Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 131
Hollywood Cowboys and Confederates in Mexico
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“Cause this is our land, and you’re on it.” When John Henry counters with the
statement: “We are all Americans,” the Major answers: “And that’s the saddest
part of it.” Pride, the film implies, was the cause of an unnecessary battle and an
unnecessary war.
In addition, the film suggests that one cannot run away from the problems
caused by destructive pride. Mexico is not the place for discovering a new future
by escaping the past, but instead is the place where the problems of the past can be
repaired. Compromise, the film suggests, tempered by the strength of personal
honor, offers the best cure for this repair. It is the American way, the viewer under
stands, to a stronger American future.
This returns us to the question of the role of history in the historical motion
picture. I would propose that the facts of history are relatively unimportant in the
historical film (or in historical fiction, for that matter). Granted, the narrative de
tails of a remote time and place provide a sense of verisimilitude in the telling of a
story set in the past, but it is the human condition, the discussion of human values
and concerns, that is of paramount significance. Whether set at the end of the
American Civil War, or in Mexico during the reign of Maximilian and the Juarez
revolution, the message of the human condition in The Undefeated is greater than
time or place. The same message could, arguably, be told within the futuristic
confines of science fiction, or within the contemporary milieu of the detective
story, the horror story, or the romance story, but perhaps not quite as effectively.
The finest Westerns, after all. reveal the landscape of the mind and the frontier of
our emotions much better than any historical moment or geographical location.
The same is true with Southerns, such as The Undefeated (which, as the characters
return home at the film’s conclusion, first North then East, may actually be an
“Eastern,” but that’s a discussion best left for another time).
Michigan State University
Gary Hoppenstand
Notes
1
2
3.
4.
5.
Sicphcn Jiiy Gould. “ Jurassic Park." in Past Imperfect: History Aeeordin^ to the Movies, ed.
Mark C. Carnes (New York: Henry Holl Owl Book. 19%). 31.
George MaeDonald Fraser. The Hollywood History of the World: Prom One Million Years B.C. to
Apocalypse Now (New York: William Morrow. 1988). xi-xii.
John G. Caw elli. Adventure. Mystery, and Romance: Pornnila Stories as Art and Popular Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1976). 192.
Richard W. Elulaih. “The Historical Development of the Western," in The Popular Western:
Pssays Toward a Definition, eds. Richard W. Etulain and Michael T. Marsden (Bowling Green:
Bowling Green University Popular Press. 1974), 717-8.
Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones, "introduction," in The Western Stoiy: Pact. Piction, and
Myth, eds. Philip Durham and Everett L. Jones (News York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975),
1.