Vietnam War

The Vietnam War functions here as a reference point for the political and stylistic changes reshaping the American Western, rather than as a setting for events in the book. In the account of 1969 filmmaking, Westerns begin to carry contemporary conflicts into their frontier stories, while their antiheroes and violence depart from the conventions of older television Westerns.

Political Conflict Recast as Western

The book identifies Little Big Man and Soldier Blue as films in which Western characters fight the Vietnam War. The frontier setting therefore becomes a vehicle for presenting a conflict with immediate political resonance. This is part of a wider tendency described in the same passage: filmmakers were encouraged to make parallels between Western stories and the political issues of their own time, so that familiar genre conflicts could take on a contemporary charge.

Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here offers a related but distinct example. Its Indian protagonist, pursued by the authorities, is described as a de facto Black Panther. The comparison shifts the Western’s political emphasis toward the experience of someone running from power. Together, these examples show how the genre’s political references could work through analogy rather than through a literal depiction of the Vietnam battlefield.

A Changing Western

These political connections belong to a broader transformation in the American Western. The book contrasts the newer films with nostalgia-oriented productions associated with older stars and describes the emerging style as grittier, younger, more carefully dressed, and more receptive to antiheroes. Actors long cast as villains, including Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Lee Van Cleef, and James Coburn, could now appear as heroes and movie stars; established leading men could also unsettle their familiar screen personas.

The embedded television series Lancer is presented as an attempt to borrow some of this new Western atmosphere. Director Sam Wanamaker could not reproduce the films’ full treatment of violence for a CBS series airing at 7:30 on Sunday nights, so he pursued the shift through the show’s look and through Johnny Lancer, played by Jim Stacy. The character’s shadier, antiheroic quality offered a way to challenge the genre’s television conventions within the limits of network broadcast.

Violence and Its Limits

The account distinguishes the new Westerns not simply by the presence of villains, but by the brutality of their violence. Deaths no longer ended with a character clutching his stomach and slowly falling; bodies were violently torn apart and blood became conspicuous on screen. In Sam Peckinpah’s films, the action could be shown at 120 frames per second, turning the spurting blood into what the book calls a visual poetry beyond conventional brutality.

That graphic style could not be transferred wholesale to Lancer. The contrast between theatrical Westerns and a Sunday-evening CBS series marks a boundary between forms of representation: the television production could suggest a tougher, more modern genre through character and costume, but its broadcast context limited how far it could go in depicting violence. The Vietnam War reference consequently sits within a larger account of how the Western absorbed contemporary political meaning while negotiating the different freedoms of film and television.