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Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men and Cowboy Cinephilia

Critics love cowboys. More to the point: Male critics love cowboys. The contribution of female film critics and feminist film theory to scholarship on the Western is considerable, but the perception that this genre is in some sense “masculine” is nevertheless a recurring critical motif. Douglas Pye, for example, reminds us that the Western’s first critics were “relatively young, White male . . . critics and teachers . . . making peace with, as well as critical capital out of, a genre in which as boys in the postwar period they had a substantial emotional investment.”1 Martin Pumphrey, likewise, prefaces his discussion of the Western by informing his reader that “Beneath the discussion of texts . . . lies a personal imperative to examine some of the processes through which I myself learned masculinity.”2 These critics imply that masculine spectatorship—or, given the personal relationship to the genre both authors acknowledge, masculine cinephilia—can inspire a method of writing about the Western film and its interventions into social constructions of gender. Of course, there may be certain problems with using cinephilia as the lens for such an inquiry. Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier, for example, have argued that cinephilia (particularly in its French contexts) is marked by an ahistorical, individualist, and masculinist discourse, shortcomings that would prevent it from having much to say about gender as a social and historical process.3 Pye and Pumphrey, however, suggest a corrective to this tendency; even though they retain a (self-critical) masculinist love of film, they place the male love of the Western in particular historical and social contexts: Pye, in the history of the genre’s early critical reception in academic film studies, and Pumphrey, by suggesting that a spectator’s love for Western films is itself part of the social process through which masculinity is constructed. In this respect, I suggest that the recent return of cinephilia as both object of historical inquiry and critical method in academic film studies has the potential to build upon this masculinist love of the Western in creative ways. Cinephilia can help us think through what a love for the Western means for our understanding of the genre’s participation in the construction of masculinity and gender. A close look at Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952), a rodeo cowboy film and cinephile favorite that plays with the gender roles of the classical Western, offers a particularly useful case study for understanding how the masculine-cinephile’s reflection on the cowboy’s negotiation of identity can inform the writing of genre criticism. Ray, an auteur beloved by many cinephiles, is the director of several distinctive films that can be categorized as Westerns: Johnny Guitar (1954), Run for Cover (1955), and The True Story of