Cowboys and contestants

Rollin', rollin', rollin'
Though the streams are swollen
Keep them doggies rollin'
Rawhide
—“Rawhide” Theme, Ned Washington and Dimitri Tiomkin

The ‘60s TV show “Rawhide” aired past my bedtime. The only memory I have of it is that guitar-driven, adrenalin-pumping theme—from the same man, Tiomkin, who composed the music for “High Noon”—rustling up to my room from the den where my father lounged, himself probably half-asleep until that first crack of the bullwhip and then Frankie Laine’s singing had him sitting up in his saddle and me reaching under the bed for my toy six-shooter.

Give me hokey westerns over the embarrassing humiliation and greed of today’s “reality” programming any day. I ask you, who would you rather have your kid emulating? Some self-centered putz who wants to be Donald Trump’s apprentice, or Paladin of “Have Gun Will Travel”? A devious, scrawny "survivor," or Hoss of “Bonanza”?

I never got to see Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates in “Rawhide.” I wouldn’t get to see a Clint Eastwood western until several years later when, one fateful summer day, allowance in hand, I bicycled to the local movie house with a few 9-year-old friends—each minus our parents’ permission—to catch a matinee screening of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

An ad in the newspaper had caught our attention. It featured Clint wearing a cowboy hat and a poncho, lighting a cannon's fuse with the same match he’d used to fire up the cigarillo jutting from his bearded mug (at least that’s how we read it). "Who is this guy?" we asked. The tagline read, “For three men the Civil War wasn’t hell. It was practice.”

My friends in tow, I asked my mother if I could see this movie that had us frothing at the mouth. "What does The Long Island Catholic say?" she asked as she folded sheets by the basement washer. For Catholics of the World War II generation, following the dictates of the Church went pretty much without question.

My friends and I checked The Long Island Catholic, a weekly journal that authoritatively rated films on behalf of the Church. The paper gave it a “B,” meaning “Morally objectionable in part for all.” That was one rating away from "C," for “Condemned.” No way was my mother going to let me see this one. If I wanted to see this film, I was going to have to do it without permission, from her or the Church. Who is this guy? I thought. I had to find out.

Inside the theater, director Sergio Leone’s epic tale of buried treasure in the Old West unspooled before our eyes. I remember being blown away by the panoramic desert vistas, the outfits caked with dust, the sweat beading on sunburned brows. I remember the actors, each looking like he’d been riding the trail for weeks, each determined to claim that buried treasure for himself: Clint, as the quiet, sharpshooting “man with no name” (I guess that answered my question); Eli Wallach, as Tuco Benedito Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez, Clint's sometimes cool, sometimes reckless Mexican sidekick; Lee Van Cleef, as Angel Eyes Sentenza, the baddest bad-ass gunslinger I had ever seen. This western was 180 degrees from “Gunsmoke.” Even the guns sounded different: they didn't go "bang"; they squealed death.

I most remember Leone's lingering closeups of the eyes of these desperadoes: calculating (Clint, the "Good"), angry but contained (Angel Eyes, the "Bad"), fearful and frenetic (Tuco, the "Ugly"). What a great film, buoyed by a now ubiquitous Ennio Morricone score and completely deserving of the claim, “The best cinematic meditation on greed since 'Treasure of the Sierra Madre.'"

Somehow, at 9, my friends and I understood what “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” was all about. Maybe it had something to do with striking out on our own for the first time in our lives. Returning home later that day, we strapped on our holsters and started playacting the film, looking for that treasure, each of us studying the others' eyes, calculating.

Momma, don’t let your sons grow up to be reality show contestants. Let them be cowboys.