Frontier Films for America250: On the Western Genre and Beyond with Matthew J. Franck

Summary

Podcast Summary:

Frontier Films for America250: On the Western Genre and Beyond with Matthew J. Franck

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Ryan Schinkel
Guest: Dr. Matthew J. Franck
Date: May 6, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this rich, cinematic episode, Ryan Schinkel speaks with Dr. Matthew J. Franck—political scientist, writer, and cinephile—about the enduring power and mythology of frontier films, especially the Western genre, in American culture. In the context of America’s 250th anniversary (America250) and the modern frontiers of space exploration, the conversation explores how movies construct national identity through tales of cowboys, explorers, and outcasts who define, defend, and are ultimately exiled from the communities they shape.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Dr. Franck’s Path to Princeton and the World of Film

• Journey to Princeton ([01:28]): Dr. Franck details his academic background, eventual move to Princeton, and how film is one of his lifelong passions, despite not being a trained critic or historian. He mentions his "Bookshelf" column at Public Discourse, often dedicated to films.
• Early Movie Magic ([02:30]): Franck shares a childhood story about discovering, as a college freshman, that "The Wizard of Oz" was actually in color—a transformative moment.

  “I blurted out, ‘Oh, my God, it’s in color.’ And everybody turned and looked at me like I had two heads.” ([03:14])

Cinematic Education: Epics, Adaptations, and the “Upgrade” of Genres

• Formative Films ([03:59]): “Seeing Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen was just revelatory...” Franck praises David Lean for transitioning from small-scale dramas to epic CinemaScope adventures, focusing on Lean’s evolution as a director.
• Novel to Screenplay Dynamics ([06:21]): Discusses how the adaptation of “The Bridge on the River Kwai” led to a stronger narrative by creating an American character as a bridge between British and American perspectives, adding depth and coherence.
• The Con Man Archetype ([08:09]): Franck and Schinkel discuss the con man as an American archetype, comparing William Holden’s character in "Bridge on the River Kwai" to Huck Finn and the persistent theme of identity reinvention on the frontier.

  “He’s a con man.” ([08:09])

Empire, Edges, and the Birth of the Western ([09:09])

• The conversation traces how Lean’s films (e.g. "Dr. Zhivago," "Lawrence of Arabia") and others tell stories at the shifting borders of dying empires, setting up the discussion for the Western as America’s mythic space at the edge of civilization.
• Revolutionary War on Film ([10:15], [21:45]): Noting the scarcity of Revolutionary and Civil War films versus the abundance of Westerns, Franck and Schinkel ask why the Western became America’s premier cinematic myth.

The Frontier Thesis: America’s Unique Border ([11:54], [13:33])

• Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis ([11:54]): Franck thoroughly explains Turner’s idea that America’s character was forged in the ever-moving frontier, a zone unlike the fixed borders of Europe—simultaneously a site of violence, cooperation, and endless self-reinvention.

  “In America… frontier came to mean something new. It meant that wild country to the west that was as yet unpeopled or unsettled by us…” ([13:39])

• The role of the frontier in assimilating immigrants and forming a democratizing ethos, albeit one marked by violence, exclusion, and myths of individual achievement ([16:24], [27:37]).

The Western: America’s Cinema of Self-Making ([17:22])

• Literary Lineage: From Cooper and Twain to Louis L’Amour and Cormac McCarthy, the frontier narrative pervades American fiction and film.
• Transformation of Archetypes ([17:22]): Western heroes—cowboys, sheriffs—morph into private detectives and modern lawmen in noir and action genres (e.g., Clint Eastwood, "Dirty Harry," "Die Hard").

  “The cowboy became the lawman who is a rough John Wayne figure brought in to deal with frontier justice style, some threat that is beyond the current bounds of what the law is able to do.” ([18:41])

The Western’s Legitimization and Star Power ([19:27], [21:34])

• John Wayne & John Ford: Explains how Ford elevated Wayne and the Western itself from B-movie filler to the quintessential American A-picture with "Stagecoach" (1939).

  “Stagecoach accomplished two things. It made a star out of John Wayne, and it made a respectable A picture subject out of the much derided horse opera, the Western.” ([20:47])

Rarity of Revolution and Civil War Epics ([21:45], [22:42], [23:06])

• Few Revolutionary War movies despite the wealth of stories; "Drums Along the Mohawk" highlighted as a rare exception. Modern TV and limited miniseries (“John Adams”) supplement, but the Civil War gets greater, though still limited, cinematic attention (“Gone with the Wind,” “Gettysburg,” etc.).
• Frontier as TV Staple: Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone series, and the word "frontier” in political rhetoric ("New Frontier," Star Trek’s "space: the final frontier.") ([24:01])

Race, Community, and Democratization on the Frontier ([27:17], [29:23])

• The West as a space of assimilation but also of exclusion and oppression—slaves, Mexicans, Chinese immigrants, and Native Americans each have complex histories and are sometimes treated empathetically (e.g., John Ford’s "Cheyenne Autumn"):

  “Cheyenne Autumn is a beautiful, elegiac film… It’s kind of a heartbreaking film in many ways. And Ford put his heart into it. It’s one of his last films.” ([29:30])

The Mythic Power and Ambivalence of the Western Hero

• Loner, Lawman, Outcast ([31:04], [35:02]): Westerns tell of men needed by civilization but excluded from it; this pattern repeats in John Wayne’s roles ("The Searchers," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance").

  “He’s the man outside civilization. He can’t come in.” ([36:19]) "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." ([39:54])

• The law is established by those who break it—heroic violence making possible the peace and order that then exiles the hero.

Westerns as Templates for Other Frontiers ([42:00])

• New frontiers: science, aviation, space. "The Right Stuff" and "Armageddon" are discussed as inheritors of the Western myth, with astronauts and cowboys fulfilling the same archetypal narrative.

