Lonesome Dove

When I was young Westerns reached an apogee (26 on prime time television in 1959) and then quickly fell out of favour. A combination of overexposure, changing times, and a wave of revisionism lead to the deconstruction of the traditional Western. In 1985 Lawrence Kasdan, hot off Body Heat and The Big Chill, tried to revive the form with Silverado. That film included every element Kasdan remembered from his boyhood watching televised Westerns, and while fitfully entertaining was an ungainly and phony mess. Sort of what Steven Spielberg might have done if he had fired his editor. Four years later Larry McMurtry showed him how it was done. McMurtry had himself done his part in revising the mythology, with his debut Horseman Pass By (filmed as Hud) and The Last Picture Show. With Lonesome Dove he set about taking the deconstructed pieces of the myth and reconstructing them. Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call are former Captains in the Texas Rangers. Everyone calls McCrae "Gus," and everyone calls Call "Captain." They are the kind of men that other men would proverbially "follow into Hell." The trouble with men like that is they just might lead you there. Gus thinks the sound of his own voice is the sweetest music there is, and it is his duty to share it with the world. Call doesn't say much, but when he does others listen to every word. Robert Duvall plays Gus. He claimed in an interview promoting the miniseries that Gus was his favourite part. That is standard for film promotional purposes, but this time might be true. Tommy Lee Jones is an actor who is capable of overacting without moving a muscle. In Call he has a part suitable for his formidable talent; the role fits the man and the man the role. It is the late 1870s, the most mythic time for a Western, but for McCrae and Call the Wild West as they knew it is finished. For thirty years they drove away or killed Comanche and Kiowa and bandits. Now their turf is tamed, and they live in the deconstructed West, scratching out a fitful living as ranchers. The work is hot, hard, and dirty, and all the workers can look forward to is saving up two bucks for a “poke” with Lorie (Diane Lane), the town’s whore. One day their old friend Jake Spoon (Robert Urich) turns up. Jake has been “North,” way up in Montana, which he says is beautiful, and empty, with no people to clutter things up. (McMurtry originally wrote the story on the early seventies, with John Wayne in mind for Call, Jimmy Stewart for Gus, and Henry Fonda for Jake.) Call decides they should move to Montana and start a cattle ranch, and when he decides something, he’s not a man to change his mind. They cross the Rio Grande, steal one thousand head of cattle from some Mexican rustlers, pack up the ranch, and head for Montana. There is continuity to this. One of the major works in the canon of classic Westerns is Howard Hawks’ Red River, in which John Wayne and Montgomery Clift lead a cattle drive north from Texas to Kansas. In McMurty’s The Last Picture Show the last movie shown before the theatre closes is Red River; not only is the West gone, even the myth is gone. Anarene, Texas in the early fifties is so bleak it’s as though McMurtry was saying: “You think the universe is empty and frightening without God? In Anarene they don’t even have John Wayne.” Lonesome Dove picks up the pieces with a cattle drive to reconstruct the mythology of the West. The genre is older than the West, though. McCrae and Call and the hands are on a quest; their peers are Jason and Lancelot and Odysseus and Frodo Baggins. They will travel the height of Texas, cross through Indian Territory into Arkansas, on up through Kansas and Nebraska, then head northwest through Wyoming and across Montana. The trip is twenty-five hundred miles, or maybe three thousand. They aren’t sure where they are going, but the destination isn’t the point. It is the trip that matters, a last adventure while, hopefully, they are still up for it. They will see marvels, fight monsters, and remind themselves of who they are, or think they are. Lonesome Dove isn’t an action movie. There are many exciting scenes: Lorie’s rescue, the battle with a hostile tribe in Montana, or the day Call loses his temper among them. But this is a story about the connections between people, and the most moving moments are emotionally stirring: Blue Duck’s chilling: “Was that his name?”; the hanging of horse thieves; a deathbed vigil. McMurtry based the story on real people and real events. This is the West as we would like it to be, and just possibly the way it really was. There is a sign hanging over the gate of the Hat Creek Cattle Company (“Proprietors Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call”) that bears the inscription: “Uva Uvam Vivendo (sic) Varia Fit.” Call: “... and if that ain't bad enough you got all them Greek words on there, too.” Gus: “I told you, Woodrow, a long time ago it ain't Greek, it's Latin.” Call: “Well what does it say in Latin?” [Gus blusters some gibberish] Call: “For all you know it invites people to rob us.” Gus: “Well the first man comes along that can read Latin is welcome to rob us, far as I'm concerned. I'd like a chance t' shoot at a educated man once in my life.” If you would like to spend eight hours in the company of those men, Lonesome Dove will amply reward you.