Just watched The Professionals" last night. It was promoted and has to my mind always been referred to as a Western. Set during the Mexican Revolution of mid 1910s (at least 1917) from the dialogue. Do you guys consider it a Western? If so Why? If not how would you categorise it? Me it's just an adventure story (in Louis' words just trouble)
Loved the last dialogue though :7

"You Bastard!
"For me it was an accident of birth, for you a lifetimes work!"

Les
Every sixty seconds you spend angry, upset or mad, is a full minute of happiness you'll never get back..


:7

Les
The English Language is weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought though.



:7

Much depends on location, location, location...almost as much as time frame. Lots of places in the western U.S. are still untamed and for the most part empty of people. It’s also kind of scary where people live. You’d swear an old run down shack was empty, but nope. People live in all sorts of places and under all kinds of conditions. Being a bit of a loner it’s much more comfortable for me to live with my cat, Storm, but it ain’t healthy...mentally nor physically. We need interaction, conversation and friendship with folks. I had thought recently of moving in with my sister and her family...they live on a mountain that is a bit off the beaten path, but within view of a medium sized town and city. I may still move nearby. We all need kin and friends, but as we age close friends and family fade away. I remember my father in-law saying he felt like he’d lived too long, and I am just beginning to understand what he meant. There is still one old friend left, but he is 800 miles away. What’s interesting is my favorite place to live is northern North Dakota, but friends and family there have all died. There is family in California and as far East as Maryland, but the west has a hold on me that I can’t shake. My cat, Storm, is so used to travel that friends and family can’t get over how calm she is in the car...she hates motorcycles or we’d really be having some adventures. Oh boy...she is bugging me to come to bed...later folks. Storm warning.

"We don't have any law here. Just a graveyard." LL from TREASURE MOUNTAIN

:7:7 Fifth Wheeler is needed. You may need to check Chronicle of the Old West site for Dakota's fifth wheel adventures (2-3 years on the road.)

Les
Every sixty seconds you spend angry, upset or mad, is a full minute of happiness you'll never get back..


:7

Les
The English Language is weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought though.



:7

In it's earliest days the western genre WAS simply adventure. The genre's roots were in the 1880s (maybe the '70s) and while it took place in areas that were depopulated enough so that they could be considered exotic compared to the "east," there were certainly many western readers.

The clearest example of the breaking up of the adventure genre into the Western, Historical, and Science Fiction sub groups we see today is the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He write in all three categories, occasionally cross pollinating them significantly ... and why not I'm guessing that to him it was all the same thing.

A Princess of Mars takes a soldier in the cavalry in Arizona (I think I've got this right) to Mars, which incidentally looks a lot like the northern AZ desert! ERB actually served with the 7th Cavalry out of Ft. Grant AZ in the 1890s.

The Mad King takes the son of a wealthy mid western farming family to a fictional Balken Kingdom and into a "Historical" seeming plot similar to Prisoner of Zenda ... and then brings him back on the eve of WWI, just after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.

The Mucker is a classic Far Eastern adventure but the "hero" is a gangster. Return of the Mucker is a Western set south in the border in a situation much like The Wild Bunch.

The Bandit of Hell's Bend, The War Chief, Apache Devil, The Deputy Sheriff of Comanche County and even The Girl From Hollywood are all somewhat classic Westerns.

There's a lot more detail to ERB's genre mash ups ... except they weren't really mash ups. He was writing between 1914 and 1941 (after which he became the USA's oldest war correspondent!) and he mostly just wrote about the times he lived in. Very little of his work was set in the future and only slightly more of it was set in the past.

I introduced my boys to ERB when they were preteens (they're in their 30s now), by reading aloud The Son of Tarzan to them. That was when I realized that he wrote run-on sentences, and it was tough to read with interest-holding inflection. I never tried to read his works aloud after that. I enjoyed the few John Carter books I read, as well as the 2012 movie.

Another writer who was a genre-bender was Robert E. Howard, who went from Conan to Breckinridge Elkins without a hitch. If you can find the Elkins stories or A Gent From Bear Creek, it's definitely worth the time. Escapist humor/fun.