  “All of this is part of the American explorer and frontiersman ethos that has really animated Americans since before there was an America.” ([44:10])

Other Frontier Films & Final Reflections ([47:10])

• Recommendations extend to films like "Lost Horizon," Malick’s "The New World," and those addressing adventure, cultural encounter, and the “mythic” experience of forging community at the boundaries of civilization.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Western Hero:
  “Together Ford and Wayne created the image of the Western hero that endures in the American imagination. That hero is tough, laconic, principled and duty bound unto death, but governed by a code that does not always coincide with the law… John Ford's America is a good deal like Ford himself. Loud, brawling, and hard charging… But it's true enough that in John Ford's films we will forever see something of ourselves.” ([48:46] - Dr. Franck, reading from his Public Discourse essay)

• On Cinematic Magic:
  “The magic of film… can, like Dorothy, transport you into a more colorful place.” ([03:22] - Franck)

• On the Loner’s Exile:
  “He’s the man outside civilization. He can’t come in.” ([36:19] - Franck, discussing John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in "The Searchers")

• On the Myth vs. Truth in History:
  “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” ([39:54] - Schinkel, quoting "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance")

• On the Ongoing Frontier Spirit:
  “We want to do it off planet. We want to do it on the moon, we want to do it on Mars. And space gives us a new and unprecedented perspective on God's creation.” ([45:13] - Franck)

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Selected Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:14 – Franck’s ‘Wizard of Oz’ color revelation
• 06:21 – “Bridge on the River Kwai” and adaptation choices
• 11:54 – Introduction to the American ‘frontier’ concept and Turner’s thesis
• 17:22 – Transition of Western archetypes to detective fiction and modern genres
• 19:27 – Ford and Wayne elevate the Western
• 29:23 – Discussing Ford’s sympathetic treatment of minorities in his films
• 36:19 – “The Searchers” and the exiled hero
• 39:54 – “Print the legend” and the myth-making impulse
• 44:10 – American frontier ethos in the space program
• 48:46 – Franck’s essay on John Ford and the enduring Western hero

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Conclusion

The episode intertwines film history, American myth-making, political philosophy, and nostalgia, revealing why Westerns—and the larger “frontier” narrative—remain central to American identity and self-understanding. Dr. Franck and host Schinkel illuminate how the Western evolves, reincarnates, and finds new life in everything from detective noir to space exploration, continually asking: who do we include in our legends, and at what cost to truth?

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Recommended Films Mentioned:

• The Searchers
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
• Stagecoach
• Cheyenne Autumn
• Lone Star
• The New World
• Lost Horizon
• The Right Stuff
• Armageddon

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For more, consult Dr. Franck’s essays at Public Discourse and check Madison’s Notes for full transcripts and episodes.

Transcript

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Welcome to the new books network.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Welcome to Madison's Notes, the official podcast of the James Madison Program in American ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. I'm your host, Ryan Schinkel. As we continue season five, I have with us now Dr. Matthew J. Frank as our guest, a senior contributing Fellow at Public Discourse, a visiting lecturer in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, as well as a senior Fellow at the Witherspoon Institute and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Radford University. He has written, edited and contributed to many books, including against the Imperial Judiciary from 1996, available for purchase online. Since I've known Professor Frank for many years, I did not learn until recently he was a fellow cinephile lover of movies. So I thought to have him on the podcast to discuss frontier films for America 250 in light of the country's 250th anniversary, as well as the recent Artemis 2 rocket. So, Dr. Frank, welcome to Madison's Notes.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Thanks very much, Ryan. It's great to be here with you. Please call me Matt. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Okay. So how did you get here to Princeton?

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

When I was a professor of Political Science at Radford University, I applied for a visiting fellowship in the James Madison program and got here for that academic year of 2008, 2009, my first extended sojourn in Princeton. I returned to Radford for the year that followed, but then came back permanently to Princeton in the summer of 2010 to join the staff of the Witherspoon Institute where I directed something called the center on Religion and the Constitution for a number of years. I joined the Madison program staff for a few years and then I retreated to part time work. Everything in my life is now a side gig, which is fun. So I write a monthly column called the Bookshelf, which I sometimes devote to movies instead of books. Public Discourse, which is the daily web zine of the Witherspoon Institute. I claim no expertise. I'm not a film historian, I'm not a professional critic, but I'm a lover of movies who has Turner Classic Movies permanently tuned in on his television at home.

[Ryan Schinkel]

How did you get into movies?

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Oh, I've always loved them since I was a kid. Of course, when I was a child in the 1960s and well into the 1970s, television in my parents house was black and white. And I remember this remarkable experience I had as a freshman in college when a lot of us students gathered into a dormitory lounge once to watch the wizard of Oz on a big screen like a 70s era projection TV kind of thing. I wasn't even used to it being brown monochrome. I was used to literal black and white gray. But all of a sudden, this brown monochrome Kansas in the wizard of Oz suddenly became the blazing color of Oz itself when her house lands there right after the tornado. I'd seen the movie numerous times as a child. It was always on network television certain times of the year. But I had never seen it in color. And so I blurted out, oh, my God, it's in color. And everybody turned and looked at me like I had two heads. What is the matter with you? But that experience captures for me the magic of film. The way it can, like Dorothy, transport you into a more colorful place.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Especially in a movie theater on a big shared screen. It's larger than life, heroic, mythic stature. I once heard movies put as a shared dream. You're having some experience where the logic is loosely defined. After wizard of Oz, what were some of the films that were part of your cinematic education?

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Seeing Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen was just revelatory to see what David Lean could do with men in the desert. There's that scene where Peter o' Toole has first gone from Cairo into the Arabian Peninsula. He's got a guide with him, and they've stopped at a well. While they're at the well, he begins to see this tiny dot shimmering in the distance. It comes a little closer and a little closer. His Arab guide has sharper vision in the desert than he does. He's more accustomed to figuring out the shapes of things in that environment. He realizes that it's a threat coming and goes running for a pistol. And before you're even able to get more than the barest outline of a man on a camel, a shot rings out and Lawrence's guide is killed. That's the entrance. Omar Sharif. That tracking shot of Sharif approaching on his camel is just magnificent. Films like that were important for me.

