How The North Was Won

For over a century and a half, the American western had made glorious the abstract idea of manifest destiny. The Indians are rioting, the open range is being fenced in, and the railroad is destroying a way of life, yet nobody truly doubts that progress and American goodness, led by an outsider willing to sacrifice everything to protect the weak and innocent, will eventually prevail. Harry Vincent may feel jealous of this influential myth but in the end makes no effort to create a competing mythology. Vanderhaeghe the novelist opted for the complexities and nuances of literature over the rabble-rousing power of a mythmaker like Ira Chance. The director should have listened to his writer’s doubts. Whereas Larry McMurtry’s books recall Howard Hawks’s genial westerns and McCarthy’s pessimism makes him a brother to Sam Peckinpah, Vanderhaeghe’s brand of complex, ironic realism has no cinematic heritage.

While Australian filmmakers and novelists like to recast their country’s early history as a struggle between the disenfranchised and colonial oppressors, making heroes of scalawags, troublemakers and criminals, we Canadians tend to see our colonial history as a tale of sensible authority. Our films of the early West are usually personal and introverted, leaving the drama of emerging societies to the record keepers and documentary makers. Content with the official version, perhaps we feel we have no need of rival mythologies, much less violent catharsis.