Christine Bold's "The Frontier Club," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: The Frontier Club by Christine Bold.

The entry begins:

Because The Frontier Club focuses on a group of clubmen who hunted, politicked, and wrote together, and so made the modern western, the movie would need an ensemble cast—say the boyish bonhomie of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (this would be Roosevelt’s Nine) crossed with the menace of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. In fact, a cameo figure in the book—the thuggish Cheyenne Clubman Major Frank Wolcott—already appeared in Cimino’s film, played by Ronnie Hawkins as patsy of the big cattlemen. Cimino also created the smoky clubroom settings—from 1870s Harvard to 1890s Wyoming—in which frontier clubmen hatched the violence which they wrote into the national psyche. Given that the book revolves around popular print culture (rather than casino heists or gun fights), I’d be well advised to seek a new director: if Steven Spielberg can make the oft-told passage of a constitutional amendment nail-bitingly suspenseful, he could surely convert the connections between popular westerns and government policy-making into high-stakes action.

Like the Boone and Crockett Club, the cast would need two strong leaders:

• Theodore Roosevelt—who tends to be played for laughs (Robin Williams) or...[read on]

Learn more about The Frontier Club at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Frontier Club.

My Book, The Movie: The Frontier Club.

--Marshal Zeringue