[Ryan Schinkel]

You saw that on the big screen.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

I did not first run. I was three when it first came out in theaters. But it was in a boutique movie house near my College in the 70s. I just remember the overwhelming impression of

[Ryan Schinkel]

it still extremely long.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Yeah, I know. Sadly, she's passed away now, but one of my dearest friends was in the movie theater with me. And she said to me afterwards, if I had to see one more bed of sand, I was going to go crazy. She thought it was too long. But I think it's a magnificent achievement. And the thing about Lean is, before he made Bridge on the River Kwai. There was no reason to believe that David Lean had it in him to do CinemaScope color epic adventure stories on the scale of those films. His great trio, Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago. You couldn't see that coming from Lean's work in the 40s, which is mostly much more intimate black and white films like Brief Encounter and this Happy Breed and Tony Dickens adaptations. Beautiful Dickens adaptation with Guinness. You know, he and Guinness had a love hate relationship. Sometimes Guinness would say, I will never work with that guy again. But then Lean would call him up and he'd do it. And of course he got the Oscar for River Kwai as Colonel Nicholson. It's based on a book by Pierre Boulle who also wrote Planet of the Apes, interestingly enough, and you have a

[Ryan Schinkel]

theory about turning books into films that something like Bridge and the River Kwai were fun but not great novels.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Boole's Bridge over the River Kwai, which became Bridge on the River Kwai in the film version. It's not as good as the movie and I explained this in my column. One of the serendipitous things about it was that River Kauai could not be greenlighted for a major Hollywood budget. Lean was stepping up to this huge canvas of Technicolor CinemaScope and the only way he could get the movie funded was to have an a status male lead Hollywood star in the movie with all the British actors like Guinness, that turned out to be William Holden. But the only way they could get William Holden was to rewrite a small and insignificant part. Originally one of the British officers in the novel. As this American officer in the novel, Major Shears, the character played by William Holden is just another member of the British commando team sent to destroy the bridge. But when they rewrote the Shears part, they gave it to an American who's in the camp, escapes from the camp and then returns to the camp. All of which plot elements in that character's story arc are missing from the novel. So Holden's character in the screenplay wound up stitching together the two halves of the story in a more coherent and interesting way. He becomes the bridge between the British commandos and and the British in the prison camp.

[Ryan Schinkel]

It's also the contrast between the American and the British officer.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

He's also a fraud. He's not actually an American naval officer. He assumed an officer's rank on his capture.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Socially mobile, assuming a new identity.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

He's a con man.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Paul Cantor has a great essay on Huck Finn, where he talks about the con men and how it's an extremely American archetype.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Right? It's very American.

[Ryan Schinkel]

He's moving his way up by taking on a new identity. And the American officer, he's forced against his own desire into having to fight a heroic situation with swiftness and even devotion. While that's happening, Alec Guinness, who has the more old school patriotism and sense of king and country, is both doing the things necessary to help his men and also helping the enemy build something.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Right. He builds their morale by building the bridge, which actually helps the Japanese war effort. And even his junior officers are at first mystified before they too throw themselves into it and get wrapped up in the project.

[Ryan Schinkel]

David Lean's films, he starts out with Dickens adaptations in the World War II films, but then he creates a quartet of great films dealing with the edges of empire, the ending of some and the beginning of others. So Bridge on the River Kwai, you mentioned Lawrence Arabian, Dr. Zhivago, but you also have Passage to India.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Ryan's Daughter is set in Ireland.

[Ryan Schinkel]

It's during World War I, I think,

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

so it stars Robert Mitchum. It's not as well known as the others, but as successful. It made it difficult for him to bounce back, which he finally did with Passage to India, which is based on a Forster story.

[Ryan Schinkel]

But the bridge in the Ruquai, it's the end of the British Empire and it's the beginning of the American Empire and Japan is in retreat. Lawrence of Arabia, it's the paradoxes that arise from the extent of empire and the Rudyard Kipling impulse to throw off your Englishness and localize with the indigenous

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

population, go native, as they say.

[Ryan Schinkel]

As they say in Dr. Zhivago, it's the end of the Tsar and then the rise of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Soviet Empire. So it's dealing with the fall of The Old Pre World 1 Empires and the rise of the Cold War empires. United States and the Soviets.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Yeah. And the Ireland of Ryan's Daughter is of course set during the waning days of that period when Whitehall still controlled all of Ireland. So maybe that too even fits the theme. It's the nearest part of British imperialism, but their empire over the Irish endured for centuries.

[Ryan Schinkel]

All of those films from David Lean deal with the kinds of heroes found at the edges of world empires. But we're here to talk about a very specific kind of hero. The cowboy more generally, also the American frontiersman. Now, the Western is not as prominent today as it was back Then around the mid century. But it was an extremely prolific genre that's dominated the American mind. Yet we have, as you once pointed out to me, very relatively few films in involving the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. The Western seems to be the most of the Canaan for portrayals of American history or self mythologizing. Can you tell me a bit about that and why you think that is?

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

I'm not sure why that is. I can say this. The American literature from which films are occasionally made of some note is full of frontier themes. If going back as far as James Fenimore Cooper with the Deerslayer prominently filmed many times. The Last of the Mohicans most recently with the Daniel Day Lewis, which is very fine. So Cooper is a frontier novelist. Twain, look, how does the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn end with Huck saying he's going to light out for the territories, right? He rejects civilization. He's going to go west. By the way, Twain had an extremely low opinion of Cooper and his essay on Fenimore. Cooper's Literary Offenses is one of the most hilarious essays you'll ever read. But it's probably not until the end of the 19th century that a kind of frontier mythos in literature really takes hold. So we were talking recently about the great frontier thesis of the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner.

