Guest Commentary
So you want to B a cowboy?
Mack Hall

For Father's Day the daughterperson gave me a tin box containing 12 of John Wayne's B westerns from the 1930s. 4Made on budgets of hundreds of dollars, these Depression-era yarns feature repetitive plots and plot devices, hokey dialogue, flimsy sets out back, and cheesy acting, and yet they remain great fun.

Highly structured, the B western's immutable characteristics are:

Saloons are strictly all-guy.

No problem is so subtle or so complicated that it can't be solved by the indiscriminate discharge of firearms by everyone in the immediate area.

All bankers wear black frock coats and black hats, are evil, and are in cahoots with the gang that is trying to steal the ranchers' land because there is a vein of gold that the ranchers don't know about.

Unless absolutely necessary for a plot device, six-shooters never need re-loading.

All jails have windows facing on an alley, convenient for whispered visits and escapes.

Horses never need care of any kind; you just park them out front and ignore them until you need them again.

Horses can run at full speed for hours at a time.

There is always a pass, as in: "They'll meet us at the pass" and "They'll meet you at the pass" and "I'll meet you at the pass" and "Meet me at the pass" and "The supply wagon is coming through the pass" and "The outlaws are blocking the pass."

There is exactly one young woman. She is almost always brunette and always spunky/feisty. Her elderly father or uncle always gets killed. She sticks a shotgun or rifle in the hero's stomach when she thinks he's the varmint, but when facing the real villains needs rescuing.

If there is an older woman, her sole purpose is to tell Paw or Unc to come into the house and leave them kids (meaning the hero and the spunky brunette) alone on the front porch at the end of the movie.

When a hero or a villain runs out of a building, there is always a horse - not necessarily his - just standing around waiting to be taken. If two men run out of a building there are always two horses - not necessarily theirs - waiting.

When the plot slows, one bunch of horsemen chase another bunch of horsemen for a few minutes, often around the same big rock several times, shooting pistols at each other.

Indians are rare in B westerns. The few you see suffer a remarkable inability to use prepositions or helping verbs.

Unless the bad guys have intercepted the supply wagon again, pistols, rifles, bullets, and dynamite are available for sale right next to the candy and the dresses down at the general store.

The hideout, the runaway stagecoach with the screaming maiden in need of rescuing, the quick draw, the showdown in Main Street, the dive off the cliff into the convenient body of water, fisticuffs, the leap onto the horse from the hayloft, the loyal if somewhat dim partner - all are stirred into a plot soup in varying proportions to make movies that in their artlessness make great art indeed.

Thanks, daughter-person; you've taken me back to the 1950s and Saturday afternoons at The Palace Theatre on Main Street.

Mack Hall is a resident of Kirbyville