Review of He Was Some Kind of a Man: Masculinities in the B Western by Roderick McGillis

Authors

• John M. Clum, Duke University

Date of this Version

Fall 2010

Document Type

Article

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly 30:4 (Fall 2010).

Comments

Copyright © 2010 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.

Abstract

It takes something of a masochist to watch close to two hundred B westerns, but Roderick McGillis claims to have done that in researching this book. For those of you who are not film history buffs, a B movie was a cheap, relatively short (sixty to seventy-five minutes), formulaic genre film made to be the second half of a double feature. A lot of B movies were westerns because they were cheap and popular, particularly with boys and young men. They had their own stars, many of whom moved on to television, which killed the B movie: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, William Boyd (Hopalong Cassidy), Bob Steele, and Johnny Mack Brown. John Wayne began in B westerns but graduated to the top of the bill in John Ford's Stagecoach. Like author Roderick McGillis, I remember when B westerns were a staple of early afternoon television programming on just about every local channel. I also recall realizing by the time I was ten that these films, though bearing different titles, were so limited by generic conventions they were sometimes hard to tell apart: white hats versus black hats, the same set and stock footage, the inevitable chase on horseback, the climactic fight between hero and villain. For McGillis, the nostalgia for a mythic, morally unambiguous American past communicated by these movies reinforces his own nostalgia for them as a crucial part of his boyhood.