Why West­world remains the ulti­mate genre mash-up

Two men dressed in cow­boy hats, pash­mi­nas and gun­slinger belts stroll through the slid­ing doors of a saloon and order some whiskeys at the bar. Upon being insult­ed by a sim­i­lar­ly dressed man sat near them, one qui­et­ly retorts, ​“You talk too much.” ​“You say some­thing, boy?” comes the curt reply. ​“I said, you talk too much.” ​“Why don’t you make me shut up?” The oth­er cus­tomers sat at the bar spring up and flee in pan­ic and the jaun­ty music ema­nat­ing from a rick­ety upright piano abrupt­ly stops, as the two men square up. The lat­ter takes up the invi­ta­tion to shut the oth­er up by draw­ing quick­er and shoot­ing him dead.

It’s a sequence that even some­one with the slight­est famil­iar­i­ty with west­erns will recog­nise, and one that has been repeat­ed time and time again through­out the his­to­ry of cinema’s most endur­ing genre. But in this case, all is not quite as it seems – because this is a scene tak­en from 1973’s West­world, a film set not dur­ing the fron­tier years of the 19^th cen­tu­ry, but rather in a futur­is­tic world where the Old West has been re-cre­at­ed as an arti­fi­cial theme park where vis­i­tors can come and play out their favourite tropes from the genre on a rich cast of robot­ic char­ac­ter props.

West­world is cur­rent­ly attract­ing lots of atten­tion thanks to the new HBO adap­ta­tion that debuted this week, which looks set to take on sim­i­lar themes of the moral unease of peo­ple using humanoid machines for their own plea­sure, and the threat of a robot rebel­lion. Such themes con­tin­ue to res­onate, espe­cial­ly as machines grad­u­al­ly become a big­ger part of our every­day lives.

But one thing this new series may not be able to recap­ture is the original’s rela­tion to the west­ern genre. These days true west­erns are few and far between, with the few that are made usu­al­ly labelled neo-west­erns – pres­tige pic­tures rather than major stu­dio hits. Where­as in ear­ly ​’7os audi­ences still had fresh mem­o­ries of films like How the West Was Won, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Butch Cas­sidy and the Sun­dance Kid reign­ing supreme at the box office. And where today super­heroes pro­vide the wish-ful­fil­ment fan­tasies of many cin­ema­go­ers, back then every young man’s macho ide­al was to walk and talk like a cowboy.

Young men like the film’s chief pro­tag­o­nists, Peter and John, who walk into the saloon in that scene from West­world. The dif­fer­ence with them is that they know they are in a west­ern (albeit one sim­u­lat­ed by the theme park oper­a­tors), which adds an amus­ing meta lev­el to the whole film. When Peter (played by Richard Ben­jamin) responds to his android aggra­va­tor by scowl­ing ​“You talk too much,” he’s tak­ing his cues from the genre, and is self-con­scious­ly adopt­ing the role of hard-man cowboy.

Although ner­vous at first (espe­cial­ly com­pared to his com­pan­ion John, played by James Brolin, who imme­di­ate­ly adopts the whiskey-down­ing, cig­ar-chew­ing, curt-talk­ing swag­ger of the arche­typ­al Clint East­wood anti­hero), he grad­u­al­ly feels his way into the role, and throws him­self into lat­er sit­u­a­tions such as being pro­posed to in the town’s broth­el, escap­ing jail, and get­ting involved in a mass brawl in the local saloon. Each scene is wry­ly self-aware, and it is great fun to watch as the tropes are ticked off.

Giv­en that the film is direct­ed by Michael Crich­ton, the man who wrote ​‘Juras­sic Park’, it should come as no sur­prise that the robots mal­func­tion and start attack­ing the guests. At this point the gun-fight­ing action that had erst­while been harm­less fun sud­den­ly becomes dan­ger­ous, as Peter and the gun­slinger who insult­ed him at the bar (who, in anoth­er meta touch, is played by The Mag­nif­i­cent Sev­en star Yul Bryn­ner) play out a cli­mac­tic shoot out, only this time for real.

It turns out to be a very uneven match, and the sin­gle-mind­ed relent­less­ness of Brynner’s steely-eyed gun­slinger is the most mem­o­rable part of the film. He pur­sues Peter out of the theme park and into the neigh­bour­ing resorts of ​‘Medieval’ and ​‘Roman’ World, and looks about as incon­gru­ous as when the cast of Blaz­ing Sad­dles break down the set walls of their arti­fi­cial Old West. Peter may just about man­age to sur­vive his ordeal, but he realis­es along the way that play­ing the bad-ass cow­boy hero in real life is a lot tougher than it looks on screen.