The last time I went to a movie at a theatre in Bermuda, it was to see Michael Keaton in ‘Batman Returns’.

That must have been ten years ago. The reason it’s been so long is that the older I get, the less tolerance I seem to have for people who laugh or shriek in the wrong places.

I confess, though, that there was a time when that wasn’t true, when I shrieked as much, and I suppose as inappropriately, as anyone else did. During the first half of the 1950s, I rarely missed a junior show on Saturday mornings at the Island Theatre. I watched hundreds of movies there, and developed a life-long passion for them.

The middle seat in the front row downstairs was claimed in perpetuity by an older kid as his own. Early on in my movie-going career, some friends of his took the time to demonstrate to me, in fairly dramatic fashion, that the concept of first come, first served, meant nothing to them. I was left in no doubt that if I ever again tried to sit in his seat, my face would be altered in ways that would likely preclude any appearance in public ever again.

From then on, I sat a couple of rows back. But if it hadn’t been for him, you’d have been able to find me, any Saturday morning between 10.15 and 12.15, in the middle seat of the front row, as close to the action as you could get without climbing onto the stage.

Films in those days were shorter than they are now — they generally ran for an hour and 20 minutes, but there was a newsreel to watch, cartoons, a couple of previews and a chapter in whatever serial was running that day, so the show lasted for a couple of hours. It was pretty good value for a price of, as I remember, a shilling each.

It must have been a lot easier for the theatre’s management to find movies suitable for kids in those days than it would be now. There weren’t a lot of particularly adult, or particularly violent movies.

As I recall it, the hottest thing in Bermuda in the early ‘50s was Jane Russell, in a low-cut blouse, rolling around in the hay (really) with some cowpoke in a movie called ‘The Outlaw’ (it was made in the early ‘40s, but movies sometimes took a while to get here).

Cowboy movies were the big thing in Junior Shows. But not the kind of cowboy movie they make today. Mostly, these were low budget B-westerns, which in those days were as much of a Hollywood industry as horror movies are today. They were known as horse operas — the plots followed a formula, and the bad guys really did wear black hats.

Psychologically, the Old West of 40’s and 50’s movies was a pretty odd place.

The good guys were melancholy types. Life was a serious business, and to deal with it, they had to be strong and calm and wise and, of course, ride a horse flawlessly. That is not to say they were anything like normal.

Most of them were, let’s face it, unemployed. When the camera introduced us, they were as likely as anything else to be riding aimlessly into town, having a drink at the bar, or playing poker. They wore the same clothes from the beginning of the movie to the end, no matter how many days or months of plot time that represented.

But that did not mean that it would occur to you to think of them as unsuccessful, or poor. Worldly accomplishment, in the way we think of it today, played very much a secondary role in these B-Westerns. I’m not sure I can remember a cowboy hero who owned much more than his own horse. I certainly don’t remember one who owned a business.

The standard for judging good guys in westerns was their ability at gunplay. They had to be able to draw faster, and shoot straighter, than the bad guys. That was the skill that set them apart and made them the heroes they were. It set them above bankers, ranchers, preachers, presidents of chambers of commerce... even above the Sheriff, or the Marshall, especially if those officials suffered any deficiency in the gunplay department themselves.

Some of the west’s females worked in saloons, in which case the good guys could treat them as equals and be friends with them, but... they could never marry them. In those days, the morality of this kind of situation was very clear. Any woman who worked in a saloon had fallen from Grace and could not again be part of what might be described as polite society.

The women the good guys were allowed to marry were... well, soppy would be as good a word as any. They went to church, sometimes taught in the town school, wore long gingham dresses, rode in buckboards more often than on horseback, and kept wanting to stop the action — they were against all fighting and gunplay. Falling in love with the hero was inextricably mixed up with reforming him, getting him to hang up his guns and become (gag me with a Peacemaker) a successful member of the community.

This produced a strange dichotomy for the kids in the audience... the guns and his ability with them were the strength and validation of the hero, they were his manhood. How could you sympathise with someone who wanted to strip him of that, even if you knew that it would probably let him live his three score and ten, give his horse and his sidekick, if he had one, a better life, and ensure he could always afford a change of clothes?