[Ryan Schinkel]

The significance of the frontier in American history.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

1893, it was in Chicago. My great grandfather was there. So In July of 1893, the AHA, the American Historical association, had its meeting in Chicago during the Columbian Exposition. Turner gives this lecture there. It's then published by the aha. He's a professor at the time at the University of Wisconsin. And he developed the theme of this essay and a lot of subsequent essays which were then collected into a book. Turner was not a monocausal guy. He believed that historical events and experiences had multiple causes. It's all very complicated. However, what he wanted to bring to surface in this essay was an underappreciated cause or variable in the American experience. Something that is pretty decisive in shaping what America is and how it thinks of itself. And that's the frontier. Now that word frontier is interesting everywhere else. The word frontier, which comes to us from the French, means border or boundary between two nations. So you could speak of driving in France to the Swiss frontier, right? That would just be the border checkpoint. I'm at the frontier, honey. You call your wife and tell her, well, in America, bracketing of course, the presence of the tribes of Native Americans who were here when European settlers came from the settlers point of view, there was this vast wilderness to their west, peopled, yes, by tribes that they regarded as uncivilized savages, whom they sometimes brutally pushed aside and treated badly. All of that has to be taken

[Ryan Schinkel]

as red, fierce competition, but also sometimes in different places, a lot of cooperation.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

But here on this continent, frontier came to mean something new. It meant that wild country to the west that was as yet unpeopled or unsettled by us, by Europeans and the descendants of Europeans. And so the frontier was pushed westward, first to the fall line of the great rivers like the Hudson, the Delaware, the Susquehanna and the James River.

[Ryan Schinkel]

This would have been during the colonial times and after the Revolution.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

So John Marshall, the great Chief justice, grows up on the frontier, which is what? Fauquier county, an hour west of Washington D.C. and then explorers like Daniel Boone cross the Cumberland Gap and explore Kentucky. That's frontier. In Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, Kentucky is still the frontier. So the frontier keeps moving westward through the Northwest Territories, through the Old Southwest.

[Ryan Schinkel]

When de Tocqueville visits, my home state of Michigan, was the frontier.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Somewhere out west where I was in a log cabin reading Henry V for the first time.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Right. So Lincoln is born in Kentucky in a log cabin. It's in 1809. So the frontier moves ever westward. And what Turner does, he opens his essay with an observation in which he quotes the head of the Census Bureau who says following the 1890 census that essentially the frontier is now closed. There's no frontier line, no line that runs north to south west of which is the frontier. That's gone in 1890, says the census Bureau. And Turner picks up on this and says, well, that's very interesting. That should tell us something about a frontier experience that has been formative, a shaping influence on American life. Turner didn't speak of things this way, but you can take the concept all the way back to John Locke, who says in the Second Treatise that originally all the world was America, by which he means savage, pre civil condition, state of nature without what Locke would recognize as organized civil society, with governments and the rule of law and so forth. So Americans have this in our cultural experience, that we're a mobile people. We'll pick up and move to new frontiers when life makes demands on us or frustrates us. People came here as immigrants and moved immediately to the west. That's why you find these interesting pockets of Germans here and Swedes there all over the Middle west and the western states. My great grandfather A toddler from Germany in the years just before the Civil War, came to Michigan with his family and became a blacksmith.

[Ryan Schinkel]

The Shinkles also came pre Civil War and settled in Indiana. And then in Michigan, there were so many of them with kids who had the same first names that the local administrator took all the last names of the different families and changed the spelling in order to divide everyone.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

That's funny. It's a country where people acquire new identities as well as new lives, which

[Ryan Schinkel]

is what we're talking about with the con man, the self made man. Right. Someone who remakes himself like being born again.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

And of course, the frontier has given us so much of our literature. Not only Cooper and Twain, but later Owen Wister, Zane Gray, Louis Lamour. Louis Lamour. And that line of writers who come down to Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, and so on.

[Ryan Schinkel]

I could also add a local Detroit favorite, Elmore Leonard.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Okay.

[Ryan Schinkel]

And some of his western stories.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Yeah, that's right.

[Ryan Schinkel]

And much of his gangster and lawman novels, like Raylan Givens, are just modern westerns.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Sure. And eventually the cowboy or sheriff hero, the loner with a gun who brings rough justice to the uncivilized west, comes to be replicated in a new guise in the Sam Spade or the Philip Marlow of detective noir fiction.

[Ryan Schinkel]

And the outlaws become the gangsters. You mentioned that Clint Eastwood starts playing the man with no Name in the Sergio Leone trilogy and then immediately starts playing Dirty Harry in the Don Siegel films.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Yep, yep, absolutely. And of course, Eastwood memorably returns to the western in films like Pale Rider and others.

[Ryan Schinkel]

The Outlaw, Josie Wales, High Plains Drifter, and then Unforgiven, which unfortunately decimates the genre. Although it is a fantastic film. I remember there was a little inside joke that the Coen brothers had in the film. Hail Caesar.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

I love that movie.

[Ryan Schinkel]

In the film, character cowboy singer Roy Rogers figures, sing songs, gets the farm girl, knows how to lasso, and the studio is trying to turn him into sort of a straight lace, social comedy gentleman, and he just doesn't know how to say it. But then as George Clooney's character is kidnapped, he starts piecing together who was the person or the people behind it. And that's when he starts figuring things out. So the cowboy turns into the private tech almost by default. This is in Die hard, where John McClane calls himself Roy Rogers nickname on the radio.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Yippee ki yay.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Yes, we will not finish the rest of that sentence. But in that film, the cowboy became the lawman who is a rough John Wayne figure brought in to deal with frontier justice style, some threat that is beyond the current bounds of what the law is able to do.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Instead of a gun on his hip and a horse under, we have the detective with the gun in his shoulder holster and his car. You have Steve McQueen in bullets. You have Dirty Harry. Even John Wayne gets into the private eye genre late in his career. Now, let's think about that character whose name escapes me in Hail Caesar. The cowboy that they try to make over into a leading man in a more romantic contemporary film.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Hobie Doyle.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

