The cowboy's last stand

The Western will not die or pass from mind, so long as any tourists driving in the real West stop at somewhere like Durango, Colorado, or Santa Fe, New Mexico, and cannot resist the temptation to buy a pair of Western boots and a cowboy hat, along with the Navajo jewellery. Back home, we may feel shy in our Stetson. The boots make too much noise on the hard floors. But we have not lost the childhood urge to put on cowboy clothes. We still rent old Westerns on DVD, and there are fond connoisseurs who have their top 10: pictures such as Red River; The Searchers; Run of the Arrow; Shane; The Naked Spur; Winchester 73; The Wild Bunch; My Darling Clementine; High Noon; and Once Upon a Time in the West.

They argue over whether some of those films should be replaced by The Man from Laramie, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid or The Gunfighter. But few of the aficionados reckon the Western is coming back. There has been little that has been good since the Seventies; and little that was true to the genre since the Fifties. In part, that's because the genre wore out. We had so many Westerns on the big screen and the small that everything became an absurd cliché - that's when people started making parody Westerns, satires on the form, films such as Blazing Saddles, Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and even the Leone classic, Once Upon a Time in the West, which half-understood the difficulty of taking Monument Valley seriously any longer.

The fatigue had other causes: there was our shame over the slaughter of Indians; the dismay at the discovery of how we had abused our own environment. In the age of feminism, there was less room for Westerns that kept the little woman at home, baking vittles for the man and ready with a chaste kiss when honour had been defended. We were also catching up with the way some of our heroes - Wyatt Earp is the classic case - were operators, gamblers, humbugs and minor rogues and not solemn suits for Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster and Kevin Costner to put on. There was a key Western of the early Sixties, John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which an uneasy equation of truth and legend emerged. Ford said, when the legend becomes the truth, print the legend. But historical candour, journalistic enquiry and a new, abashed view of heroes had taken their toll. We suspected that the West had been made by hustlers. So why trust the Western any more?

There are exceptions - three or four in a decade. Kevin Costner will not give up the view of himself against a Western horizon. Why should he, when he got a Best Picture award for Dances With Wolves? He starred in a ponderous Wyatt Earp film, too far from the truth to have modern credibility. And yet, just a few years ago, with Robert Duvall and Annette Bening, he made a delightful, modest, old-fashioned Western, Open Range, on that vexed issue of land rights, small farmers and big ranchers.

Far and away the most intriguing Western of 2006 is The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. This is a film directed by and starring the Texan actor Tommy Lee Jones. Of course, purists may object to Melquiades Estrada. Though set on the Mexican border, it is not a period film. Its time is today, and down there most men do still wear cowboy hats and boots. But the modernity allows the much-buried title character to be a Mexican, illegally in the US, brutally dispatched by a border guard and kept for burial by his loyal friend (played by Jones). In look and tone, it's more a Sam Peckinpah film, made in a rare, calm summer. But it's worth noting that the film is written by Guillermo Arriaga, the Mexican writer who wrote Amores Perros and 21 Grams - those are bleak pictures about the West now, and in particular about the unending racial friction that comes under the heading "the immigration problem".

The most fruitful thing about these films is not just that they show Americans and Mexicans working together, nor even that they address a constant topic in modern politics. It is, instead, the wisdom that they embody - that there is no need to lament the death of the Western if you cultivate an intelligent exploration of issues arising from a life in the West in the hundred years or so since the Western genre discreetly closed its books.

I have one outstanding example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. Here is a well-known American film, never identified as a Western, but which it seems to me is a fine example of paying attention to the real, ongoing history of the West. There is a water problem. An emerging town wants to be sure of getting enough. So rich and powerful men make a plot. They go into the wilds, into the mountains, and they effectively steal some of the nation's water and direct it to the emerging town. There is a good guy who finds out, and the big rancher nearly has him killed to shut him up. The film is called Chinatown. Its great villain, Noah Cross (played by John Huston) wears a cowboy hat a lot of the time.

I know, the orthodoxy says that Chinatown is a film noir, or a crime picture, or a study in the history of Los Angeles. But it is also a natural development of the Western, in that it discovers a personal and civic moral issue in the politics by which the natural resources of the area are to be used or exploited. Yes, Los Angeles is a modern city. But in the Thirties it was a glorified frontier town, fighting for its existence and its character. And just because LA is now huge and the flashpoint of so many immigration issues, and just because LA has a Latino mayor, we shouldn't be ignorant of its history. Or its future. California may soon have a Latino governor, and senators. Yet the current dispute over reforming US immigration laws is a racial stand-off nearly as blunt as the one over slavery. People of Latin and Asian ancestry are coming into the US at alarming rates - or alarming to some.