Your Western heroine never mixed it up with the bad guys herself, even if kidnapped, as she often was. Very occasionally, one might condescend to load a rifle if the good guy was really in a corner (normally, this involved a large attacking force of ‘Injuns’ armed with that most cowardly of weapons, the flaming arrow), but that was acknowledged to be the exception, not the rule.

When the good guy won in the end, as he invariably did, and rode off into the sunset with his heroine, as he invariably did, happiness among the kids in the audience was tinged with a sense of loss and unfairness.

What to think about the Western heroine? Hmmm. For kids, this was a sissy conversation, not the kind you wanted to get involved in at all. However, I am prepared to venture an opinion that if conversations had been held, which I deny, the consensus among kids my age would have been that we would only marry a woman like that in an emergency. What we didn’t realise at the time was that it was a dilemma we would never face, because women like that didn’t really exist any more.

I said the plots of these horse operas had a sameness about them. The circumstances changed from movie to movie, but underneath, they were the same. The good guy fought, not so much for justice and right, although that was always the side he was on, but because he had to fight. Really, it was his honour he was defending, and for that reason, he was an absolutely invulnerable hero.

The American film critic, Robert Warshow, put it perfectly in an essay he wrote in the early ‘50s:

“When the gangster is killed, his whole life is shown to have been a mistake, but the image the Westerner seeks to maintain can be presented as clearly in defeat as in victory: he fights not for advantage and not for the right, but to state what he is, and he must live in a world which permits that statement.

“The Westerner is the last gentleman, and the movies which over and over again tell his story are probably the last art form in which the concept of honour retains its strength.”

As a thriving industry, Westerns died around 1955. At the same time, movie serials died, and the excellent name Buster Crabbe (he seemed to star in just about every one of them, whether the action was on the bottom of the ocean or the surface of the moon) disappeared from public consciousness. So did radio shows, like One Man’s Family, Our Miss Brooks, Jack Benny, The Shadow, Tales from the Crypt and Bold Venture, to name just a few that were aired in Bermuda.

There were lots of reasons — one of them was that during the Second World War, people lost their innocence. Those who had been overseas had experienced the terrible randomness of war and knew the black hat/white hat stuff was nonsense. In the war effort, women had participated directly in the work force... they had grown Rose the Riveter muscles of all kinds.

During the years after the war ended, it looked as though some elements of society wanted things to return to the way they had been... wanted women, for example, to lose the muscles and get back into their kitchens. It wasn’t going to happen, the top was off the box, as the various revolutions of the ‘60s were going to demonstrate in unmistakable fashion.

Movies that ignored the newfound facts of life, as these horse operas did, especially when you considered they were being shown against the stark ‘50s backdrop of the Cold War’s atomic gunfight, weren’t exactly ringing a lot of bells.

Also, costs skyrocketed after the war. Even though B-Westerns were sometimes shot in only a week, it became harder and harder to show a profit. Westerns were notoriously poorly-paid work. Stars like William Boyd and Gene Autry and Roy Rogers appeared at fairs or in circuses to supplement their incomes, or got their own radio shows. Those who could sing — Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Tex Ritter, Jimmy Wakely, Rex Allen and others — made country and western records.

And, of course, television changed the landscape altogether and forever.

Hollywood still tries to make good Westerns, and occasionally succeeds — ‘Dances with Wolves’ wasn’t bad, nor was Clint Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven’.

Jim Jarmusch made an odd, but worthwhile black and white Western, starring Johnny Depp, called ‘Dead Man’.

There were the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, of course, capped off by the best one he made, ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’, in which Henry Fonda, of all people in all roles, plays a very evil bad guy, in a black hat of course.

Sam Peckinpah made a couple of good ones — ‘Ride the High Country’, for example, or ‘The Wild Bunch’.

But, in the end, I gotta tell you, there isn’t anything like those old-time Junior Show Westerns. Now that’s a fact, as Gabby Hayes would have said, durn tootin’ it is.

gshorto[AT]ibl.bm.