Romance & the Western

In mid-February 1872, George Custer was missing his wife terribly. He was in Kentucky and she was with family and friends shopping for clothes in Ohio. “I expect my Sunbeam is so deeply interested in the mysteries of clothes that all thoughts of her dear Bo are vanished. The little bouquet-holder you gave me stands before me holding a delicate pink rose with buds, and a spray of white flowers-reminding me of you.” At the conclusion of George’s note to his wife he wrote a short poem to her. “Love born only once in living, Truth that strengthens in the giving, Constancy beyond deceiving…” I think it’s safe to say that George loved his wife even though he had trouble at times with fidelity. And Elizabeth loved her husband and the romantic poems he penned. I never cared much for romantic poetry. With the exception of one witty rhyme, I don’t care much for poetry as a whole. Like Groucho Marx, “My favorite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September’ because it actually tells you something.” I’m not crazy about the typical romance movie either. The dialogue never rings true. Some of the best romantic dialogue is found in a handful of my favorite westerns however. The dialogue in film Lone Star with Ava Gardner and Clark Gable is suggestive, but not verbose. For example, “Have you never heard of the word discretion, Mr. Jones?” Ava’s character asks Gable’s character, a man she finds quite attractive. “Oh, often. But I don’t approve of it. Do you?” In the film Many Rivers to Cross, actress Josephine Hutchinson describes her daughter’s feelings about the character actor Robert Taylor plays. “If he asked her to bring him the Ohio River in a saucepan, she’d do it.” I like the exchange between Henry Fonda and J. Farrell MacDonald about the woman Fonda’s character is in love with in the film My Darling Clementine. “Mack, you ever been in love?” Fonda playing Wyatt Earp asks. “No, I been a bartender all my life,” MacDonald’s character responds. And finally, the film The Naked Spur starring Madeleine Carroll and Preston Foster, has one of the best romantic lines of all time. “Do you love me,” Carroll’s character asks Foster’s character. “I might,” he replies, “but I don’t want to.”