Often described as “psychological westerns”, these films eschewed the conventional heroes of the old west for more complicated protagonists, flawed and motivated by darker impulses….
The “Noir-Western” sounds like a contradiction in terms. One associates the western with the 19th century American frontier, wide open vistas, horses, cowboys and Indians, “good guys” and “bad guys”, and a generally wholesome attitude. This is a sharp contrast with the sensibility of film noir, an outgrowth of the 1930s crime film and the Second World War. The noir milieu was the mean streets of urban America, its alleyways, bars, and nightclubs, or in the cramped homes of characters leading seedy lives, with even seedier morals. The western lived in the sunlight; noir lived in the shadows. Yet, as many have noted, something happened in the mid-1940s – the dark elements of noir started to seep into the western.
Often described as “psychological westerns”, these films eschewed the conventional heroes of the old west – think the honest lawman, the upright rancher, the cowboy fending off “savage Indians”. These were replaced with more complicated protagonists, flawed and motivated by darker impulses. Notable examples include a group of films made by director Anthony Winchester ’73 Mann and actor James Stewart in the 1950s. In the five westerns they made together, beginning with Winchester ’73 (1950), Stewart played men who were bitter, often carrying the weight of past misdeeds or of grudges to settle. There was the angry gunman looking for his rifle in Winchester ’73, the ex-bushwhacker trying to lead a wagon train to safety in Bend of the River (1952), or the bounty hunter out for vengeance in The Naked Spur (1953). Gone were the idealistic heroes Stewart portrayed in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) or It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). The Stewart in Mann’s westerns was angrier, more neurotic, and prone to violence.
It’s worth noting that the fusion of noir and the western has roots all the way back to the beginning of cinema itself. In one of the first “narrative” films in history, The Great Train Robbery (1903) directed by Edwin S. Porter, we see elements of both the western and the gangster movie in this ten-minute short about a group of outlaws pulling off a railroad heist. The movie’s famous final shot of one of the bandits aiming his revolver towards the camera and firing was explicitly referenced by a later master of the gangster film, Martin Scorsese, in his 1990 mob classic Goodfellas. In the 1940s, we find another example of the genre compatibility in a pair of movies: first the crime thriller High Sierra (1941), directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Humphrey Bogart as an ex-convict who gets roped into one last heist. He’s eventually pursued by the law, and chased all the way into the Sierra Nevada mountains for a breathtaking climax. Walsh later remade the film as the western Colorado Territory (1949), this time starring Joel McCrea as an outlaw on the frontier. It’s basically the same story, and also builds towards a rousing finale in the mountains as the protagonist gets cornered. However different they may traditionally appear, there is one important theme central to both the American western and film noir: violence.
Although it’s not the first “noir western”, a useful place to start is with the 1948 film Blood on the Moon, directed by Robert Wise and starring Robert Mitchum as a down-on-his-luck cattle hand in Texas who gets involved in a land battle between homesteaders and ranchers. Mitchum’s presence already invokes the noir connection here, as film scholar Alan K. Rode put it in his book covering the film: “His character could have traded in his Stetson and chaps for a fedora and rain coat.” Mitchum had recently come off of the noir classic Out of the Past (1947), where he went head-to-head with Kirk Douglas’s racketeer over the affections of Jane Greer. Mitchum brings his cool, ambiguous persona as easily to Blood on the Moon, this time clashing with a manipulative homesteader played by Robert Preston. It’s a story full of twists and moral complexity, with characters constantly changing sides. With the atmospheric black-and-white photography of Nicolas Musuraca (who also shot Out of the Past) and the taut direction of Robert Wise, Blood on the Moon delivers the goods.
