Real Men Don’t Cry, or What Happened to the Western, Anyhow?

Real Men Don’t Cry, or What Happened to the Western, Anyhow?

Spring (14 hrs or more) | This course is completed

10 Hilton Field Road Hanover, NH 03755 United States

Founders Room

Repeat Course

4/5/2019-5/17/2019

9:00 AM-12:00 PM EDT on Fri

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$80.00

We will cinematically explore, in a variety of Westerns, certain masculine images constructed on experience and behavior codes which demand physical strength, determination,courage, and endurance. The traditional Westerns of John Ford, Howard Hawks, George Stevens, and others seem to have disappeared, only to be replaced by non-Western films which feature boy-hero comedies, superpower fantasies, and films featuring male actors in a man-child role or extended adolescence. In the 1953 movie Shane, child actor Brandon de Wilde calls out to departing Western hero Alan Ladd, “Shane! Come back!” The unspoken meaning seems to ask, “Teach us how to be men.”

Possible films to be screened include:
Stage Coach (1939, Ford)
High Noon (1952, Zinnemann)
The Searchers (1956, Ford)
Shane (1953, Stevens)
Oxbow Incident (1943, Wellman)
Red River (1948, Hawks)
High Plains Drifter (1972, Eastwood)

  • There are no required texts.
Watson, Don

While a student at the Universite de Poitiers, Don Watson discovered the French fascination with American Westerns. He also learned to appreciate the New Wave Cinema. He retired from teaching French and Latin at Hanover High School while he still had a sense of humor. In 1991, he started the Sister City Exchange program between Hanover and Joigny, France. He has an MA from the University of Chicago and an MLS from SUNY-Albany.