Back in the saddle: The return of the Western

The Western is back, again, this time with films from Russell Crowe and Brad Pitt. Andrew Gumbel examines why the genre can never be headed off at the pass

There is a moment, about halfway through the just-released hit Western 3:10 to Yuma, when the well-worn conventions of the genre – the cattle runs, the stagecoach hold-ups, the swinging saloon doors, the improbably alluring barmaids, the psychotic tobacco-chewing gunslingers, and the threat of the gallows at the end of a newly constructed railroad line – fall away to reveal something more unusual and groundbreaking.

The main character, an unaccountably charming robbery-gang ringleader played by Russell Crowe, has just eluded the government agents and citizen volunteers who have captured him. But then he runs into a railroad crew building the next stretch of the Southern Pacific line through the Arizona desert, and his luck takes a turn for the worse.

One of the foremen recognises him as the man who murdered his brother, and determines to have his revenge. Crowe's character, Ben Wade, is fastened to a long pole, his hands secured behind his back and subjected to a strange form of torture involving a pair of electrodes and a foot-operated power-generating machine.

All around, we see the hauntingly browbeaten faces of Chinese workers pressed into something close to servitude – as they were in the real history of the West – to do the hard manual labour of blasting rocks, smoothing out a path and laying down the tracks. Wade's captors complain that the Chinese don't know how to work and suggest the place could really use some Negro labour.

Then the government party shows up. They try to get back their prisoner by asking nicely – to no avail. When they see him being tortured with the electrodes, one of them says weakly: "That's immoral!" The foreman simply laughs him off.

What happens next is one of the many pleasurable plot twists of 3:10 to Yuma and I don't intend to reveal it here. But the basic set-up, for anyone searching for contemporary meaning in a film set in that mythological period of American expansion into the farthest corners of the western wilderness, is already plain to see.

Wade is tagged as the bad guy, and yet we understand that the Southern Pacific's henchmen are immeasurably more inhuman and ruthless, and the government's men – who are beholden to the railroad barons in many ways – are morally ambiguous at best, not to say ineffectual and easily prone to corruption.

In all this, it's not hard to see an impassioned case against President Bush's exquisitely Manichean moral universe, divided into those who are with us – the good guys – and those who are with the terrorists – the baddies. The torture scene, although played lightheartedly, is an unmistakable reference to the sadistic US practices that emerged from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

And there is more. We still live in a world, after all, where American consumers benefit from cheap Chinese labour. It would be a mistake to read too much portentous political commentary into a film that strives, above all, to be rollicking good entertainment. The script never falters or stops for little lectures; it keeps the action rolling and, even more, keeps the psychological tension among the characters high at all times. But to anyone who wants to ask the question: what's the point of a Western now?; then these glancing references to our own morally confused world certainly provide some kind of answer.

The Chinese labourers and the torture scene were nowhere to be found in the original 1957 Hollywood version of 3:10 to Yuma – starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin – nor did they feature in the Elmore Leonard short story on which both films were based. This new movie opens up the world of the Old West considerably – not just to Iraq and China, but also to New Zealand, Crowe's home country, and to Wales, the birthplace of his co-star, Christian Bale.

The Western, in other words, has become about much more than America's obsession with itself, and its wild-frontier ethos. It has become a truly global genre, reflecting the entire world's obsession – with America, with its troubling moral ambiguity, with its propagation of both violence and belief in its essential virtue.

And the last couple of years have seen something that pops up in the entertainment business every decade or so – a revival of the Western – only this time it has a scope and an ambition unseen, arguably, since the great revisionist Westerns of the 1960s and 1970s like Little Big Man and McCabe and Mrs Miller.

Not all of it has come from America itself. Two years ago, an Australian film called The Proposition – directed by John Hillcoat and written by the lugubrious rock musician Nick Cave – essentially transplanted many of the archetypes of the American Western and shifted them to Australia, using the tale of two rival brothers as a window on to the development of an entire society. Naturally, Australia and the United States both have ample grounds for guilt over their treatment of native populations and their imposition of a European cultural model on a new continent.

Around the same time as The Proposition's release, the US cable channel HBO started airing its widely lauded drama series Deadwood, set in the rough, mud-spattered world of the Dakotas, and written by David Milch, previously responsible for NYPD Blue. Milch said at the time he was fascinated by the ways societies forge order out of utter chaos – again, not an inappropriate theme at a moment when the United States had just embarked on an imperial adventure to create a political system made in its own image in Iraq.

And there was, of course, the much-acclaimed gay Western, Brokeback Mountain, which dispensed with almost all the conventions of the genre – the loose women, certainly, but also the guns and the bad guys – to focus on the inner psychological layers of bad faith and betrayal that keep two kindred spirits from ever completely joining as one.

Now Hollywood is dishing out some more. 3:10 to Yuma is certainly the most obviously commercial venture. Even including that one railroad scene, it is essentially a gleeful romp, a film that takes great pleasure in citing every well-worn trope in Western film lore and in gorging itself on each and every one of them. Guns, cattle, an amiable doctor, a town drunk, Civil War veterans, a father pitted against his son and a husband against his wife – it has them all, and more besides.

No such commercial sensibility hangs over The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which has just come out in the United States and will have its British premiere at the London Film Festival next month. Written and VC directed by yet another non-American – the young New Zealand film-maker Andrew Dominik – it seems to take a certain perverse pleasure in its own plodding pace and dark, brooding, stilted tone.