Another entry in the noir western style is The Furies (1950; see image below), a less discussed film from director Anthony Mann. Adapted by Charles Schnee from the novel by Niven Busch, The Furies is about a wealthy cattle baron (Walter Huston) engaged in a battle of wills with his fiercely independent daughter (Barbara Stanwyck) over control of their estate. The struggle is intimate also—Stanwyck despises Huston’s new wife (Judith Anderson), and likewise, Huston begrudges his daughter’s close relationship with a Mexican (Gilbert Roland), whose family has a bitter, longstanding feud with Huston over territory they claim as rightfully theirs. Another player, a cunning businessman played by Wendel Corey, also courts Stanwyck and muddies the waters even further for all involved. The Furies explores many themes: racism, sexuality, the power dynamics of family and gender, and the encroachment of modern capitalism upon the shrinking world of the old west. Huston, and even Stanwyck’s character, represent the old guard: land, cattle, frontier justice. Wendell Corey’s investor represents the new, financially driven economy of the future. Moreover, the film’s title and themes evoke ancient Greek theater. With all its fratricidal conflict and emotional intensity, The Furies feels like a story by Aeschylus or Sophocles, but transplanted to the 19th century Old West. Like the characters in those Greek tragedies, the flawed protagonists of The Furies seem fated to sow their own destruction.
One can make a case for other titles from this era as bearing noir western status, even in color. Shane (1953), directed by George Stevens, is one such film, not often grouped with other “psychological” or “noir” westerns, though it stars Alan Ladd, whose filmography boasts many noir credits. He plays the title character, a gunslinger who comes to a small Wyoming town and finds himself embroiled in a struggle between a family of homesteaders (Jean Arthur, Arthur Kennedy) and a cattle baron (Emile Meyer). There’s a dark undercurrent running through the film, as Shane seeks peace from a violent past. He is reluctantly drawn into conflict however, and a confrontation with the cattle baron’s sadistic enforcer, played memorably by an early-career Jack Palance. Like many noir protagonists, Shane’s past seems to follow him wherever he goes. Small-town trouble is also afoot in Silver Lode (1954), a low-budget western from director Allan Dwan, whose varied career dated back to the silent era (Dwan directed the Douglas Fairbanks version of Robin Hood in 1922). The stars of Silver Lode could’ve come straight out of a classic B-noir—headlining it are John Payne, Lizabeth Scott, and Dan Duryea. The film follows Dan Ballard (Payne), who on the day of his wedding is arrested by a team of marshals for an alleged murder and theft, charges which he denies. He spends the rest of the film trying to prove his innocence, but is met with obstacles at every turn, including by an increasingly hysterical town posse out to get him regardless of due process. It’s an obvious allegory for McCarthy-era America (heading the witch hunt is bad guy Duryea, who’s even named “McCarty”).
In the late 1950s, director Budd Boetticher made a string of dark westerns starring Randolph Scott, often labeled as the “Ranown” westerns (taking their name from Scott and producer Harry Joe Brown’s production company). One of them was The Tall T (1957). Its script by Burt Kennedy was based on a short story by Elmore Leonard, who before he became a widely acknowledged master of crime fiction wrote his share of westerns [two of them were also adapted into the original 3:10 to Yuma (1957) starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, and Hombre (1967) with Paul Newman]. The Tall T is about a small rancher, Pat Brennan (played by Scott) who’s travelling by stagecoach when he and his fellow passengers are held up by a gang of bandits (played by Richard Boone, Henry Silva, and Skip Homeier). Coming in at a lean 77 minutes, the film is packed with nervous energy and suspense. Boetticher builds the tension through tight pacing and visual framing, giving the film a harsh, dusty beauty. A sort of psychological dance is played out between Brennan and the gang’s leader Frank (Boone). Frank senses a kindred spirit in Brennan, and envies the rancher’s bit of land and cattle. Frank tells his captive about his plan to have the same:
Frank: I’m gonna get me a place someday. I’ve thought about it…I’ve thought about it a lot.
Brennan: You think this is how you’re gonna get it?
Frank: Sometimes you don’t have a choice.
Brennan: Don’t you?
Randolph Scott plays Brennan with an affable surface, but suggests something darker underneath. His stoic demeanor is a prototype for the laconic hero Clint Eastwood would later portray in the westerns he made with Italian director Sergio Leone [A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)].
