MB Sue Matheson "The West-Hardboiled: Adaptations of Film Noir Elements, Existentialism and Ethics in John Wayne Westerns"

The West Hardboiled: Adaptations of Film Noir Elements, Existentialism, and Ethics in John Wayne's Westerns, by Sue Matheson was a primarily about the different ways that John Wayne films are presented over time. The way that the films integrate "20th century preoccupations and attitudes into the 1880s" is through the film technique known as"noir elements".(890) Matheson states that noir elements is "the connection between characters and milieu is extremely important because states of the inner world, the mind and emotions, are transmitted by expressionist techniques of exaggerated or distorted representations of the outer world"(890).

Wayne films from the late 50s to 60s are a great examples of Mathesons point that the time period that the films were shot affected the way the film was presented. After World War 2 the general American public was conservative. John Wayne films like, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, El Dorado, The War Wagon, and Hondo, used the elements of a "conservative status quo" to "reflect the postwar disillusionment and realism characteristic of the 20th century"(891). Matheson felt that after Hiroshima "the Western culture, lost the last vestige of its innocence." As further stated "the pervasive corruption, a seminal characteristic of noir sensibility, is also the basic characterization in Wayne's Westerns.

The image of John Wayne in these post war films also changed. His "persona is an antisocial loner who functions in a world preoccupied with sociopaths a Hobbesian wilderness where life is generally nasty, brutish, and short"(892). Wayne as Matheson explains in the introduction is not necessarily a loner however. His hardboiled nature however never made him less ideal."Richard Nixon believed that his country's domestic problems could be straightened out if the American people would only model their behavior on Wayne's performance in Chisum"(888). Similar to Nixon, songwriters and war heroes viewed "the Duke as an icon of American Manhood"(888).

Matheson's article focuses on the point that the majority of the films of the great John Wayne that people enjoy are enjoyable because of the film noir that they were shot in. Matheson's point that the time period of the films production ultimately changed the style of how the characters acted and what the overall mood was.