Wyatt usurped.

• Author: Brooks, David

ONE OF THE odd features of travel through Russia is that people who dress like Chicago gangsters are perpetually telling you they are actually like Wyoming cowboys. In Smolensk, an oblast official who sported a Homburg, a black shirt and gold teeth once looked at me significantly and uttered the refrain that is constant in the former Soviet Union: "It's just like the Wild West here." He went on to describe the lawlessness of the place, and what he saw as his own rough efforts to tame his oblast, and make it the sort of place in which decent people could live.

It's interesting that so many Russians should associate their condition with that of the American pioneers. It's a long way from the Slav hinterland to Arizona, from Tolstoy to Tombstone. But this is the era of bourgeois triumphalism, and it is the American myths, and the American Western myth in particular, that the aspiring bourgeoisie identifies with. While European myths celebrate aristocratic virtues (King Arthur, Roland), the lawman of Western myth is dedicated to the rule of law, civic order, and peaceful homesteads. He, like the official in Smolensk and like the conscientious officials in troubled places all around the globe, is trying to establish bourgeois tranquillity in the midst of a Hobbesian state of nature.

The quintessential version of the law-man tale is John Ford's 1946 feature film My Darling Clementine. Henry Fonda stars as Wyatt Earp, a man whom fate has cast in the role of civilizer. As the movie opens, Earp is happily driving his heard of cattle to market, stopping at Tombstone just to get a beer and a shave. He's nearly killed by a stray bullet while getting lathered in the barber's chair and rises to find a town given over to drinking, corruption, and killing. He returns to camp to find that his cattle have been rustled and his younger brother killed. "What kind of town is this?" he asks incredulously through the first third of the movie.

"You're not going to deliver us from evil?" Doc Holliday asks Earp after he has taken over as marshal, intending to find his brother's murderers and tame Tombstone. Earp replies that it wouldn't be a bad idea.

Like many of the best Westerns, the movie is tightly focused on a central morality tale, told in real time (not condensed from events over months or years) and much of its power derives from Ford's clear, almost schematic vision of what it takes for a town to become civilized. One of Earp's first acts is to quiet some outlaws so that a traveling actor can recite Shakespeare (one of the movie's oddest moments has Victor Mature as the consumptive (!) Doc Holliday join in and deliver a heartfelt version of Hamlet's soliloquy). Earp also forces Holliday to revive his surgical skills, which he had abandoned when he left his Boston medical practice and became a degraded gambler out West. After Earp pacifies the town a bit, the citizens begin to erect a proper church--not a camp meeting, they emphasize--for proper worship. The movie closes with Earp's sweetheart, Clementine, watching her beau ride out of the now happy town. She's signed on to become the town's first schoolteacher, and to build the first classroom. Thus in short order Ford has presented us with the four horseman of civilization: art, science, religion, and education.

Earp's departure at the end of the movie reminds us of the central ambivalence that runs through many Westerns: the rough customers who build a bourgeois order may not actually be fit to live in it. The talents required to destroy the wicked sit uneasily in a domesticated world. This too is a lesson which may have some...