Бэби-бумер из Шри-Ланки делится воспоминаниями о золотой эре американских вестернов

View(s): As a member of the baby boomer generation, i.e., people born during the post-World War II birth surge around the world, I am keen to record my own experiences and observations over the past seventy-plus years, particularly since Sri Lanka became an independent nation. This article primarily focuses on the Western comics and movies that many people in my generation enjoyed during their school days. In addition to my own experiences, I also did research making use of AI. The evolution of American Western literature The American frontier, the moving zone of land and settlement where American society met and pushed beyond unbroken wilderness and Native American territories, expanded rapidly during the 19th century. It spans from early 17th-century colonial settlements along the Atlantic coast to the early 20th century, when the West was fully mapped and settled. The American public heard stories about cowboys and cattle drives, gold mining, outlaws and bank robbers, sheriffs and marshals, stagecoaches and railroad expansion, frontier towns and gunfighters and resistance by Native American peoples normally referred to as “Red Indians’. Much of this information reached people through newspapers, travellers’ accounts, soldiers’ stories and oral storytelling. But the public wanted something more exciting than factual reports. That created a market for frontier adventure literature. The great breakthrough came in the 1860s–1880s with the American dime novel. These were inexpensive, short books aimed at a mass readership. They were particularly important because they made Western stories available to ordinary Americans rather than just wealthy readers. These books, printed on low-quality pulp paper that turned yellow quickly, cost only 5 to 10 cents. They targeted working-class people, factory workers, and young boys, and most were short, formulaic stories ranging from 100 to 200 pages. Eye-catching, dramatic illustrations on the front and back covers grabbed the buyer’s attention. A typical story contained a brave frontier hero, a dangerous wilderness, outlaws, Indians, a beautiful landscape, a gunfight, and, finally, the hero’s victory. One of the most important early figures was Buffalo Bill Cody. He was a real person, but dime novels turned him into almost a superhero. These novels had a market abroad, mainly in countries under the British Empire, including Sri Lanka. My father was a voracious reader of Western paperback novels. He used to obtain books from the used-book sellers opposite Maradana railway station. They offered a buy, read, and return service to people like him. When a book was returned, they bought it back at a lower price, usually twenty five cents less than the original price. One such seller, whom we kids called “Atha Kotta”,  had a small outlet. We also named his outlet as “Atha Kotta and Company’. Apparently, the owner was an ex-Royal Navy man who was injured in an explosion and lost one leg and injured his arm, badly. He was medically discharged and retired from the Royal Navy. He started the used books outlet in the early Fifties. Later, these outlets were moved to McCallum Road (D.R. Wijewardene Mawatha) as part of the road expansion programme carried out in view of the Non-Aligned Conference held in the mid-Seventies. These outlets also sold American comic books; some of them, as I remember, were “The Lone Ranger”, “Roy Rogers’’  and “Billy the Kid”. For the young girls, there were digest-sized (about 5” x 7”) Schoolgirls Picture Library (SPL) books published in Britain. As a kid, I was fond of reading (or was it looking at the pictures?) Western comics, which were popular among schoolchildren. We used to exchange comic books among friends. My elder sisters were fond of the SPLs. The silent Western: The Great Train Robbery The silent film industry in the United States developed in the 1890s. A particularly important milestone was “The Great Train Robbery” the American silent Western short film that was approximately 12 minutes long and released in 1903. Directed by Edwin S. Porter it was widely regarded as one of the earliest narrative films to combine multiple scenes, dynamic editing, and location shooting into a cohesive story, helping establishing techniques that influenced the development of modern cinema. The film became an international success and is frequently cited as a milestone in film history. With the innovation of synchronized sound around 1927–1929, the American Western movie became a popular entertainment when it encompassed the real history and mythology of the American frontier. As a result American dime novels became an important source for early Western films. The Adventures of Buffalo Bill (1917), Buffalo Bill (1944 Hollywood movie), Wild Bill Hickok (1923), The Plainsman (1936), Deadwood Dick (1940) and Kit Carson (1940) are some of them. The Stagecoach In 1939 the Stagecoach directed by John Ford was screened. His movie was a game changer that transformed the Western from a cheap B-movie filler into respected, serious cinema. John Wayne played the Ringo Kid in the breakthrough role that made him a major global star. This movie was the first to use Monument Valley as a stunning backdrop. Those massive desert rock formations became the iconic, mythic visual image of the American West for decades to follow. In other words the Stagecoach completely revolutionized the Western film industry. High Noon The next turning point in Western movies was High Noon (1952). The movie shifted the genre from mythic adventure toward realistic, psychological, and moral complexity. It looks like a simple cowboy story, but underneath it is a powerful story about courage, duty, fear, conformity and the failure of a community to stand up against violence. Before High Noon, Western heroes were fearless and invincible. Gary Cooper played Marshal Will Kane as a man who openly felt fear and doubt. The film takes place in real time, creating intense suspense as a lone town marshal waits for a noon train carrying a man whom he sent to prison some years ago. That man had threatened that he would kill the marshal on his return. The protagonist was afraid, isolated, and ultimately abandoned by the cowardly townspeople he protected. High Noon directly reflected the double standards and hypocrisy of politicians. The theme song for the movie was “The Ballad of High Noon” (commonly known as “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin”). The song became an enormous commercial hit and a massive cultural phenomenon after the movie’s screening. It completely changed how Hollywood movies used music for marketing. The changing landscape of film viewing in Sri Lanka When I was a kid, I did not have many opportunities to see Western movies. Going to the movies was a grand family affair in Sri Lanka during the 1950s and 1960s. Though my mother was an ardent Sinhala movie fan, my father occasionally took us to a suitable English-language movie, including a Western. I have also watched “Bioscopes.” A street vendor occasionally came with a small viewing box. He charged a few cents to look into the box while he hand-cranked short film strips, which often featured action-packed cowboy gunfights. I was, however, allowed to go to movies with my friends when I was a teenager in the mid-Sixties. Some of the Westerns I enjoyed with my friends were “Mackenna’s Gold”, starring two of my favourite stars, Gregory Peck and Omar Sharif; “The Pitiless Three”; and the Dollars Trilogy, “A Fistful of Dollars”, “For a Few Dollars More” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. Clint Eastwood rose to global fame in these movies. He became a popular Hollywood actor as well as a filmmaker. With the introduction of TV in the seventies, I had the opportunity to watch many old Western movies shown by ITN, the pioneer in setting up a TV station in Sri Lanka. In the Eighties, I became a collector of DVD movies. My son, who is an expert in computer technology, transferred most of the movies to a “pen drive” to enable me to watch them on my TV screen. As Sri Lanka like many other countries is shifting from traditional single-screen theatres to digital platforms, driven by changing audience tastes and modern technology, now you can watch most of these movies on the Internet. 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