Saturday, October 30, 2021

Hollywood and the Western


In the late 19th century, Native Americans were exhibited in Indian Medicine Shows, and Wild West shows like Buffalo Bill’s, and in anthropological exhibitions in amusement parks like Coney Island, and in the great World’s Fairs, where they were presented in paddocks behind fences, as primitive missing links like zoo animals.

Around the same time Theodore Roosevelt wrote his four volume history The Winning of the West, a bloody bloody account that pulls no punches. Teddy’s great uncle James Henry Roosevelt donated the land on Lower Broadway that is now the site of the Roosevelt Building. That building was the original home of Biograph Studios, employer of D.W. Griffith who directed such early western motion pictures as The Battle of Elderbush Gulch, which was made made one year before his now notorious The Birth of a Nation. At the climax of The Battle of Elderbush Gulch, the main characters are in a cabin surrounded by hostile natives. The hero of the story comes a hair's breadth from shooting his beloved in the head, lest she be molested by one of the leering, terrifying red men creeping towards them like the sideshow characters in the climactic scene of Freaks.

By the time Hollywood came on the scene, there was already a fleshed out and stereotyped iconography not dissimilar from blackfaceminstrelsy, the Original Sin of American show business. In western films, radio shows, and television programs for decades, Native Americans were presented as soulless, marauding enemies, like zombies, or jackdaws, or giant locusts on horseback. They were usually shown attacking in swarms like angry bees.

When presented as individuals they were usually made to speak a sort of pidgin tongue full of monosyllables and grunts as though they were proto-lingual, like cavemen, rather than in possession of complex languages of their own. This sort of depiction hasn’t died out. I still see it done from time to time. It was a staple of comedy for a long time. Theoretically it was done ironically, a lot of the time as an ostensibly parody of western screen characters. Bob Hope's The Paleface (1948) and Son of Paleface (1952) have that sort of thing in it. Buster Keaton, who also made a comedy called The Paleface (1922), had a sort of side career in later years playing comedy Indians, in movies like Li’l Abner (1940) and Pajama Party (1964). Nicknamed the Great Stoneface, it must have seemed appropriate for him to mimic the stoic visage of the cigar store Indian. One of his last projects, and the very last project for comedian Ernie Kovacs was a 1962 pilot for a sitcom called Medicine Man, in which Kovacs played a fast talking frontier snake oil salesman and Keaton his elderly Native American sidekick "Junior", whose dialogue was replete with “How” and “Ugh” humor. Whether the show would have gone on to become a classic 60s sitcom will always be an unanswered question because on the last day of filming Kovacs lost his life in a car accident. But later in the decade F Troop (1965-67) did become a sitcom classic. On that show, the fictitious native tribe are played against stereotype as sophisticated merchants, whose haggling over prices is redolent of the 7th Avenue garment district, though their Chief, Wild Eagle is played by Italian American Frank De Kova. The tribe are known as the Hekawi, a joke that arose from confusion when the tribe was lost on one occasion and someone asked “Where the heck are we?”

Despite their small numbers, Native Americans played a huge part in America’s pop cultural imagination until the 1970s, mostly through the influence of westerns. After years of misrepresentation, it seems like there was a brief period of apology from the late 60s through the mid 1970s and then the influence almost completely disappeared except for occasional blips like Dances with Wolves (1990). Instead of trying to address Native American concerns and make some kind of real concerted industry wide effort to reform, producers took their lacrosse ball and went home.  It’s like Hollywood went: “Sorry, all we got is bullshit. It’s bullshit or nothing. I don’t know what to tell ya! All we got is bullshit” 




 

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