He was the strong, forthright hero: authentic, stubborn, sometimes pigheaded but dedicated to justice and capable of tenderness and sacrifice; a solitary figure, called upon to defend the homestead or rescue the girl, but often exiled, in the end, from the post-frontier civilization that no longer needed his hard man’s brand of competence and courage.
Whether he was a gunfighter, a cowboy or a cavalry officer, he became, for many moviegoers, the very avatar of the American frontier: the embodiment of James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer, Emerson’s American Adam or what Garry Wills called fans’ sense of what “was disappearing or had disappeared” from American life.
The narrator of Walker Percy’s novel “The Moviegoer” talks about the memory of him killing “three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in ‘Stagecoach’ ” as more real than memories from the narrator’s own life. Joan Didion called him the “perfect mold” into which “the inarticulate longings of a nation” were poured.
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