ALBUQUERQUE — The western is all but gone, but the West lives on.
The classic westerns of cattle drives and rustlers, saloons with swinging doors, dancing girls, a tinkling piano and high-stakes card games, of ruthless land barons and of mysterious lone strangers showing up in town bent on revenge survive in happy memory--and in reruns on the lesser channels.
Yet the real, unmythic, contemporary West of big skies and ranches, and of cowboys who these days ride pickups more often than horses, that West is still in business. And its principal chronicler is a former cowboy, hard-rock miner and painter named Max Evans.
Evans looks like a man you might have seen in a western, fleeing a posse or joining one, although his only role was in fact riding shotgun beside Slim Pickens as the stagecoach driver in Sam Peckinpah's "The Ballad of Cable Hogue."
A critic once called Evans "a range-land Mark Twain." His novels and stories are often wildly funny but frequently carry an undertone of tragedy and a suggestion that the antics themselves are compensations for pains of a grueling life in unyielding country.
Evans' first novel, "The Rounders," was filmed in 1965 with Henry Fonda and Glenn Ford playing two tramp cowboys working for a tough ranch owner. Like nearly all of Evans' fiction, the novel was born in the facts of his own life. Evans had started cowboying before he was a teenager, hiring out to a rancher who was very tough but significantly more scrupulous than Tom Ed, the boss in the book (played by Chill Wills in the movie).
Now his 1961 novel, "The Hi-Lo Country," has at last been filmed. It opened in Los Angeles and New York on Wednesday for Academy Award qualification. Martin Scorsese, as urban a filmmaker as can be found, produced it; the director was Stephen Frears, the elegant Englishman whose credits include "My Beautiful Laundrette," "Dangerous Liaisons," "The Snapper" and "The Grifters," his only previous exploration of contemporary Americana.
Woody Harrelson and Billy Crudup ("Without Limits") are the cowboy pals, spiritual descendants of Fonda and Ford. Patricia Arquette plays the married woman they both love. The script was by Walon Green, who wrote Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch."
The Hi-Lo Country can't be found on gas station maps or in atlases. It was defined and named by Evans himself. It embraces, in his own words, "the north-eastern half of New Mexico, the far panhandle of Oklahoma, a lot of southeastern Colorado, and extends over into the far northwest of Texas." (A souvenir map, locating the sites of various Evans stories, has been published by literary historian James R. Gober.)