Falcon

Falcon

I read several of Howard's "Conan" series. I reached a point where it struck me that the stories were getting darker and darker. Then I read where Howard had committed suicide. At that point I decided to stop reading his stuff and looked for more uplifting stories. Maybe they got lighter later on but I wasn't interested enough to find out.

Justintime

I remember a line in the move where one character was called either a bastard or a son of a bitch to which he replied similarly to your line, "Mine is an accident of birth but you, sir, are a self-made man".

As for where you draw the line, Wikipedia, for what it's worth, draws two lines. One is 1912 based on the last few territories becoming states. The second line is 1924 based on what the writer calls the "myth of the Old West".

Personally, I always considered "The Professionals" to be pretty close to a western.

Justintime

Personally, I believe that if Westerns are only about location or topography they are a very thing and fragile genre. I don't know of any other genre that isn't about the ideas contained or discussed in it. Location isn't an idea.

Westerns are often about the "Passing of the Frontier." Possibly this is why they mostly take place at the END of the era rather than its beginning. This would include the concepts of the coming of civilization (a retelling of the American Colonial experience at the last moment in history when it was slightly similar to the original).

It often has to do with the differences between one generation from another (a hard, almost immoral, generation of founders being criticized by a younger, more civilized crowd).

It also has a fundamental that shows up fairly often that my old mentor (film director) Alexander MacKendrick called "a love story between men." Two strong, opinionated guys, often with VERY different outlooks, often of different generations (see above), come to appreciate and respect one another. Occasionally, this is even played between men and women (Hondo, maybe) in romantic circumstances. This is also where you get some interesting variations like Brokeback Mountain because it takes the "love story between men" trope and makes it literal.

I have always felt that there were great similarities between Louis's Yondering stories and his Westerns. Yondering is about the passing of a different kind of frontier, a world that was big enough and wide enough to not be completely regulated even though there were huge colonial powers (England, Holland, Japan, France) that were trying to lock it down. It took not only governments to close the freedom of the world off, it took the sort of technology that finally appeared because of WWII, communications and data processing and storage. Today we may be seeing an even greater closing of the "frontier." I wonder if the world will open up again for a long time, this is not just because of Covid but because many governments around the world are in transition. Not just the US but Europe and many other places.

It is possible that you could just as easily tell a adventure story set in the modern world about two strong yet differing personalities being forced to learn to respect one another while dealing with the generational differences of old and young and give it all the qualities of a classic western.

I seem to recall being told or reading that there are a limited number of plots and that there are no new ones regardless of genre. The only difference is how the artist/author tells or retells the tale including setting, characters, events, subplots, etc. I think some plots may lend themselves better to certain genres like what we call westerns. But, basic plots are timeless. They work as well in tales set in today as well as 1600 or 1300.

And, I think that genres can be blended. In reading "Conaghan" recently, it occurred to me that it almost reads like a romance novel. But, because it was written by Louis L'Amour, it is categorized as a western. And, probably should be. I'm just sayin'...

Justintime

The designation "Western" on the spine of a book really means very little.

In the early days of the paperback book industry books were categorized by publisher, this helped the distributors to quickly restock the racks and certain publishers did specialize in different types of books, sometimes different genres.

Then in the early 1960s, in an effort amusingly called "integration", booksellers and publishers combined the placement of all their titles into genres or categories. At that time the pressure for a writer to stick to one genre, or for all of that writer's work to be categorized into the genre they were best known for became enormous. With thousands of paperbacks for sale in even a modestly sized bookstore how else were you going to find the work by your favorite author?

No matter the genre writers work was generally lumped together in the genre they were known for and publishers just stuck the genre designation on the spine of the book to be sure the distributors got them all together.

It sounds like writers were (and probably still are) under significant pressure to stay in their "lane". Fortunately for us, your dad was able to sometimes blur the lines. At least, I think so.

Which gives me another question. Most of your dad's protagonists were along the heroic lines. But would you consider the Sackett twins to be examples of antiheros? And, if so, are there others of your dad's novels that you would consider to have antiheros as the protagonist?

Justintime