There you go. So Hobie Doyle is the star of B pictures. He's a singing cowboy, a big star and a moneymaker for the studio. He's a Gene Autry or Roy Rogers type. From the dawn of Hollywood, in the silent era, countless Westerns had been made. But these are B pictures, B Westerns that the studio just churns out, a fairly low budget. These are not the main attraction at the cinema. And so when they are trying to transition him to a Laurent Lorenz production, they give him to the studio's most prestigious director to be in a glamorous picture in a tuxedo. What they're trying to do is lift this guy up from the B pictures to the A pictures. And interestingly enough, something similar was done for the Western genre and its leading man by our hero, John ford. Throughout the 1930s, Hollywood was continuing to make tons and tons of Westerns. But relatively rarely were those A pictures. They were generally B pictures shown before the main feature. They lasted usually no more than an hour in length, so about half the length of a main attraction. And one of the stars of multiple B Westerns in the 1930s was John Wayne, who had a big break in a 1930 movie directed by Raoul Walsh called the Big Trail. But it hadn't done well at the box office and Wayne had receded to B pictures, doing one after another. John Ford elevates him to star status with a single film in the banner year of 1939, Stagecoach. But Stagecoach accomplished two things. It made a star out of John Wayne, and it made a respectable A picture subject out of the much derided horse opera, the Western. From then on, not just Ford, but Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Michael Curtiz, William Wyler, and then, famously in the 1950s, Anthony Mann Budicher. And then Sam Peckinpah comes along. The Western becomes, in many ways, the American feature film par excellence.

[Ryan Schinkel]

It's an interesting question why we are so fixated on the Western as opposed to other films. There's A famous John Ford Revolutionary War film dealing with the frontier with Henry

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Fonda Drums along the Mohawk. It's based on a Walter Edmonds novel that sold pretty well in the 30s. Stars Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert. They live on the frontier of upstate New York in the revolutionary period.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Deals with the area where the Battle of Chattanooga will be fought.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Right. Chiefly off screen. There are some battles that Fonda and his fellow frontier villagers are involved in as militiamen in the revolution. But it is interesting how not very many notable films have been made about the American Revolution. Here we are about to celebrate the semi quincentennial and Ken Burns has recently done his American Revolution documentary series. People have criticisms of some of its flaws or spins on things and I share some of those criticisms. But overall I think it's very good. But the John Adams miniseries with Paul Giamatti as Adams is very well regarded.

[Ryan Schinkel]

It's a great series. Although one problem in it is when they're showing the debate and signing of the Declaration they keep going back and forth with the kids and the John Adams family because they're sick and that

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

they're using the leeches.

[Ryan Schinkel]

It's just total wrong contrast for sake of tone.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Yeah. So relatively little. 1776, the patriot. Mel Gibson's bloody extravaganza.

[Ryan Schinkel]

There's obviously Hamilton the Musical.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

There's an interesting late 50s entry into the American Revolution. Cinemaphiles. The Devil's Disciple. Based on a George Bernard Shaw play starring of all people, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas and Laurence Olivier. But it's a character study of the characters those three actors play that is not really dependent in a heavy way on the events in which they're involved. You could have picked it up and put it down in another wartime setting with ease.

[Ryan Schinkel]

It seems there's so much for the taking and so little of it has been used over a hundred years of filmmaking. There's usually some sort of TV series or a TV movie like Washington Crossing the Delaware. But there's so little of it done when you could have such a big budget.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Right. Frontiersmen of our early history made television appearances in series devoted to Davy Crockett and to Daniel King.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Of the Wild Frontier.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Yeah. Wild frontier. And that word frontier keeps coming up. Right. When John Kennedy ran for president he proclaimed a new frontier. When Star Trek went on the air in the late 60s, space was said to be the final frontier. So Americans have had this frontier thing going a long time. But the movies thrive on spectacle, conflict, violence. The depiction of strong passions in people appeals to our sense of justice and injustice. And so the frontier gives us lots of ready material for that. And so of course do war pictures, which does make it interesting that the American Revolution as one of America's longest wars and the one that made us a country, has had relatively little cinematic attention.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Same with the Civil War to a certain degree. Obviously. There's Gettysburg with Martin Sheen and there's

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Gone with the Wind, the Red Badge of Courage with Audie Murphy. I find John Huston a little more

[Ryan Schinkel]

than the Revolution, but not as much compared to the Westerns, which gets reinvented like every couple decades.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Not at all compared to the Westerns. And then of course, the Great War picture period for Americans is from the 40s through the 60s with Second World War film. The studio system of Hollywood was large and well established. It was the center of world cinema. With all apologies to the great directors of Europe.

[Ryan Schinkel]

The blockbuster was invented here, Technicolor was invented here. The best and highest talent could create crowd pleasing features. And once in a while you'd have something artistically innovative.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

But what happened? Of course, the Second World War was an all hands on deck mobilization of the whole society. And Hollywood enthusiastically embraced this. The whole array of studios, all of the big studios, went in for patriotic gung ho support of the war effort. Directors, actors.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Frank Capra's why We Fight series, which earned the Pentagon its one Oscar.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

John Ford was wounded at Midway filming the Japanese attack.

[Ryan Schinkel]

The serendipity of filmmaking, right?

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

His superiors sent him there fearing and half expecting that a Japanese attack would be made on it. So they knew something Ford didn't know. But he was just going around the island filming the troops in the tranquil days before the attack. And then all the warning klaxons started to sound and suddenly there he was in the thick of the war and he got a Purple Heart for it.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Great documentaries were made involving World War II, but there was a lack of great feature fictional portrayals that only happened after the war. They were Expendable by John Ford as an example, or to deal with the self mythologizing, Audie Murphy's To Hell and Back, right, plays himself. It's Buffalo Bill writing his autobiography. And as the west is still happening, he starts portraying it. Before the Western as a fictional genre, it probably existed in the autobiographies. So Davy Crockett's autobiography, Kit Carson's autobiography, to hype on the Western, specifically, Turner has an interesting point. That the frontier was able to immediately Americanize immigrants more than anything else. You're a Swede, you're a German, you're French, you're English, you're Irish, you're Chinese, whatever you happen to be.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

That was more fraught with difficulty. Agreed.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Many freed slaves went out West.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Right.

