ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, May 11, 1996 TAG: 9605130010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B10 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: RICHMOND
SOURCE: DANIEL NEMAN RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH
William McDowell loves two kinds of operas: regular and horse.
His shelves are filled with books about singers and opera tapes. But it is horse operas - Western movies - that sent him to England this weekend.
McDowell is serving as guest historian at a B Western film festival in Birmingham. John Hart, best known as Clayton Moore's replacement as ``The Lone Ranger'' on television, will be the featured guest, but McDowell will be on hand to answer any questions on the genre.
The rest of the time he will be hanging around with his friend, fellow Richmonder and fellow Western movie buff Tom Wyatt, and watching old movies.
McDowell, who will turn 75 in two weeks, and Wyatt, 66, like the classic Westerns and the big stars such as John Wayne all right. But their passion is the smaller, lower budget films and such half-forgotten stars as Buck Jones, Tim McCoy, Bob Steele and Johnny Mack Brown.
The first widely popular movie, ``The Great Train Robbery,'' made in 1903, was a low-budget Western (filmed, though it was, in New Jersey). The so-called B Westerns were an immediate success and ruled the screens for decades, finally running out of steam about 50 years later. Their allure, McDowell said, is easy to understand.
``I consider them to be, in a way, morality plays. ... Good triumphed over evil, and I'm a firm believer that's the way it should be,'' he said.
In some of the more recent movies, evil wins out over good. But McDowell prefers the older style.
``I always thought every picture should have a plot. I don't think you should go see a movie in which two guys slug each other from start to finish.''
The desire ``to spend my life wearing the white hat'' may have led to McDowell's avocation, acting. He has appeared in 95 stage productions, many of them in his native Charleston, W.Va. He was in just one movie, the enormously obscure 1968 film ``The Road Hustlers,'' which was pointedly not a Western (it was about moonshiners).
``As much as I like Westerns, I never really had the desire to act in them, because I don't think I would have been any good,'' McDowell said.
Wyatt began watching movies when he was about 7. His father would take him and his brother to the theater at 11 in the morning and they would stay all day. They would watch the feature film - and the serial, newsreel and short comedy or cartoon - five or six times.
``After we got home from the theater, all that week we'd get on our broomsticks with our cap guns and re-enact the movie,'' Wyatt said.
In the 1940s, Westerns would first play in Richmond at the Grand Theater at Seventh and Broad streets, and Wyatt would rush out to see them all. If it starred one of his favorite actors, such as Brown, Steele or Charles Starrett, he would go see it again three weeks later when it played at the Venus Theater on Hull Street. Then he'd see it again three weeks later at the Patrick Henry, at 25th and Marshall streets.
Movies at that time cost a dime, until World War II began and the price shot up to 11 cents. During the war, if you couldn't come up with the admission price, theaters would let people in for a ball of tin foil or a can of grease to help the war effort.
Today, Wyatt is intrigued by the background music in old Westerns (though not as much so by the songs) and the scenery as much as by the certainty of good defeating evil, with ``the good guy beating the villain and getting the girl at the end. Not kissing her, but riding off into the sunset.''
Traditionally, Wyatt said, Westerns end with the cowboy kissing his horse.
``You know, they say in the old days, the cowboy always kissed the horse in the end,'' said McDowell. ``Now they still do, but they worry about it.''
McDowell's expertise as a Western historian - he was given the Second Annual Shoot 'Em Up Pioneer Award in 1992 - began when he was a child. He started keeping file cards of every Western he could think of. Then he kept track of Western character actors, for whom he has a particular fondness.
``You had to be there,'' McDowell said. ``It's an experience that will never come again.''
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Richmonders William McDowell (left) and Tom Wyatt holdby CNBup a poster advertising a typically little-known B Western.
McDowell's taking his shoot-'em-up expertise to a Birmingham,
England, film festival this weekend, where he'll be guest
historian. color AP