Who would make a better sheriff: Joan Crawford, George Bush, or Aaron Sorkin?

If making a genre film means hewing to stylistic and thematic conventions, then the western is the genre man's genre. Its conventions are more restrictive than those of, say, noir, which means that riffing on them is harder and therefore more likely to be awesome, in a low Sturgeon number* kind of way. On top of super-robust constraints (which alone would suffice), they're one of America's strongest aesthetic advantages over Europe: our "strong man" archetype is libertarian, not fascist.

Low Sturgeon number aside, the films in the recently published list of the top 100 westerns are pretty disappointing. Pace Robert Stacy McCain, Grace Kelly is what's wrong with High Noon, which has no business in the top ten, much less in the number two spot. Howard Hawks has my back:

I saw High Noon at about the same time I saw another western picture, and we were talking about western pictures and they asked me if I liked it, and I said, "Not particularly." I didn't think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking for help, and finally his Quaker wife had to save him. That isn't my idea of a good western sheriff. I said that a good sheriff would turn around and say, "How good are you? Are you good enough to take the best man they've got?" The fellow would probably say no, and he'd say, "Well, then I'll just have to take care of you."

It's the sheriff's responsibility to protect his townspeople because they shouldn't have to protect themselves. He can get resourceful about using the womenfolk (i.e. Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo), but High Noon goes further. Saying "Gary Cooper spent ninety minutes scrambling to find back-up when Grace Kelly was his best bet all along!" makes no acknowledgment of the fact that from the moment Grace Kelly picks up a gun you've already lost half the battle. It isn't the sheriff's job to make sure the innocents survive; they need to survive with their innocence intact. (To shift genres to the courtroom drama, the key line in A Few Good Men isn't "You need me on that wall" but "We were supposed to fight for Willie.")

If limits on how he provides protection are implicit in the sheriff ideal, then so are limits on the people for whom he provides it, which is why the cowboy metaphor for Bush's foreign policy is a disservice to cowboys everywhere.

My own top five Westerns: Cat Ballou, My Darling Clementine (for Victor Mature), High Plains Drifter, Rio Bravo, and that crypto-homosexual ironic vortex of camp Johnny Guitar, which proves that, while femininity can be a helpful shorthand for the inviolable innocence that the sheriff is meant to protect, there's room in this world for Joan Crawford, too.

*The term "Sturgeon number" via Eve: "Theodore Sturgeon famously said something along the lines of, 'Ninety percent of everything is crap,' and this blogger pointed out that while every idea can be done well, some ideas have a higher Sturgeon Number than others--a higher potential to be crap. Snakes on a Plane, to take the obvious example, has an exceptionally low Sturgeon Number. It could be two hours of Samuel Jackson just yelling, 'I want these m---f--- snakes off this m----f---- plane!!!' and it would still be awesome."

For an example of a low Sturgeon number western see Terror of Tiny Town, the Wikipedia page for which includes the phrase "and Travis Lucas with his crazy backwards feet."