Oddly enough, both film noir and the westerns of this classic era began to fade around 1960 [with some exceptions, such as Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks (1961)—see film historian Imogen Sara Smith’s essay “Noir on the Range,” along with her book In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City, for more on that and related works]. As television became increasingly popular and the movie studios restructured themselves, black-and-white noirs became “neo-noirs” in color, and the western went through various reinventions in the 1960s and 1970s, from the infusion of Italian “spaghetti westerns” by directors such as Leone and Sergio Corbucci, to the later “revisionist” westerns which sought to reinterpret the portrayals of Native Americans and the development of the “Old West”, as seen in films like A Man Called Horse (1970), Little Big Man (1970), and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971).
Clint Eastwood gave the noir western a modern revival with his 1992 film Unforgiven, which he produced, directed, and starred in. Eastwood is one of the definitive stars of the western, and also provided one of neo-noir cinema’s iconic characters with his Detective “Dirty” Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry movies (1971-1988). He brings that weight to Unforgiven, which follows former bounty hunter William Munny (Eastwood) as he tries to leave behind his violent ways. The movie brings together many of the traditional concerns of the western: lawlessness, corruption, male comradery, loneliness on the frontier. More unique is its frank depiction of misogyny against women. After a cowboy viciously assaults a prostitute at a brothel in the Wyoming town of “Big Whiskey”, the establishment’s madame (Frances Fisher) posts a bounty for killing the perpetrator and his associate. Munny reluctantly takes the offer, along with companions Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) and the “Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett).
Eastwood takes his time telling the story, allowing us to get to know the characters. We learn that Munny, now a small pig farmer and father, was once the “meanest son’ bitch…and the worst man for a killing, as in the best” as the Schofield Kid says at one point. Munny says he’s not what he was, respectfully crediting his late wife with curing him of “drinking, and wickedness.” Eastwood gives a powerful, soulful performance as Munny; his rugged good looks here appear weathered. Unfortunately for Munny, the job eventually brings him into conflict with the villainous sheriff of Big Whiskey, “Little Bill” Dagget (Gene Hackman), who doesn’t take kind to bounty hunters and other “assassins” on his turf. When we get to the climactic standoff, Eastwood doesn’t find heroic triumph, but bitter resignation: Hackman: “You be William Munny of Missouri, killer of women and children” – Eastwood: “That’s right. I’ve killed women and children, just about everything that walked or crawled on this earth…and I’m here to kill you Little Bill, for what you did…” With its brooding tone and moral ambiguity, Unforgiven offers a final commentary of sorts on the destructive nature of violence, and what the classic “western” meant.
Which is not to say that the western or its noir variant has disappeared. In the 21st century, though westerns appear more and more rarely, the genre continues to evolve. Elmore Leonard’s 3:10 to Yuma was entertainingly remade in 2007 by director James Mangold, this time starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale in the lead roles. That year also saw another effort at the “psychological western”, the sprawling, underrated epic The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). From Australian writer-director Andrew Dominik, the film is a dark meditation on celebrity and the nature of mythmaking versus the cold reality. Here the original American outlaw folk hero, Jesse James, is played by Brad Pitt. His adoring counterpart is young Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), who idolizes the gunslinger, joining up with his gang with notions of becoming famous himself. He insinuates himself into James’ company, both annoying and fascinating the gang leader, who in a telling scene says “I don’t know if you want to be with me, or be me.” Dominik paints the story in moody, elegiac tones. Shot by Roger Deakins, the film is filled with darkly beautiful images, underscored by a grave musical score from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Pitt and Affleck do strong work here, bringing a lived-in quality to their portrayals, as do the rest of the cast which includes Sam Rockwell, Jeremy Renner, Paul Schneider, Mary-Louis Parker, and Sam Shephard.
The Coen brothers gave the noir western a contemporary spin with the superb No Country for Old Men (also 2007). Based on the Cormac McCarthy novel and set in Texas circa 1980, the film is about a hunter (Josh Brolin) who comes across a stash of money left in the middle of what appears to be a drug deal gone wrong, and runs off with it. This puts on his trail a ruthlessly eccentric hit man (Javier Bardem), and an aging lawman (Tommy Lee Jones) who tries to make sense of the violent mess that follows. With their signature blend of dark humor and suspense, the Coens infuse moral weight into a riveting thriller.
