The New York Times - MARCH 24, 2014
He
was the strong, forthright hero: authentic, stubborn, sometimes
pigheaded but dedicated to justice and capable of tenderness and
sacrifice; a solitary figure, called upon to defend the homestead or
rescue the girl, but often exiled, in the end, from the post-frontier
civilization that no longer needed his hard man’s brand of competence
and courage. Whether he was a gunfighter, a cowboy or a cavalry officer,
he became, for many moviegoers, the very avatar of the American
frontier: the embodiment of James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer,
Emerson’s American Adam or what Garry Wills called fans’ sense of what
“was disappearing or had disappeared” from American life.
The
narrator of Walker Percy’s novel “The Moviegoer” talks about the memory
of him killing “three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty
street in ‘Stagecoach' ” as more real than memories from the narrator’s
own life. Joan Didion called him the “perfect mold” into which “the
inarticulate longings of a nation” were poured.
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