[Ryan Schinkel]

The point is, when you're out there, the conditions individualize you. They cut you off from whatever is your demographic extraction and they force you in a similar environment. That has a very formative effect. It's almost like you're going to Marine boot camp.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Turner posits a democratizing influence to the frontier. And there's much to be said for it, although we don't want to overdo it too much.

[Ryan Schinkel]

But the importance is that Americans believe in this kind of thing. It's not exactly by your bootstraps. It's obviously communal efforts.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Right? And when immigrants and others and migrants from the east get to the west, the question before them is, can they do the work and make a contribution to collective survival of the budding communities that they're planting out there? The towns they're building, the communities, the farms they're busting sod for, or the range that they're pasturing their cattle on. Can they do the work and survive? And if they can prove themselves, that suffices. Okay, so there is a democratizing ethos to it. But we can't sugarcoat the fact that the racism is still a factor. Yes, emancipated slaves make their way westward, but many of them face great difficulties of the bigotry of whites. The white Latino American Mexican relationship continues to be a very difficult one. In places like Texas, where the border had moved over the course of war, vast parts of what had once been Mexico were now part of the United States. Hispanics, Mexican Americans are left behind and the Chinese are treated terribly as ill paid, ill fed coolies. Then, of course, by the Chinese Exclusion act of the 1880s, statutorily prevented from becoming citizens by naturalization.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Something you point out though, is that a Western director like John Ford is still able to look at these ambiguities and take what is these different minority groups and value the heroism in each of their examples. And that becomes, through the storytelling, the inheritance of all Americans.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

And it's a bum rap on Ford that he makes stereotypically anti Native American film.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Look at Cheyenne Autumn.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Cheyenne Autumn is a beautiful, elegiac film about what becomes of a tribe of Native Americans who. Who are driven from pillar to post in the dead of winter to be planted on a reservation somewhere that is strange to them. It's kind of a heartbreaking film in many ways. And Ford put His heart into it. It's one of his last films. It's about 1964 stars Richard Widmark, notably

[Ryan Schinkel]

after the manor shot of Liberty Valance, where he's making westerns that are somewhat complicating the picture of the more straightforward heroic westerns that he had been making before. But if you look at they Were Expendable or the Searchers, he was always dealing with the complexities of the heroic portrayals that he was engaging in.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

And Ford had an interest in beleaguered peoples, you might say the Irish, for example. The Irish. His own Irish. Right. John Ford won the best director Oscar four times. None of the films for which he won were westerns.

[Ryan Schinkel]

How Green Was My Valley How Green Was My Valley?

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Welsh coal miners under the thumb of English coal mine owners.

[Ryan Schinkel]

The quiet man in 1952.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

The quiet man is his love note to Ireland. But the first movie in which he won a best director Oscar was a much darker movie about Irish life called the Informer, which is about a man who betrays his fellow Irish Republicans to the British authorities. A lovely performance by the great character actor in the ford stable, Victor McLaughlin.

[Ryan Schinkel]

The John Ford Stock Company, it was called, where he. The same actors, the same crew.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Ward Bond, Barry Fitzgerald, Ben Johnson, Harry

[Ryan Schinkel]

Carey Jr. To finish off dealing with why the western fascinates us. It seems that those harsh conditions create a kind of vicarious way of living out the idea of heroism. It's something in which the harsh justice, the passions, the violence, the spectacle bring out a situation in which greater nobility is required to survive.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Sure. And some of it is just the bigness of the West. Right.

[Ryan Schinkel]

The mythic stature of it.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

The incredible wide open spaces of it all.

[Ryan Schinkel]

You think like the early films of Terrence Malick.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Yeah. Gregory Peck in the Big country, for instance. Or think of the expansive vistas even in a dark Coen Brothers film like no country for Old Men, Fargo or True Grit. Yeah. Last night I watched a film I'd never seen before. John Sales film called Lone Star with Chris Cooper. Very highly recommended. It's set in the present day, in the year that it was made, 1996. It's modern day 1990s Texas. Chris Cooper plays a small town sheriff in county on the Rio Grande River. The border with Mexico. And there's a nearby army post. The colonel who's commanding that army post is a black man. Most of the town, most of the county is Hispanics, Mexican Americans. There's constant crossings of the border by illegal immigrants coming into the United States. But the story fits The Western template in so many ways. You've got the lonely sheriff in pursuit of justice. You've got a life lived violently on the dirt plains of West Texas. You've got all the racial conflict of three races meeting in the same community and conflagrations erupting between them. The Mexicans, the blacks and the whites. No prominent Native American roles. But of course, the Mexicans are mestizos. Right. So they stand in as well for the Indians. But it's a very affecting film. It has some of the noirish aspects of a detective story because the sheriff is trying to figure out an old mystery when a skeleton is unearthed in the desert.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Western noir.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Yeah, it's Western noir. It's also a sort of a socially conscious message picture about the encounters of cultures on the frontier.

[Ryan Schinkel]

On that note, Ben Franklin once wrote about the very known phenomenon that goes all the way back to colonial times. If someone got kidnapped by an Indian tribe once, later freed by their relatives, they would go immediately. At the first chance they get back to the tribe. It was impossible for them to stay among European civilization.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

And it may be that people simply long to be with those with whom they feel an authentic cultural affinity. And if you've been kidnapped as a child and raised by the Indians, that may simply feel like home to you. The encounter of the cultures and the assimilation of members of each race with the community of the other is also a recurring theme in some of our films. Right. So Last of the Mohicans. Hawkeye is raised by the Mohicans. There's example one, Cooper gives us a man raised by the Native Americans. Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man, Dances With Wolves is another example.

