By Mary Shaffer
and Jerry Bunin
The Tribune

Filmmakers in almost every decade have used the Western to mirror current values and culture.

Western heroes were role models in the post-war 1940s and innocent '50s, rebellious in the '60s, disillusioned by the '70s, gone in the greedy '80s and are being revised in the politically correct '90s.

Most every great American film director has either made a Western or traced its heroes into modern times as detectives or space explorers.

You can catch 10 of the best Westerns ever made in a Thursday evening series starting tonight at The Palm Theater.

John Harrington, who co-organized the series around a film class he teaches at Cal Poly, said he picked films to illustrate how the Western hero changed to reflect contemporary values.

The series features several key Western filmmakers: John Ford, Howard Hawks, George Stevens, Sam Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Sergio Leone, and Clint Eastwood.

Hawks set ''Red River'' (1948), the oldest film in the series, when the first wagon trains entered the vast frontier and when a man could stake a claim and make something worth passing on to his children.

John Wayne plays a rugged, visionary and tyrannical rancher who leads the first cattle drive up the Chisholm Trail and winds up battling his own shortcomings, his adopted son (Montgomery Clift in his first role), his hired hands and the elements.

In John Ford's ''The Searchers'' (1956), Wayne plays another flawed hero, a Civil War veteran who spends his life tracking and despising, yet admiring, the renegade Indians who kidnapped his niece.

Like many of Ford's best films, ''The Searchers'' is set amid the towering buttes and sweeping vistas of Monument Valley, a landscape that seems even more intimidating because he contrasts it with the tiny, isolated pioneer settlements.

Wayne is a true Western hero, but nobody knows it in ''The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,'' Ford's dark 1962 tale of mythmaking and deceit.

Jimmy Stewart plays a timid lawyer who gets undeserved glory and a political career for killing evil Liberty (Lee Marvin). Wayne's strong, silent rancher gets no credit and can't survive in the more civilized society his unsung heroism helps create.

He's an outsider who doesn't belong.

Outsiders are central to many Peckinpah films.

Peckinpah, who began by writing and directing TV episodes of ''Gunsmoke'' and ''The Rifleman,'' uses sudden, stylized violence in thought-provoking Westerns tales about lost causes.

He saw violence as a cleansing of the soul, replacing such false codes of honor as laws aimed at protecting the powerful with more lasting values such as friendship and freedom.

His ''Ride The High Country'' (1962) finds aging ex-sheriffs Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott (in his last role) looking back on how the West has changed and their lives lost direction.

They rediscover themselves on a danger-filled journey to guard a gold shipment.

In Peckinpah's ''The Ballad of Cable Hogue'' (1970), Jason Robards' title character enjoys a solitary life running a stage coach stop at a desert water hole until autos replace horses.

Peckinpah's ''Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid'' (1973) builds a generational conflict around the relationship between the outlaw Kid and the former friend who kills him.

Garrett (James Coburn), who is about to marry and settle down as sheriff, adapts to changing times by killing his wild past while Billy dies violently trying to preserve individual freedom.

Penn's ''Little Big Man'' (1970) takes a more satirical look at coming-of-age, survival and myths in the West.

This big-screen tall tale stars Dustin Hoffman as 121-year-old Jack Crabb who recalls his life as pioneer, honorary Indian, gunfighter, con man and survivor of Custer's Last Stand.

Jack Crabb is no hero, just a witness to events that have as much to say about Vietnam as about Little Big Horn.

Long before ''Dances with Wolves'' (1990), Penn's film portrayed Indian culture sympathetically and earned an Academy Award nomination for Native American actor Chief Dan George.

Anti-heroes are featured in Leone's ''Once Upon a Time in the West'' (1968), a semi-satirical epic that followed his famous ''Dollars'' trilogy with Eastwood.

Charles Bronson plays a gunslinger reluctant to get involved, and Henry Fonda is cast against type as one of the most memorable and vicious villains in screen history.

Both are motivated more by self-interest than a good cause.

The series ends with Eastwood's ''Unforgiven,'' last year's Academy Award winner, a far contrast from the film which opens the series, ''Shane'' (1953).

In George Stevens' classic Western, Alan Ladd stars as a mysterious stranger, an ex-gunfighter who defends a community of peaceful farmers against cattlemen who use violence to keep rangeland open.

Good and evil are clearly defined in ''Shane,'' with the hero acting like a noble knight in shining leather.

For Eastwood's dark story, the knight is tarnished, the community corrupted and the moral landscape gray and muddied.

The success of ''Unforgiven'' and renewed popularity of Westerns in general inspired Poly professor Harrington to re-offer the course he first taught 20 years ago and revives every few years.

Each week, the class will view a second film linked by character or concept to the films shown that Thursday at the Palm series.

Harrington said it's an opportunity to introduce a new generation to films he has enjoyed since childhood with a ''basic love, completely irrational but very deep.''

Mary Shaffer works at Cal Poly. Jerry Bunin is a Telegram-Tribune reporter.

Film Schedule

• Jan. 6: ''Shane''
• Jan. 13: ''The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance''
• Jan. 20 ''Red River''
• Jan. 27 ''Ride The High Country''
• Feb. 3 ''The Searchers''
• Feb. 10 ''Little Big Man''
• Feb. 17 ''Once Upon A Time In The West''
• Feb. 24 ''The Ballad of Cable Hogue''
• March 3 ''Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid''
• March 10 ''Unforgiven''