Still, it has remarkably interesting things to say about the oft-told story of Jesse James – played here by Brad Pitt – and equally interesting things to add to the Western genre as a whole. James was the notorious Missouri bandit who, along with his brother Frank and a gang of other disaffected supporters of the South in the American Civil War, robbed trains and stagecoaches throughout the 1870s, only to be betrayed by his last remaining confidants, the Ford brothers Charlie and Bob, right at the moment when he was planning to give up his life of crime for good.

He was also one of the first big stars of the emerging popular press, and has never stopped being a subject for the movies. It is this aspect – the outlaw as celebrity – that the new film examines most closely. Pitt's own iconic celebrity status plays into this beautifully, of course. Bob Ford – compellingly played by Casey Affleck – comes across as a deranged fan who, having read every word ever written about James, first tries to befriend him, almost to the point of stalking him, then feels humiliated, turns against him and decides he can outdo him.

There are unfortunate similarities here to the plot of the children's animated movie The Incredibles, in which an ageing superhero is similarly stalked by an admiring kid who then turns nasty. But Assassination also follows on in a long tradition of meditation – in the movies as well as outside – on the parallel mythologies of the Wild West and of Hollywood itself.

We see, by the end of the film, that, although Jesse James was a feared and wanted man, nobody thanked Bob Ford for killing him. On the contrary: an attempt by the Ford brothers to cash in on their act by dramatising it on stage earned them only ridicule. Charlie committed suicide, and Bob ended up on the receiving end of a shotgun blast, fired by a man who was himself seeking fame as "the man who shot the man who shot Jesse James".

Clearly, celebrity was a pathological condition in America well over a century ago. One curious fact: the very first movie version of the Jesse James story, made in 1921, starred the bandit's son. Even the family wanted in on burnishing the myth.

The weird cult of the West has been previously explored in films as diverse as John Ford's elegaic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which a newspaper editor famously concludes it's better to print the legend than the truth, and Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill and the Indians, in which Bill Cody's travelling frontier show is seen as a metaphor for a 200-year-old country obsessed with turning its every experience into mindless entertainment. Our own age – of icons built up and knocked down, of demigods touted in magazines and gossip rags, of Lindsay and Britney – seems as good a time as any to revisit these themes, and give them a new twist.

It's not just opportunities for thematic depth that keeps Hollywood coming back for more and more Westerns, though. It is something much more basic to the whole business of making movies, and that is – in a phrase – the purity of the form. The Hollywood industry is hung up to the point of obsession on the idea of a three-act structure for screenplays.

Whole books have been written (most famously, by Robert McKee, who was sent up mercilessly in the Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jonze movie Adaptation, and by Syd Field) touting the virtues of exposition, development and resolution, all of it artfully spiced with plot twists to keep the audience spinning off in new directions. Producers as well as their professional readers judge scripts less on their writing than they do on their adherence to this structure.

The great thing about the Western is that it lends itself beautifully to this. The whole genre, arguably, is a brilliant blend of lowbrow popular culture and dramatic form dating back to Aristotle and the great Greek tragedians. Betrayal, revenge, catharsis – you can almost draw a straight line from Euripides observing Orestes' escent into madness all the way to John Wayne in The Searchers.

At the height of the studio system, when movie production truly was a sort of machine, the three-act Western was about as good as it got – think of Stagecoach, or Shane, or High Noon. Then, when the studio system started breaking up, the Western became more experimental in form. Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954) is structured in five acts rather than three.

The Sixties more or less killed the classic Western because the decade was all about breaking out of formal strictures and tearing up the rulebook. The world saw spaghetti Westerns – grandiose exercises in parody and knowing pastiche – and spoof Westerns like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Later, Hollywood made Westerns inspired both by the counter-culture and by the geopolitical shock of failure and moral compromise in Vietnam.

That revisionist strain is what has sustained the genre, intermittently, ever since. Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves (1990) chose to see things from the Indian point of view, sort of, and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992), a couple of years later, tried to put a new spin on the utility, or futility, of violence (although the ending is graced with a full-blown shoot-out anyway, which undermines the premise rather).

Some Westerns have refused to take themselves seriously. (3:10 to Yuma's most immediate forebear in that regard might be The Quick and The Dead (1995), starring Gene Hackman, Sharon Stone and Crowe again) Some have taken themselves very seriously indeed, like Jim Jarmusch's much admired but little-seen Dead Man, which is essentially a film about death.

Like crime movies, latter-day Westerns arguably work best when they are made with a sensitivity to big societal shifts – the ones that occurred in the late 19th century and the ones going on right here and now. There are as many stories in the Wild West as the horizons are wide and the landscapes varied. The conventions of the genre keep the story rooted in familiar territory for cinema-going audiences but also give them a frame of reference for taking on any new sort of storyline or theme.

And so 3:10 to Yuma, for all its tongue-in-cheek adherence to convention, manages to have a surprising amount to say about good, evil and how to distinguish between the two. "Even bad men love their mommas," Crowe's Ben Wade says at one point as he summarily dispatches one of his enemies. It's a perfect movie line, but it's also a window on to a surprisingly complex moral universe.

'3.10 to Yuma' is out now; 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford' is at the London Film Festival (www.lff.org.uk) on 19 and 21 October