[Ryan Schinkel]

There's a kind of elegy for this lost way of life. As if, is there a way that the Western settlement could have been done in which Native life was still preserved? There's also the sense of isolation. Everyone was a man for himself. But then you have the music man with all the little local platoons marshalling together in the small town. That is what you're trying to recreate for yourselves. Western films replay the rebuilding and how we envision what America truly is.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

That's the state of nature. Social contract theme is a useful one for understanding the American Western, our country's self, understanding of its character. But look at some of the Westerns we've already mentioned, like the Searchers and the man who Shot Liberty Valance. In both of those films, John Wayne plays a man who is indispensable to the taming of the West. In the Searchers he rescues his niece, Natalie Wood, who has been kidnapped by the Indians and been their captive and made a part of their community for several years by the time he finds her. But at the end of the Searchers, in that beautiful closing scene, when young Natalie Wood is reunited with what remains of her family and community, really her whole family is gone except for her uncle Ethan, John Wayne. But she's adopted into the loving arms of neighbors at the end of the film on her return home. And what's literally the last shot of the film before the credits roll, the front door of the cabin, which from the interior closes and the screen goes dark. And on the outside of the door is John Wayne. He's the man outside civilization. He can't come in.

[Ryan Schinkel]

It's the greatest closing shot in film history.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

He has lived a violent life and he has separated himself from decent, polite society. In the man who Shot Liberty Valance, it's much the same. He's the man who shot Liberty Valance. Spoiler alert. It's not Jimmy Stewart who killed him, right? It's from the alleyway with a Winchester rifle. It was Wayne who kills Liberty Valance, an act attributed to Jimmy Stewart's character, which makes him a hero, which makes him the champion of statehood for the territory, which makes him the long serving first senator of the new state, the man whose name everyone knows, and John Wayne's character, the indispensable man of violence. Jimmy Stewart playing a lawyer who's literally bringing the rule of law to the community, right? John Wayne is the gunman himself, borderline lawless, who is indispensable to taming this frontier, but can't assimilate into the decent, polite society.

[Ryan Schinkel]

To delve into these two films, in the Searchers, John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, and he's a former officer in the Civil War.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

He was Confederate cavalryman.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Confederate cavalryman. Anytime he's in any domestic situation, whether he's coming home to his brother's family, whether he's interrupting a wedding, there's always someone who is like, why are you here? They're always looking a little askance. His presence, even if explicitly welcomed, is somehow creating tension. Because he is a rough and ready guy.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

He's a hard and menacing figure.

[Ryan Schinkel]

He is not an exile, but the servant of the domestic sphere and eventually of the town that will grow from it. But he cannot partake of it. He must defend it on the outside. But that means he has to do dirty business. His hands are bloodied. He can't just wash them clean like Pilate. He has to protect civilization but has to engage in things uncouth for civilized people. He does show animus towards specific tribes based on what they did to his family. He also does show respect for his rivals. Almost as if both of the one native he's hunting who's kidnapped his niece need. This memetic rivalry is something Rene Girard would understand. They hate each other, but they actually need each other.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

They have a very tense face to face encounter in the Indian chief's teepee in which it becomes quite clear that each one understands who the other is and what their conflict is about. And it's really extraordinary. Jeffrey Hunter actually get out of there alive. Wayne played this figure in a number of westerns.

[Ryan Schinkel]

It's his ur character.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

His best roles were as the hard man whose place in polite society is deeply in question. So even in his Cavalry trilogy pictures, Ford Apache, she Wore a Yellow Ribbon in Rio Grande.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Even in the Quiet Man, a little bit just as a former boxer.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Yeah, he's a man out of place. You see it as well in his great performance in Red river for Howard Hawks, the film in which John Ford, after seeing proclaimed that he had discovered that Wayne could really act after all that Hawks had pulled a performance out of John Wayne that Ford wasn't sure he had in him. And then of course, he got even more out of him in the Searchers.

[Ryan Schinkel]

It's a heroic type that we both look askance at. The PI the private eye detective who's always being taken into custody by the local district attorney. You're not allowed to solve this case.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

You notice that the noir private detective never has a stable family life either. He too is a loner, often an

[Ryan Schinkel]

alcoholic who has to learn how to get over his alcoholism by taking on a case again. At the end of the man who Shot Liberty Valance, Jimmy Stewart is at John Wayne's funeral telling all the supporters that John Wayne, the lawman who taught him this lawyer how to use a gun, later told him, I shot Liberty Valance. They rip up their notes. The main editor explains, this is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. The rule of the law has replaced the rule of the gun. Once the railroad comes, civilization is complete and the west has been killed off. Once John Wayne's character realizes his role is no longer needed, this noble lie has to be put forward. And he's lost the love of his life to the lawyer, the great Vera Miles. He then burns down his own house. This elegy of the old west, this old rose that's now gone but that noble lie. That's the Western being told. John Ford said the noble lie.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Print.

[Ryan Schinkel]

The legend was based on a love of country. Do you agree with it? In Fort Apache and Manishot, Liberty Valance. Would you have printed the legend or would you have gone with the truth?

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Oh, my.

[Ryan Schinkel]

As a philosopher.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Oh, that's a tough question. In Fort Apache again, spoiler alert for the great John Ford film. Henry Fonda's character, who's based strongly on George Armstrong Custer, dies at the hands of Indians in an attack very much like Little Bighorn. Of course, the point of the story is he's trapped in a tragic end of his own making. His own folly did him in. And John Wayne, who succeeds him as the commander of this frontier army post, knows it full well. But he tolerates and even does his part to advance the legend that Fonda died heroically without a stain on his character or on his record as a military tactician with some acumen. But, of course, what he lacked entirely was the tactical acumen to keep himself alive. So what would I have done? I don't have to make that choice, fortunately. But I respect the choice that Ford's John Wayne makes and that Jimmy Stewart and the newspaper editor make in the man who Shot Liberty Valance.

