Paul Thomas: Sun sets on gun-toting heroes of OK corral

On most Saturday nights back in the dark ages when my family didn't have TV - this was the early 1960s - we'd invite ourselves round to the home of friends who did.

After shovelling down dinner, we'd get there in time to watch The 77th Bengal Lancers, which was the warm-up to the highlight of the week, Bonanza.

The hottest western on TV followed the adventures of the Cartwright family, patriarch Ben and his three sons, who bore absolutely no resemblance to one another.

Adam was dark and brooding and eventually bald; Hoss was an amiable behemoth who didn't say much besides "Okay, Paw" and whose forte was the titanic fist-fight with a posse of normal-sized hombres or a fellow overgrown freak; and Little Joe was an impulsive pretty boy who got to kiss lots of girls but always woke up in his own bunk.

There was no Mrs Cartwright. Perhaps she never really recovered from bringing Hoss into the world.

In those days television meant westerns. Shows such as Gunsmoke, Laramie, The Virginian and The High Chaparral commanded Saturday night primetime.

Hollywood was also cranking out big-screen versions. John Wayne starred as himself in dozens of cowboy pictures and was the biggest box-office star for the best part of two decades. Most leading men, even Marlon Brando and Sean Connery, had a stab at the western, while John Ford, widely regarded as America's greatest director, did little else.

And then the western pretty much disappeared. The novelty value of Prime's Monday night series Deadwood reinforces the fact that the western is an endangered species, if not on the verge of extinction.

Deadwood is a far cry from the Cartwright's Ponderosa ranch. As the pre-publicity emphasised, this is not the Wild West as portrayed in countless horse operas and the novels of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour; this is what's left of that fictional, sentimentalised west after it's been deconstructed with a blunt tomahawk.

There are various reasons for the decline of the western. Hollywood discovered that the elements audiences liked - heroic individualism, rough justice, incessant gunplay - could be transplanted to contemporary, urban settings and given far greater firepower. It's not stretching a very long bow to argue that the ubiquitous maverick cop is simply an updated version of the classic western hero, the enigmatic loner who comes to the aid of the respectable, law-abiding community from which he chooses to keep his distance.

Westerns entailed the expense and inconvenience of location shoots, elaborate sets and period costumes. The black-and-white morality of the traditional western was a hard sell in the era of Vietnam and Watergate. Making the western relevant to a rebellious and cynical generation meant taking a revisionist approach and turning myths on their heads.

While this approach produced a handful of memorable movies, it also hastened the genre's demise. The western's enduring appeal to middle America lay in its affirmation of a masculine ideal and the myth of the frontier. When that ideal and mythology began to be debunked, it was only a matter of time before the core audience turned away.

Both writer/director Sam Peckinpah and actor/director Clint Eastwood started out in horse operas. Eastwood was the hot-tempered trail-hand Rowdy Yates in Rawhide, while Peckinpah created two TV series, The Rifleman and the ill-fated The Westerner.

Eastwood went on to star in Sergio Leone's celebrated spaghetti westerns. While studded with low comedy, the "Man With No Name" trilogy portrays the west as an amoral wasteland populated by grotesques and psychopaths.

Eastwood's last western, Unforgiven, employs the overtly revisionist device of a secondary narrative centred on a journalist-cum-dime novelist who is systematically and brutally disabused of his starry-eyed notions about the code of the west.

Peckinpah's westerns have an elegiac quality reflecting his nostalgia for the old west.

But he was also a turbulent soul and a daring film-maker. The laconic lament of Ride the High Country gave way to the apocalyptic vision and balletic carnage of The Wild Bunch.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, his final western, is heavily valedictory in tone. The former comrades-in-arms weigh each other up, before heading off towards their inevitable showdown. Billy asks Garrett how it feels to have sold out, to be wearing a badge and doing the bidding of the cattle barons. Garrett replies, "It feels like times have changed."

"Times, maybe," says Billy. "Not me."

* Paul Thomas is a Wellington writer.