When I lived in the Far East, a Japanese woman whose impression of the United States had been formed by American movies of the 1940's and 1950's, told me that her vision of the U.S. was that every town looked like New York City and all the inhabitants wore ten gallon hats and carried guns. From the viewpoint of the silver screen, she was pretty close.

As iconic as the New York skyline is to urban movies, I believe that it is the landscape of the western movie and the image of the cowboy that personifies America to most of the world.

For Americans, the western has always been a reflection of how we see ourselves and a barometer of our values. For that reason, I contend that in 1969, the western movie died and the America we once knew and loved was buried along with it.

From the moment in The Great Train Robbery in 1903 when a bandit points his gun at the audience and pulls the trigger, Americans embraced the western movie as a truly American art form. Starting with the silent films, the western was unambiguous in its moral tone. White hats. Black hats. Good vs. evil. The hero, ramrod straight, incorruptible, standing alone if necessary, but standing for what was right and just. That's the way we wanted to see ourselves. We did the right thing. We fought fair. We were always the good guys.

That rigid moral code was the backbone of the western movie until the post World War II era. After that conflict, directors, writers and actors, especially those who had served, brought a world-weariness and cynicism to the western that had previously been the domain of film noir.

To me, the difference was most notable in the actor, Jimmy Stewart. Prior to going off to war, he had played good, decent, upstanding characters in often lighthearted movies. In a string of 1950's westerns, most made with Anthony Mann, the normally affable and laconic Stewart, became a grizzled, hard case who bore a constant undercurrent of menace coupled with sudden displays of absolute fury and violence.

The scene in 1953's Shane when Jack Palance kills Elisha Cook with a booming pistol shot and Cook's body skitters back into the muddy street signaled a major change in the western. The myth of a sanitized, prettified west that movies had previously portrayed gave way to stark reality and unvarnished violence. The western genre also entered into a period of psychological upheaval that reflected the uncertainty of the times. A world that had once seemed bright and hopeful was now mired in a major cold war and nasty little hot wars. Moral black and white transmuted into shades of gray. The line between hero and villain became blurred. It was impossible to know who the good guys were anymore.

The country and the western were already wounded when Vietnam fired the final fatal shot. Tales of atrocities committed by our own military. Young people openly telling the government they would not serve. Politics overriding military decisions. Our country lost its way and was unable to clearly see what its role in the world should be. The country that had survived The Great Depression and triumphed in World War II was beginning a descent into greed, selfishness and arrogance from which it has yet to recover.

For one brief moment, during The Vietnam Tet Offensive and the siege of Khe Sanh in 1968, American heroism made a grand last stand and the next year, 1969, the western too, decided to go out in a blaze of glory.

1969 produced three of the greatest westerns ever made. They are Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, True Grit and The Wild Bunch. As if the people who created these movies were prescient regarding America's future, all three dealt with western figures who were throwbacks to an earlier time, trying to survive in a west that no longer needed them nor shared their values. Doubly poignant is the fact that both John Wayne and his True Grit character, Rooster Cogburn, are old men believing in American values that no longer exist.

The director of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ends the movie with a freeze-frame, sparing us the bloody details of the certain deaths these two romantic heroes face. Sam Peckinpah, the director of The Wild Bunch, is not that kind.

Peckinpah was a man out of touch with modern values. He was a rough, hard living man who believed that your word meant something and maybe your honor was all that you had and you valued it above your life. In The Wild Bunch, William Holden, himself weathered and worn down by life, plays Pike Bishop, a man in similar circumstances. Pike and his gang of outlaws may be at the end of their ride, but, in the best tradition of the old westerns, even though they are bad guys, they still believe in a code of honor that means they will do what they see as right even at the cost of their own lives. The Wild Bunch is the western movie's eulogy. The western as we knew it, the western that taught legions of kids the cowboy's code of honor and justice was dead.

That same year two movies of note premiered that showcased the new values that were replacing the old. Easy Rider has as its main characters, a couple of drifters moving across the American landscape, showing little purpose and relatively little sense of morality. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper would never be mistaken for Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea. Midnight Cowboy only alludes to the west in the drug store cowboy attire worn by Jon Voight as a low-rent hustler.

Since then, a couple of good westerns have been made. Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven gives a realistic portrait of the gunslinger and Dances with Wolves is another positive step in showing the Native American as more than the savage of the old movies.

TV fare like Lonesome Dove and the more recent Broken Trail, as well as the westerns with Tom Selleck, have all produced solid ratings. Maybe it's just us old codgers who watch them, wanting to recapture a time when the world was easier to understand, a time when our country was the good guy and righteous and heroic. Maybe we want life to be as simple as when we were ten years old, sitting in the dark of a movie theater and watching our cowboy heroes ride over the hill to save the day for all of us. Well, maybe it's time for us to remember the cowboy code and saddle up and get the job done ourselves. As The Duke would say, "We're burning daylight." Vaya Con Dios, Buckaroos.