In addition, they are more likely to attain success or prosperity than those earlier minorities, the Indians and the blacks. So there is a dispute now between policies of amnesty (letting illegals become citizens) and putting up a wall to keep them out. How quickly we forget, the nation that rejoiced in that famous cowboy's exhortation,"Tear down that wall, Mr Gorbachev!" America is already fatally trapped. Many of the social systems of Los Angeles (domestic help, for example) could not function without Latin workers. Equally, the vast farm for fruit and vegetables that is the San Joaquin Valley could not exist without illegal (and cheap) labour. Try picking strawberries in 100 degrees!

There is a white America as unhappy about this social situation as it is silently opposed to black-white intermarriage. But here's the rub: just as the numbers predict more Latin representation in American politics, so it should promise more Latin voice in story-telling and film-making. In the past 20 years, Gregory Nava made two touching and sincere films - North and Mia Familia - about Latin peoples coming to live in California. But we are very close to a culture of Latins born and raised in southern California and Arizona and no longer ready to ask for sentimental favours. Of course, those with history (not too many in the US) will recall that not too long ago those places were Mexican.

There are several other obvious issues that emerge from any study of the West: water and land values, shifting from the infinite resources to precious and restricted commodities, and the money to be made out of them. Allied to that is the delicate balance of the environment and the almost certain crisis to be faced when global warming at last sinks in upon the American public. Petrol is now rising in cost in ways that will never be reversed and which will bring America into line with European countries. This could mean the collapse of Detroit, the first profound assault on a key American liberty (driving) and a subsequent change in political values.

The harsh imperatives of environment and energy could have a fascinating impact on another secret issue in the West: the clash between reason (or evidence) and fundamentalism. That's where Brokeback Mountain is so interesting, for it is a story in which two simple men in Wyoming stumble into a love affair where their own experience and needs are stifled by their ideological upbringing.

HBO has a fascinating new series, Big Love, that is the first serious attempt to deal with Mormonism. Bill Pullman plays a man with three wives and three families. That much is rare and comic. But the series promises to turn on the economic and political power of Mormonism in certain western states, and that extends as far as Nevada, the state in which America is most out of date and most hysterically ahead of modern times.

HBO's view of America is both enlightened and adventurous (it's worth stressing that the company has a number of British executives). They may be encouraged to pursue Big Love by the surprising impact of the series Deadwood. This came from an interesting but failed movie, Wild Bill, made in 1995 and starring Jeff Bridges as Wild Bill Hickok. As written and directed by Walter Hill (a surviving lover of the old Western), Wild Bill sought to explain that the legendary figure was a touching wreck in real life.

Despite real quality, Wild Bill went nowhere. Then Hill was persuaded to do a pilot for Deadwood in which the focus was shifted. The story no longer fixed on an icon (though he did appear briefly, under the guise of Keith Carradine). Instead, the series said, what was life-like in the real Deadwood as it struggled to move from a wide-open frontier town to a city?

Above all, this meant an attention to business, and the realisation that the frontier was defined far less by valiant lawmen and resolute guns-for-hire than by businessmen, willing to pay off the gunfighters and the legal system. So Deadwood is a story of a struggle for power in "cities" where you can't cross the street without battling the mud and the natural waste material left by the standard form of transportation, the horse. Indeed, a day may come when we have a throwback Western in which a plumbing genius is the real defender of liberty and honour (as well as the saver of lives).

Deadwood reeks of period detail and foul language. The latter is less easy to defend. Truth to tell, history suggests that amid violence, cruelty and exploitation, the 19th-century West was strangely God-fearing, and not much given to profanity. It's just that by today's tough standards we assume that the language was coarse and the sexual relations constant. Of course, the real history of medicine suggests something different. A lot of hoodlums in those days may have been shy and scared of the pox.

I hope this sketch of the real West is not alarming that part of you fond of Stetsons and six guns. There is no reason why other issues I'm talking about can't involve guns and hats, too. There is a natural inclination towards violent resolution in America that likes costume.

It may have taken 200 years for America to discover its real novelty, and it is to be found in the West, where outlawry once was natural and unstoppable - and was the breeding ground of the country. I do not mean to praise that, but it would be crazy to deny it or to miss the way in which the profiteering and exploitation so often rebuked in the classic Western actually triumphed in real life and fenced in space just as it tied to define local freedoms and spiritual values. So the ultimate revenge of Mexico on the US is no small matter.

Equally, there are those who see the Pacific rim as a battleground where Asian peoples will conquer America. The Chinese were once hi-jacked here to make railroads and be servants. But they are now dominating the Californian education system and they are vital forces in technology. Shoot-Out in Silicon Valley is still a likely title and topic for the next great Western - even if the shooting can be kept virtual.

The Western once was a tidy fable, and soon enough we felt the gap between that tidiness and the unruly energies of America. But that is no reason to decide that the old-fashioned morality of the Western is not worth applying in the very complex and troubled life of the West.

Tales from the Big Country: the Classic Westerns, National Film Theatre, from tomorrow, 020 7928 3232