Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 127

Hollywood Cowboys and Confederates in Mexico

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demonstrated that frontier expansion on the North American continent also flowed
in the geographic directions of north and south. In popular fiction, authors such as
Jack London and James Oliver Curwood published many frontier adventure sto
ries that take place in the far north, in Canada and Alaska; other frontier adventure
novelists, such as B. Traven, author of Treasure o f the Sierra Madre (1935) and
Glendon Swarthout, author of They Came to Cordiira (1958) employed settings
that were located south of the U.S. border, in Mexico. Indeed, conducting a close
review of the genre, it soon becomes obvious that the frontier adventure story is
comprised of “Northerns” and “Southerns,” in addition to Westerns. A useful ex
ample of a Southern movie is director Andrew V. McLaglen’s The Undefeated
(1969), starring two of Hollywood’s biggest marquee stars of that period, John
Wayne and Rock Hudson.
At the heart of The Undefeated is the cowboy story, the tale of a group of
cowboys who are involved in a livestock drive, in this particular instance, horses
rather than cattle. These cowboys are led by John Henry Thomas (played by John
Wayne), an American Civil War colonel in the Union Army, who quit his commis
sion immediately following General Lee’s surrender in order to reward the men of
his command by providing an income for them. Taking Horace Greeley’s advice
literally, John Henry and his men (accompanied by a band of Cherokee braves) go
west to make their fortunes as cowboys. Complimenting this standard Western
formula is an additional narrative, somewhat less conventional in nature. James
Langdon (played by Rock Hudson), another colonel of the Civil War (though this
time an officer who served in the Confederate Army), in order to escape the hard
ships that will result from a defeated and disgraced South, decides to lead a group
of his soldiers and their families south to Mexico so that they can find a new home
under the regime of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. At issue regarding the
motivation of both major characters — John Henry Thomas and James Langdon
— and their follow ers is a Richard Slotkin-like regeneration, though in this narra
tive variant, a moral regeneration, that will allow them to Jettison the experienced
horrors of war and embrace the start of a new life.
John Henry tells his commanding officer, General Joe Masters (played by
Paul Fix), that the reason he is resigning his commission is because he feels a
special responsibility to his troops and their future welfare. He informs the Gen
eral that these men didn’t join the Union Army for any specific ideological cause,
but because they were loyal to him. Only a mere handful have survived combat
over the past three years, and John Henry feels that he can make a great deal of
money for these surviving men by wrangling wild horses to sell to the U.S. Army.
Like John Henry, James Langdon also thinks he can regenerate the hopes of his
friends by escaping the post-war South and traveling to Mexico to begin again. To
achieve this ambition, he is willing to leaving everything behind, even burning his