With determination worthy of an outward-bound Lemming, this writer daily reads over amusement sections in search of new and different Western movies, and then goes to see them. His friends, an intellectual lot, laugh at this and claim that "if you've seen one Western you've seen them all." I think I can prove them wrong.

A few weeks ago, I borrowed six bits from my roommate and went downtown to see a double feature pairing a picture called "Western Union" with another about Buffalo Bill. Aside from "Buffalo Bill's" Technicolor, they were pretty similar. Both used stock shots of bison chomping grass, both featured hundreds of war-painted extras in multi-feathered athletic supporters, both showed a genuine social concern for the plight of the Indian. More than this, "Buffalo Bill" included some scenes of a burning camp, and these--possibly discovered lying around loose on the cutting room floor--were reprinted in black-and-white in the second picture. Yet "Western Union" was a good movie, "Buffalo Bill" was foul; their difference can point up some useful criteria for deciding what makes a good Western.

The first is technical accuracy. Cavalrymen did not wear dress uniforms into battle, as they do in "Buffalo Bill." Given the better part of Montana to fight in, they presumably did not pick a deep and narrow gulch, largely under water, while hordes of enterprising Sioux lay above poking out their rifles from behind many convenient rocks. An Indian is more apt to wear a battered fedora than a war bonnet. "Western Union's" Indians at least spoke Indian, or a reasonable facsimile of it, while "Buffalo Bill's" dog-warriors muttered monosyllables except for a chosen few who spoke fine idiomatic English, converted to Indian through the deletion of a few conjunctions and the elimination of a few tenses. If a Western is not accurate, it is apt to be ludicrous.

The second criterion is that the Western should not be adulterated with extraneous, non-western material. "Buffalo Bill" worries about the problems of old age in America, "natural" vs. "scientific" medicine, journalistic responsibility, and the degradation of royalty as it wallows in its plot; "Western Union" sticks to putting up its telegraph line. "Buffalo Bill" gapes for minutes at a time at its overdressed heroine--it was a dour day when someone discovered that Alexis Smith in tights, watching a bar-room brawl, could pull in millions of dollars from audiences that had formerly found Westerns beyond comprehension.

There are important positive features necessary to the Western: the filming should be primarily outdoors, and it should interlace bright action sequences with dark, sinister night scenes. The music should be vivid, yet sensitive. But purity and accuracy remain most important. A recent example, "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," was so pure and accurate that it pleased most audiences even though it had no plot. A bad Western is not worth a bag of peanuts to drown out its sound track, but the pure and faithful Western--the classic Western--can produce that six bits' worth every time.