Why We So Love Those Oaters : Despite the naysayers and a lengthy dry spell, the Western endures; perhaps it’s the cinematic celebration of freedom

America’s Western hero is one tough hombre. Pronounced dead by critics on a number of occasions, he always manages to dust himself off and get back in the saddle again.

It has been nine decades since men of the West were first romanticized on screen in 1903’s “The Great Train Robbery” (inspired by a Butch Cassidy heist only three years earlier in Wyoming), and while most other kinds of Victorian-era entertainment have changed dramatically or expired in that time, Westerns are pretty much the same.

Horse opera, oater, shoot-’em-up, cowboy movie: Whatever you call it, the Western genre has an amazing ability to refresh itself just when it appears to have gone out of style. Westerns are now nearly as bankable a genre as they were at mid-century, when Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers rode across the silver screen.

Filmmakers are shouting “Westward, ho!” because there is gold in the West, or at least in the receipts of well-made Westerns. Moviegoers are eager once again to buy tickets to watch robust guys and gals ride and rope and wrangle in the wide open spaces.

The appeal of the celluloid West is no mystery: For those of us who spend too much time trapped at a desk or stuck in traffic, it’s plum thrilling to be transported from the stress of modern life, if only for a couple of hours, and gaze upon the big skies of Montana, or contemplate Kevin Costner galloping bareback among a herd of buffalo or luxuriate in Billy Crystal’s transformation into a top hand.

The box-office appeal of the wide-open spaces hasn’t always been so obvious. Cowboy movie heroes were declared an endangered species as early as 1929, when Photoplay magazine announced that the popularity of aviator Charles Lindbergh made horsemen seem like relics of olden times. What moviegoer would want to watch some leathery wrangler lope through the plains with old Dobbin when a fresh-faced modern ace had just flown halfway around the globe in an airplane?

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Ten years after Westerns were supposed to ride off into the sunset, John Ford’s “Stagecoach” established John Wayne as a headliner and inspired at least a quarter-century of cowboy movies that were A-pictures with top stars.

By the time Wayne finally won an Oscar for 1969’s “True Grit,” it was for playing Rooster Cogburn, a burlesque of cowboy heroes. Once again, the cowboy was going out of fashion; the cowboy movie’s only real zest in cynical post-Vietnam Hollywood was transplanted from Italy by way of spaghetti Westerns.

In 1980, Westerns were pronounced dead once and for all--this time after Michael Cimino’s ill-starred “Heaven’s Gate” laid the most expensive egg in box-office history.

Ten years after the “Heaven’s Gate” death knell was sounded, Kevin Costner made “Dances With Wolves.” This epic fantasy about a cavalry officer ennobled by his sabbatical with the Sioux corralled gigantic audiences and won a fistful of Academy Awards, resuscitating Western movies yet again.

The triumph of “Dances With Wolves” wasn’t completely out of the blue; the year before, the television miniseries made from Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” had garnered big television ratings for what was a grand-scale, old-fashioned cattle-drive epic complete with thundering stampede, a bloodthirsty Indian out for white men’s scalps, a pretty blond whore with a heart of gold and Texas Rangers who could ride, rope, shoot, fight and philosophize as well as any pop-culture cowboy ever did.

More recently, “Unforgiven” and “City Slickers” have won the hearts and minds of moviegoers; although they are as different in tone as movies can be, both are classic cowpoke fables in which heroes undertake an arduous journey and learn something deep about themselves.

And now comes Walter Hill’s “Geronimo,” with Kevin Jarre’s “Tombstone” and Larry Kasdan’s “Wyatt Earp” close behind. Also on the horizon are at least half a dozen movies about high-riding women, including “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” “Bad Girls,” “Guns and Roses” and “The Quick and the Dead.” The movie West, including cowboys and Indians and more cowgirls than ever before, is back in a big way.

Some modern Westerns cast a skeptical eye on the cowboy myth, and many aim to undermine the traditional heroic saga of the winning of the West, but even the glummest and darkest of them (like “Unforgiven”) are exhilarating for the fundamental reason that they take place in a world unencumbered by modern life’s annoyances.

Consider the movie cowboy: He pays no taxes to the IRS, he doesn’t wait in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, and he never fills out a medical insurance claim form. In the movie West of Hollywood’s imagination, there are no corporate committees who decide when to saddle up, no accountants prescribing proper amounts of hay for the horses, no middle-management bureaucrats putting up gates and fences, and little in the way of meddling government to obstruct a buckaroo with a job to do.

To be a cowboy is to take matters into your own hands, to blaze your own way, to solve problems using whatever it takes, even if that means mayhem not sanctioned by authorities. The theme of every Western--directly or by implication--is being free, which is why the appeal is eternal.

Nor should we overlook how pleasant it is to see bad guys get the daylights beat out of them by good guys--a primal satisfaction provided all too seldom by real-life current events. Even in the most ambivalent and soul-searching Western movies, there has got to be a scene in which justice is dispensed with fist or gun.

Such justice may be politically incorrect, and right-thinking members of the audience might be fully aware that courts and laws and lawyers and the rights of a defendant are all good things for civilization. But, honestly, aren’t there times when every one of us yearns to stare down an irritating creep and say, as Ronald Reagan did (imitating Clint Eastwood), “Go ahead, make my day.”

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As a matter of fact, the new popularity of Westerns can be quite easily explained by the fact that Reagan is no longer President. As long as that onetime sagebrush star was in the White House, Americans didn’t need Westerns so much because we had a cowboy hero leading the country. Whatever his talents and achievements as chief executive, Reagan was a master at projecting confidence and joie de vivre . Westerns provide the kind of reassurance he provided in the 1980s: a clear moral view of things, as well as a take-charge, can-do attitude unfazed by punctilios of politics or the law.

This is a country that has always relished straight-talkers who believe in Right and Virtue and are eager to fight for them. Finding few in public life, we turn to Western movies, which are rich with behavior that may not be exemplary but is always bold.*