The noir western reached a crescendo with director Martin Scorsese’s 2023 epic Killers of the Flower Moon. Based on the true-crime book by David Grann, it tells the heinous real-life story of a series of murders that took place in the oil-rich territory of the indigenous Osage people in 1920s Oklahoma. Released 75 years after Blood on the Moon, in a way it brings the noir western – and Scorsese – full circle. The director saw the film as a six-year-old during its theatrical run, and has cited it as an influence on Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese’s film is centered around three characters, an Osage woman Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), her white husband Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), and his businessman uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro). Scorsese and his co-screenwriter Eric Roth reshaped the narrative of Grann’s source book quite a bit for the film adaptation. The book, which gives historical background on the Osage people, their settlement in Oklahoma, and the discovery of oil there, plays out largely as a murder mystery. While the Burkharts and Hale feature prominently in Grann’s account, so does FBI agent Tom White, whose own investigation is given significant space throughout the book. The film chooses to focus primarily on the relationship between Mollie and Ernest, with White appearing well into the proceedings (and played by Jesse Plemons). While one may view this as a way to center the story more around DiCaprio’s character (and Gladstone’s), it may also have given Scorsese a more personal entry point into the material, allowing him to focus on a theme crucial to this tale and many of his other films: betrayal.
Moreover, Scorsese, a self-professed longtime admirer of the western who had never previously made one in his storied career (the closest was Gangs of New York, which he has called an “Eastern”), infuses Flower Moon with many of his other signature themes, including violence, and the codes of behavior within a community or tribe. The relationship between Ernest and his uncle Hale is fascinating and mirrors the one between Robert Mitchum and Robert Preston in Blood on the Moon. In the earlier film, Preston’s homesteader uses and to a degree deceives his friend Mitchum, in a scheme to run nearby ranchers off their land and exploit them financially. Preston even romances the daughter of his rancher adversary, to gain inside knowledge of her father’s moves in the battle of wills. Similarly in Flower Moon, Hale is a close “friend” of the Osage, and uses his friendly but gullible nephew’s marriage to the Osage Mollie to carry out his terrible pursuit of the tribe’s substantial oil rights. The lengths the white characters go to here, as in history, is quite ruthless. As Scorsese described it in an interview: “they loved them, they lived with them, and they killed them”.
Another key theme, deeply personal throughout Scorsese’s work, is redemption. So many of his protagonists – going all the way back to Charlie in Mean Streets (1973), Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (1980), Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), or even mobster Frank Sheeran in The Irishman (2019) – search for it. In Flower Moon, Ernest attempts something like atonement for what he’s done to his wife, and in so doing, has to commit another act of betrayal – this is the moral complexity of a Martin Scorsese picture. Otherwise, redemption seems to be deliberately absent amongst the film’s main characters. Scorsese himself appears in a cameo late in the film as a radio broadcaster, recounting the details of the white man’s pillaging and murder of the Osage community. We then see a present-day Osage religious ceremony, a kind of ritual dance. Killers of the Flower Moon seems to be saying that this is where redemption can be found in this story – the survival of the group, and the shared memory of loved ones lost.
As these movies show, the western genre offered another fertile ground over which film noir could cast its shadows. In the mythical lands of the 19 th century Old West, people could be just as venal and corrupt as their 20 th century urban counterparts. The rancher, the cattle driver, the lawman – they could have secrets, lusts, temptations, and violence lurking just beneath the surface. Even a pig farming family man had a past he couldn’t escape from. In Unforgiven, the Schofield Kid gets a taste of the killing he so eagerly sought. Shaken by it, he tells Will Munny, and himself, that his victim “Had it coming” – “We all have it coming kid,” Munny replies. These traditional characters of the western, as well as their villainous companions, be it the gunfighter, the outlaw, or the crooked sheriff, can exist alongside the big city racketeer, thief, hustler, detective, insurance salesman, or femme fatale – some of the fixtures of classic noir narratives. It turns out the Old West might’ve not been that different than the hard-boiled world Raymond Chandler wrote about, “where the streets were dark, with something more than night.”
Anees Aref is a writer on film, history, and politics based in the Los Angeles area who has published abroad as well as in the United States. His work has appeared in Film International and Noir City Magazine.
Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon 