John Huston and Orson Welles films, and I must say that I was impressed by them. They are not always great, but they are infrequently bad, there is a level of quality that they do not dip under, and regularly they surpass what is expected in terms of action, visual acuity, or complexity. Holt's brand of western has a balance between roughhousing and humor, and the films have a decent sense of variety even as they play with familiar tropes and ideas. When they are made by directors such as Lesley Selander, there is an elevated style to them that puts them closer to the A-westerns we might be more familiar with in the 50s -- there is little time here for the dark psychology of Anthony Mann, or the plastic kineticism of Sam Fuller, or even the archetypal minimalism of Budd Boetticher. These Holt movies move too quickly and are too 'plot heavy' to sustain the variances of strong authorial personalities, but their fluidity in pursuing that aim is something I've grown to respect, it is a modest approach that respects the expectations of the viewer without seeming too complacent.

Frequently these days I have to stop myself and ask why I am watching something, what I am actually getting out of it. If I couldn't find a reason, then I'd just stop, because there'd be no point in going on with something for the sake of pure habit. To ask this of a B-western is kind of banal -- the movies themselves ask only an hour of your time, they go down easy with some excitement and laughs, that's it. But there are so, so many of them, and even as I liked these Holt pictures for their consistency, I doubt that's the case across most B-westerns, even if I want to be optimistic, there's always going to be duds when you're churning out this many features, it's inevitable. So is there enough artistry in the B-western format, even with its constraints?

I would still have much to watch before I could pass that judgement fairly. But I have to remind myself that these films weren't meant to be watched in close succession by a deranged cinephile like myself -- they were put out every few weeks, usually attached to a larger film, and their novelty was inherit to their episodic nature, you wouldn't notice the similarities of the sets or the plots if you spaced them further away from each other. So I've come to think that's the best way to approach them: not as a 'binge' TV show with an ongoing story, but as addendums to what we would term as more 'major' works of craft. And if one goes about it that way, I think the B-western can be a ton of fun and can sustain a larger amount of novelty in your imagination. Going forward, I think I'll make a habit of interspersing them between other films, and that'll make them less intimidating as this mass glut of thousands of movies.

To answer my earlier question of 'what am I getting out of this?', I think that the B-western is important as a type of film that served as the 'background' to a larger awareness of what the past actually looked like for movie-goers in the 30s and 40s Golden Age. We have this concept of that Golden Age which is blinkered by either awards or auteurs, but the truth is that many people outside of the major cities in America were watching not A-pictures, but the programmers made by Universal, Columbia, RKO and Republic. John Wayne started out in these sorts of films and then only later migrated to his own style of larger westerns. This was the filmmaking that sustained the industry, with reliable attendance being enough so that the studios had a financial cushion to then create these bigger projects -- the B-picture was the backbone of Hollywood, and when it went away, so did the system that it had propped-up.

And I like to think about this in regards to what an 'alternative' American cinema could be -- years ago, you had mumblecore filmmakers who were able to work at their own pace because new digital technology had made it so they didn't need the big resources that production companies had. Now it seems like the real bottleneck is not on the production side, but on the distribution side -- if you can get something into a festival, it has a chance to break through, but if it doesn't, then your film gets thrown into the swamps of Tubi, YouTube, Vimeo and this lower strata of 'free' visual media. And that's also exactly where today you see all these B-westerns being hosted at -- the 'underground' of yesteryear colliding with the 'underground' of today. What can we learn from the past to ensure the future of this medium? If most films are destined today to end up on the internet, how can you feasibly work on that model in the way that B-western directors were able to make their films at a very low cost? Is there efficiency we could learn from? Like how a western is able to 'lean' on the natural landscape of the mountains and desert, should low-budget films today embrace the contemporary landscape they find themselves within, instead of trying to emulate high budget genre pictures at a reduced scale? Have we been learning the wrong lessons from this bottom-up perspective, when most directors will never be able to make the 'big' movies that they're taught in film school? What if we accept a different standard of quality that's closer to home, that loves the shaggy, scrappy energy of rugged production that won't bankrupt the artists involved?

When I watch B-westerns, it is precisely in their 'neglected' nature that I think they might prove to be a promising contributor to what a cinema divorced from high finance and corporations might look like -- anyone today can go out into nature and make a western-like film with their friends, and do similar things as well. Perhaps we need to move away from the immaculate, solipsistic images that are falling prey to CGI and AI manipulation, and instead search for the B-movies that abide by their own rules, to then see how we can remake our images free from the long shadow of the 20th century monoculture model.