47 Years Ago in TIME

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The intense popularity of TV WESTERNS moved experts to ponder the social and cultural significance of the genre long before today's hit movie Brokeback Mountain.

Theorizers, both professional and amateur, think the western helps people to get away from the complexities of modern life and back to the "restful absolutes" of the past ... In the cowboy's world, justice is the result of direct action, not of elaborate legality. A man's fate depends on his own choices and capacities, not on the vast impersonal forces of society or science. His motives are clearly this or that, unsullied by psychologizing (except, of course, in the Freudian frontier yarns). Moreover a man cannot be hagridden; if he wants to get away from women, there is all outdoors to hide in. And he is not talk-ridden, for silence is strength. Says Sociologist Philip Rieff: "How long since you used your fists? How long since you called the boss an s.o.b.? The western men do, and they are happy men." --TIME, March 30, 1959