[Ryan Schinkel]

But the Western ethos gets channeled into other things. So Frederick Jackson Turner will talk about how agrarianism, science, technology are the things that are going to channel the future. It wasn't so much the Western continuance that the frontiers expanded. So the 1983 film the Wright Stuff starts out with Chuck Yeager on horseback. It's basically a bunch of fighter pilots taking jets as high and as fast as they can, decimating the planes. And the space program is continuing, going from the stratosphere to the atomic. In a recent film like Oppenheimer, J. Robert Oppenheimer's always going on horseback. Out in the west, the Manhattan Project takes place out in the desert. A bunch of scientists creating a new town for themselves in Los Alamos and building the atomic bomb. So this is something that's continued also, I think you once mentioned by the. In terms of space Westerns, in Dr. Strangelove, when the bomb's going down, the guy on the bomb, Slim Pickens, is

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

waving his cowboy hat, yelling Yee haw. As he falls to his death.

[Ryan Schinkel]

If you had to come up with a new frontier film, what are some of your favorites?

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Oh, goodness, what was that Bruce Willis film in which a bunch of mining engineers.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Armageddon.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Armageddon. Completely implausible and absurd premise. That somehow works. And it's movie logic. They improvise their way to exploding an asteroid that's threatening to collide with the Earth and destroy all life on the planet. But they have to send up these guys who are just cowboying it. Right? They're improvising it on the fly, rather than professional astronaut scientists. The whole Star Trek genre, which I think has exhausted itself on television and played itself out in multiple series. Wrath of Khan and had a spotty run in the movies. But it's not accidental at all that Gene Roddenberry had William Shatner from episode one of the original Star Trek intoning over the opening credits, space, the final frontier. Right. And we're going to go splitting the infinitive, which H.W. fowler says is okay. We're going to boldly go where no man has gone before. Obviously. Other nations of the Earth without the American frontier experience. Exactly. That are rivals and competitors in the space race of the 60s and the present. And the present day. Russia in the 60s, China today. But for Americans, the whole enterprise of space exploration and going back to the moon now, as the Artemis Project intends to do, ultimately, as Elon Musk wants to do, colonizing Mars. All of this is part of the American explorer and frontiersman ethos that has really animated Americans since before there was an America. We are in many ways the heirs of Columbus and Vespucci and Cabot and all these other explorers and the nameless

[Ryan Schinkel]

people who went down almost like out of George Eliot. And these hidden lives in unmarked graves who helped build this country.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Exactly.

[Ryan Schinkel]

From all across the world, from all

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

different continents, want to do it off planet. We want to do it on the moon, we want to do it on Mars. And space gives us a new and unprecedented perspective on God's creation. Any of us who have lived through cataclysmic moments in American history have the memory of those days burned on our brains. Any Israeli will remember October 7, 2023. Any American will remember 9, 11, if he was of age, to have that in his memory to this day. From now, almost 25 years ago, I'm old enough to remember the funeral of John F. Kennedy. But I'll tell you, when I was 10 years old, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. And I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when that came on the television. Just as tragic cataclysms, catastrophes stick in our mind if we were around when they happened. Pearl harbor for my dad's generation, 9, 11 for mine, so too, but on rarer occasions, landmark positive moments, moments of awe and wonder by which we are simply overcome with amazement that the human being has been able to do this thing. That's what landing on the moon felt like in July of 1969. And most days I'm glase about the whole space program. But there are times when I think really going back to the moon, maybe planting a permanent human settlement there of some kind. Yes, A rotating population, but people actually living on the moon. That is so cool. And would be such a landmark moment for the human species.

[Ryan Schinkel]

It's a collective victory. Yep. What are some frontier films besides the westerns that you would recommend? Frontier, Very generally defined.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Yeah, that's interesting. The sort of encounter of adventurers with other cultures far from home is always of interest. Right. It's always a meaty subject. So in the 1930s, Gary Cooper made a film in which he starred as Marco Polo going to China. Frank Capra directed a movie of the very short novella of James Hilton. Lost Horizons is a film that was nearly lost and has been reassembled by post production recovery and restoration. Lost Horizons is a film about an altogether mythical place up in the Himalayas of Tibet or Nepal, where perfectly peaceful culture exists in which people live for extraordinary lengths of time, in some cases for centuries. And a man who discovers that culture and then must leave it sacrifices everything to return to it.

[Ryan Schinkel]

It's always told off screen, but it feels so heroic. By the way, I will recommend the Terrence Malicks 2005 film. The new World to everyone is a frontier film. When John Smith and the Virginians are about to arrive, the beginning of Wagner's Der Nibelung Overture, where it's the awakening of the gods is playing. It's about America. Pocahontas is this stuck between the love of John Smith, who is always looking for the West Indies. John Ralph, who's more like a Wendell Berry figure, always trying to plant and create to close things out. Would you be willing to read a section from your essay on John Ford in Public Discourse? Yes.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

What I wrote a few years ago by John Ford was this. Together Ford and Wayne created the image of the western hero that endures in the American imagination. That hero is tough, laconic, principled and duty bound unto death, but governed by a code that does not always coincide with the law. He is loyal to friends, but capable of getting along with very few of them. Gallant to women, but no fool for them, and capable of lethal violence for the sake of any of these loves that govern his heart. John Ford's America is a good deal like Ford himself. Loud, brawling, and hard charging. Ford's Americans are also honorable, self sacrificing and faithful to their promises. That's not the whole truth about America, not by a long shot. But it's true enough that in John Ford's films we will forever see something of ourselves.

[Ryan Schinkel]

And with that, we shall close. Matt, thank you for joining us on Madison's Notes.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

You're welcome, Ryan.

[Ryan Schinkel]

Pleasure to be here and to everyone. A happy America. 250 A transcript for this interview will be made available on the new Madison's Notes substack page, along with a copy of the audio recording. If you desire further Madison's Notes content, please check our episode catalog and subscribe to receive future ones. We are always grateful for any likes and positive ratings. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time on the Madison's Notes podcast.

[Dr. Matthew J. Frank]

Sam.