Boyd Cathey
Although Hollywood is now considered a
monolithic bastion of leftist and “woke” political and cultural
sentiment with almost no dissent tolerated, it was not always that way,
at least not to the degree that exists today. Go back sixty years ago,
and that progressivist uniformity was not as apparent.
Certainly, “Tinseltown” was never a haven
for conservative and traditionalist cinema, actors, and screen writers,
but back then to be on the Right and practicing a career in movies was
not a rare oddity like it is in 2021. In particular, the sub-genre of
Westerns, during its heyday on the big screen from the 1920s until the
mid-1960s, was dominated by actors identifiably conservative.
Indeed, most of Hollywood’s leading Western
and cowboy actors have been politically conservative, and quite a few
have been Southerners. It is well known that John Wayne was a
conservative, strongly supporting United States forces in Vietnam
(recall his film, “The Green Berets”), and often supporting Republican
candidates. But many other prominent Western actors were also on the
right.
A short list would include: Joel McCrea (a
Goldwater and Reagan supporter), Randolph Scott (a staunch conservative
and Reagan supporter originally from Charlotte, N.C., who attended the
1964 Republican Convention as a Goldwater delegate), Audie Murphy (a
Texan, life member of the NRA), Roy Rogers and Gene Autry (both
conservative Christians), John Payne (a native Virginian and staunch
Goldwater conservative), Alan Ladd (a Republican and native of
Arkansas), Charlton Heston (a former president of the NRA), Ronald
Reagan, Glenn Ford, Ward Bond, Jimmy Stewart (a regular contributor to
the political campaigns of Senator Jesse Helms), Ben Johnson (who
refused to act in Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show,” until
nudity and bad language were removed), Gary Cooper (a convert to the
Catholic Church, who supported Nixon in 1960), George “Gabby” Hayes (a
John Bircher, the quintessential cowboy sidekick, whose famous full
beard and tattered hat identified him for several generations of
Western-watchers), Walter Brennan (thrice-winning Academy Award winner
whose staunch conservatism led him to co-chair the California state
campaign for George Wallace in 1968), and Chill Wills (the noted
Western character actor who was the other California Wallace co-chair in
1968).
And there were others that we might recall from those days of yesteryear.
In more recent times, such noted actors as
Clint Eastwood, Robert Duvall, Tom Selleck (another past president of
the NRA), and Kevin Sorbo, have continued the rightward tendency among
actors who act in oaters...
...The very nature of the Western sub-genre has had a significant influence
in attracting certain types of actors to it. Westerns traditionally
expressed the purest form of “good vs. evil.” Even in the more
conflicted, morally blurred years of the later 1960s and 1970s, the few
Westerns that were made seemed to never lose sight of that essential
conflict. Indeed, the paucity of films in the genre during the last
thirty years is the clearest indication that the Western as a
clear-sighted vehicle for representing society’s conception of itself
and its frontier past has fallen on hard times. Too many heroes in white
hats and too strong an identification with a triumphant—and
white—country, subduing all before it, doesn’t offer the best medium for
representing the morally conflicted and self-loathing America of the
21st century.
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