The good, the bad and the syndicated

I’ve never been much for surfing lazily through the TV channels in search of something interesting. I have my favorites, and generally there’s something worthwhile on one of them that grabs my attention. I’ve also been doing more reading these days. That cuts my TV time as well, usually for the better.

But you never know. A few weeks ago I did indulge in some surfing, and it paid off.

I found Grit.

On the Jefferson Telecom cable schedule, Grit is Channel 7. It’s not in high definition, and that’s probably why I hadn’t run across it before. I usually watch channels in the 400 bracket — that’s where the HD offerings live.

Grit appears to be nonstop Western movies, at least during the civilized hours when I’m awake. Some of them, especially during daytime, are old TV Western series: “Death Valley Days,” “Laramie,” “Tales of Wells Fargo,” “The Virginian.” I sort of remember them from the first time around.

So far, my favorite old-time TV Western programs, like “Maverick,” “Have Gun Will Travel” or “Bonanza,” haven’t yet popped up on Grit. I classify “Tales of Wells Fargo,” etc., a rung or two below the gold-standard series like “Maverick.” 

When I was a kid, our family would drive a few blocks to my grandparents’ home for Sunday night dinner, and afterward we’d watch “Maverick.” My grandpa loved “Maverick.” 

Twin brothers Bret and Bart Maverick (James Garner and Jack Kelly) were clever and handsome riverboat gamblers who regularly got into scrapes involving money and women. They won or they lost, but they always learned hard lessons about life. Great show.

The daytime TV Westerns on Grit don’t measure up, but they’re a hoot to watch. Three minutes in, the plots are predictable; they hold my interest because of the details.

The hero (always a he) is called on to help out an old friend, the bullied citizens of a town, a girl who needs assistance, or someone else in trouble. The villain never wins: he (always a he) is exiled, jailed or killed.

It’s the full-length Western movies, which play on Grit on weeknights and Sunday daytime hours, that entertain me the most. I saw some of them when they first came out. Others are new to me since I missed them when they were first screened decades ago.

Most of the selections span the 40 years from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s, although a few are more recent, as late as the 1990s. It appears to me that Grit obtained the rights to Westerns starring certain actors: John Wayne, Audie Murphy, Charles Bronson, Glenn Ford, Randolph Scott, Jeff Chandler.

The menu also includes the so-called “Spaghetti Westerns” that star Clint Eastwood from the 1960s and ’70s. In those movies, Eastwood plays the classic American role of the mysterious drifter, flawed but basically decent, out to right some long-standing wrong. The bad guys in the Eastwood Westerns are way over the top, adding to the films’ entertainment value.

As I write this column, Grit is screening “How the West Was Won” (1962). Its cast reads like a Hollywood phone book of 60 years ago: Lee J. Cobb, Henry Fonda, Carolyn Jones, Karl Malden, Gregory Peck, George Peppard, Robert Preston, Debbie Reynolds, James Stewart, Eli Wallach, John Wayne, Richard Widmark, Walter Brennan, Andy Devine, Raymond Massey, Harry Morgan, Thelma Ritter, Russ Tamblyn and Lee Van Cleef, for starters. Spencer Tracy narrated. The epic’s plot spans 50 years and runs 2¾ hours. The film earned eight Academy Award nominations and won three.

The title itself is instructive. 

In real-life, the West was “won” by whites who stole the land and decimated the native tribes who lived there, relegating the remainder to reservations on the poorest wastelands. 

Native Americans in most old-time Westerns are typically bloodthirsty savages whose purpose in life appears to be to kill whites, and therefore deserve to be eliminated in order to establish civilization on the Western plains. Precious little character development of any of them in classic Western movies.

Most American Westerns were filmed while the Reconstruction period in American history, the decade after the Civil War, was still viewed as a sin against Southern whites that was rectified after “Negroes, scalawags and carpetbaggers” were deprived of their newfound political power in the mid-1870s.

Consequently, many old-time Western movies are sympathetic to defeated Confederate soldiers who moved westward after the Civil War. Union soldiers, veterans and active-duty troops alike are often the bad guys when written into the scripts along with former rebels.

Old Western good guys can usually shoot a pistol out of a bad guy’s hand with a quick draw. They also have an uncanny ability to hit their target with rifle or pistol while riding a horse over rough ground at top speed. Bad guys didn’t seem to possess anything close to such prowess. For them, it was shoot 10 rounds from a six-shooter and never hit anything.

With rare exceptions, women in the old Westerns were there to be helped by the good guys. 

So, usually, old Westerns offer no true plot surprises. I watch them to see how their plots twist to get to the same place in the end: the victory of goodness over badness. 

And, of course, for their nostalgia value. At my age, that’s truly the coin of the realm.