Roderick McGillis

There is already a fantastic review of this work, Roderick McGillis's tome to masculinity as observed in B Westerns, on this site that covers all of the important points so instead I'd like to provide my own feelings about the book. To start, let me mention that I am in no way the target audience for this book. I am not a film student nor a consumer of the B Western - I wasn't alive and I'm the wrong gender anyway to have really pined for the Red Ryder BB gun. However, my biggest concern when I first started reading was the writing style. It reminded me of the music journals that I've had to pour through as a Masters student, not what I would usually call enjoyable reading.

However, as I moved past the introduction and into the meat of McGillis's thesis, I really learned about and enjoyed the subject matter the whole way through. My only previous connection to the B Western comes from A Christmas Story, where the main character pines for the power and prestige that only a Red Ryder BB gun can bring. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I knew it was an actual item when I saw a display of Red Ryder and Little Beaver in a sporting goods store, so I obviously had a lot I could learn from this book. McGillis managed to convey his deep love and respect for the genre while still questioning what it taught society. I found it particularly interesting the dichotomy between what the B cowboy tended to preach and how he lived his life - that life was much more fun out riding the range, free of the constraints of "society" even as he tried to enforce that same society for others.

My only qualms with McGillis's arguments stem from using Freud as a credible source, and I realize that there are still branches of society that recognize his work as valid so it's more my personal dislike than a reflection on McGillis's scholarship. This work was obviously lovingly researched and prepared, and I think presents a balanced look at everything the B Western has to teach and has taught that age-bracket of men currently in power, which may continue to prove important to all of us. I think He Was Some Kind of a Man is well crafted and entirely worth reading for anyone who enjoys learning new things like myself or anyone wanting to take a closer look at their childhood influences.… (mehr)

Where to begin in discussing a book which seemingly lays waste to all my childhood heroes of the silver screen? And yet it doesn't. Because author McGillis is, I think, very fair and even-handed in the way he lays out both the virtues and the faults found in these much-loved and well-remembered fictional celluloid heroes. Like me, Rod McGillis, was one of those "Front-Row Kids" first examined (along with their heroes) over thirty years ago in a book by James Horwitz called THEY WENT THATAWAY. We were the kids who were packed off every Saturday afternoon to our neighborhood theaters where we sat entranced for hours by the likes of Gene, Roy, Hoppy, Rex, Tex and other lesser gods of the B-western movies as they thundered relentlessly after the bad guys, astride their respective steeds: Champ, Trigger, Topper, Koko, White Flash and others.

Unlike Horwitz's book, however, this is not simply a nostalgic look back. No, McGillis, who is a professor of English at the University of Calgary who specializes in Children's Lit and film studies, instead chooses to take an analytical look at these old films to examine the issue of masculinity and role models. Along the way he also looks at the way guns are presented to their youthful audiences, noting how the Daisy air rifle company used these westerns by markenting their product as a "Red Ryder" model. Ryder was, of course, a popular fictional western figure created by Fred Harman for comic books who made the transition to the screen quite easily, along with his boy companion, Native American (although we called 'em Injuns back then) Little Beaver. Besides talking about America's longstanding love affair with firearms, perhaps encouraged by the B westerns, McGillis also looks at the stars of those films as "corporate cowboys" who put their stamps on everything from pajamas and bedspreads to lunch boxes, cowboy hats, coloring books, comics, and just about anything else imaginable, including of course cap guns and holsters, those most essential of items for small buckaroos of the forties and fifties. McGillis even remembers to discuss that now-classic 1983 film, "A Christmas Story," Jean Shepherd's autobiographical tale of a bespectacled boy (as I was) who yearned for that Red Ryder bb gun. He looks at the ethnic and racial stereotyping of Jews, Indians, Chinese, Mexicans and Blacks, who are usually portrayed as untrustworthy, childlike and needing protection, dishonest and amoral - or worse - or simply as background decorations. There is even a short section on Black B westerns, from which only one "star" emerged, Herb Jeffries, the singing "Bronze Buckaroo." About these, McGillis says -

"The absence of overt sexuality in the majority of B westerns with white heroes is thrown into relief by the brief series of black westerns made in the late 1930s with Herbert Jeffries. 'Two Gun Man from Harlem' (1940) is an amazing black western that differs from the white films in its overt sexuality. The plot turns on an adulterous love affair. The bad guys seduces the willing wife ... Caught in flagrante delicto, the bad guy shoots the woman's husband ..."

And the fact that "overt sexuality" is conspicuously absent from the white B westerns is the axis upon which most of McGillis's study turns. Any Front-Row Kid who's worth his salt knows that girls and kissing and all that mushy stuff were never an important part of any of those films. When women did intrude however briefly into the shoot-em-up important stuff, boos and rude raspberry noises were often heard from the youthful audiences. So McGillis examines in detail this odd phenomenon and how the cowboy hero and his buffoonish or pseudo-sissy sidekick would always ride off into the sunset at story's end, leaving the woman looking longingly after them. Years later, Rex Allen would himself comment wryly on this in a song called "The Last of the Silver Screen Cowboys," chuckling about how "the only one we kissed was our horse." McGillis goes a bit further in his look at these "sexless" cowboy heroes, looking closely at things like their standard garb, which included things like form-fitting clothes in leather or with fringe and glitter and fancy embroidery with color-coordinated silk scarves, high-heeled boots and big spurs, and even questionable accoutrements like bull-whips (Lash LaRue and Whip Wilson). He talks of how this type of clothing was even then - and still is - part of the gay and SM scene and speculates on clothes like cut-out leather or sheepskin chaps, which drew attention to and emphasized the crotch area of the wearer. There is much discussion of "camp" and "queerness" and "Otherness." But, to be fair, he also points out the importance of the "cowboy codes" espoused by many of these western stars, guides for young fans on how to be good Americans, good sons/daughters, and how to conduct themselves in general. I myself firmly believe that many valuable lessons about right and wrong were learned in those countless hours spent in darkened theaters, watching those horsemen. There was never any question in those films about who were the good guys and who were the baddies. McGillis goes into much more probing detail on these issues of sex and sexuality (or the lack of same) and good vs. evil in his extensive study of cowboy films, but I'm not going to. Although I found myself often wincing and grimacing in recognition of the truth of what he says about the mythic film creations who were my boyhood heroes, I'm still glad I read this book, simply because it is a well-thought out and carefully considered look at films which, for better or for worse, have become an integral part of the American (and, apparently, Canadian) consciousness. McGillis even briefly considers George W. Bush, who "aspires to be the cowboy."

While HE WAS SOME KIND OF A MAN will probably never be a bestseller, I can see it becoming a favorite text at conferences for film buffs and teachers of film and media studies. Despite my aforementioned wincing, I did stay up until nearly 3 AM to finish the book recently. And it also convinced me to try to find another copy of Horwitz's THEY WENT THATAWAY and read it again. Thanks, Rod, for this thoughtful and insightful look at an important part of my childhood.… (mehr)