Western (genre)
The
Western is an
genre in
literature and
film. Westerns are art works –
films,
literature,
television and
radio shows,
sculpture (particularly that by
Frederic Remington), and
paintings – devoted to telling stories set in the
19th Century American West (and sometimes
Mexico,
Canada or the
Australian Outback, during the same time period), with the setting occasionally portrayed in a
romanticised light.
While the Western has been popular throughout the history of movies, it has decreased in prominence since the late
1970s.
Westerns, by definition, are set in the
Western United States during the period from the start of the
US Civil War in
1860 to the end of the so-called "
Indian Wars" at
Wounded Knee in
1890. But this definition is very elastic. Some westerns incorporate the Civil War, which was essentially an "eastern" conflict (i.e., east of the
Mississippi river). Westerns have crossed the US borders: frequently into
Mexico, sometimes into
Canada and even, famously, into
Bolivia. The timeframe is stretched even further. The genre includes films about the
Battle of the Alamo in
1836; and the
Mexican Revolution as late as
1920. There are also westerns which take place in
Australia, such as
Quigley Down Under; Australian relationship with aboriginals has many parallels with U.S. treatment of
Native Americans.
The popular perception of the Western is a
movie that centres on the life of a semi-
nomadic wanderer, usually a
cowboy or a
gunfighter, whose possessions include a
canteen; period
clothing that might include a large
Stetson hat, a
bandana,
spurs and
buckskins; a
revolver or
rifle; and a
saddle, but not necessarily a
horse. The horse itself, the "faithful steed", can be a major character in the story.
The technology of the era – such as the
telegraph,
printing press, and
railroad – may be evident, usually symbolising the imminent end of the
frontier. In some "late Westerns", such as
The Wild Bunch, the
motor car and even the
aeroplane are referenced. Weapons technology is very evident and a recurring theme is the merit of the latest piece of "hardware", be it a
repeating rifle produced by the
Winchester Repeating Arms Company or a
Colt Single Action Army handgun.
Dynamite also features somewhat, both as a blasting agent and as a weapon, and to a lesser extent the
gatling gun.
The Western takes these elements and uses them to tell simple
morality tales, usually set against the spectacular scenery of the
American West. Westerns often stress the harshness of the wilderness and frequently set the action in a desert-like landscape. Specific settings include isolated forts, ranches and homesteads; the
Native American village; or the small frontier town with its saloon, general store, livery stable and jailhouse. Apart from the wilderness, it usually the saloon that emphasises that this is the "
Wild West": it is the place to go for music (raucous piano playing), girls (often prostitutes), gambling (poker or five card stud), drinking (beer or whiskey), brawling and shooting.
In some westerns, where "civilisation" has arrived, the town has a church and a school; in others, where frontier rules still hold sway, it is, as
Sergio Leone said, "where life has no value".
This contrast is shown to great effect in
John Ford's
1962 film,
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Married couple
James Stewart and
Vera Miles return to Shinbone long after the frontier has closed and find, as Vera Miles says, that "the wilderness has become a garden" and that there are now schools, churches and a courthouse. Then James Stewart reminisces via flashback about Shinbone in those wild and dangerous days when the likes of
John Wayne,
Lee Marvin,
Edmond O'Brien,
Lee Van Cleef,
Strother Martin and
Woody Strode were in residence. The cast of this film presents a fine cross-section of the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful that are the key personnel of most westerns. For every good guy like Stewart,
Gary Cooper or
Charles Bronson, there is an evil villain like Van Cleef,
Gian Maria Volontè or
Brian Donlevy; a beautiful heroine like Miles,
Maureen O'Hara or
Rhonda Fleming; and unforgettable "characters" like Martin,
Jack Elam or
Mildred Natwick.
|
Western Set at Universal Studio in Hollywood |
The popular perception often misses the point that the Western is multi-faceted and that it contains several sub-genres with films that are essentially about the Indian Wars, the Civil War, the Mexican Wars, range wars, the railroad, wagon trains, cattle drives, prospecting, outlaws, gunfighters, town-tamers, revenge, quests and even romance. These often mix. A classic example of this is
Once Upon a Time in the West which begins with
Charles Bronson arriving by train and ends with the railroad reaching the desert homestead as he rides off. In between, the movie centres on
Claudia Cardinale's quest to leave behind her sordid past and establish herself as the mother of a new community. She succeeds but she does so only because of Bronson's indestructible presence and to understand this film it is necessary to know it is really about revenge. Bronson from first to last is the key character, the one in control, and it is his motive that starts and ends the film and determines its course. Although he famously dismisses man as "an ancient race", he himself represents the last of this ancient race for the arrival of the railroad and the establishment of Sweetwater and Flagstone are events that helped to close the frontier. The "real men" are nearly all gone by the end. Bronson is the only one left and he rides away to an uncertain and purposeless future. Possibly his character mirrored
Shane and it may be conjectured that the end of OUTW flows seamlessly into Shane, another movie in which the gunfighter acknowledges that his time is over. When Shane rides away he is wounded, so perhaps the last of these real men rode into the hills to die.
The western film genre often portrays the conquest of the wilderness and the subordination of nature, in the name of civilisation or the confiscation of the territorial rights of the original inhabitants of the frontier. The Western depicts a society organized around codes of
honor, rather than the
law, in which persons have no social order larger than their immediate peers, family, or perhaps themselves alone.
In the Western, these themes are forefronted, to the extent that the arrival of law and "
civilisation" is often portrayed as regrettable, if inevitable.
Western fiction got its start in the "
penny dreadfuls" and later the "
dime novels" (see also
Dime Western) that first began to be published in the mid-nineteenth century. These cheap books were published to capitalise on the many fanciful yet supposedly true stories that were being told about the mountain men, outlaws, settlers and lawmen taming the western frontier. By 1900, the new medium of
pulp magazines helped to relate these
adventures to easterners. Meanwhile, non-American authors like the German
Karl May picked up the genre, went to full novel length, and made it hugely popular and successful in continental Europe from about 1880 on, though they were generally dismissed as trivial by the literary critics of the day.
The Virginian, published 1902, is considered by many to be the pioneering "literary" western novel, containing the core element of a rugged individual who stick to his guns in the face of trouble, neglecting chances to simply walk away. This seeming bundle of cliches was fresh and hugely popular in 1902, and elements of this formula appear in most Western stories ever since.
Popularity grew with the publication of
Zane Grey's
Riders of the Purple Sage in 1912. When
pulp magazines exploded in popularity in the 1920s, western fiction greatly benefited (as did the author
Max Brand, who excelled at the western short story). The simultaneous popularity of
Western movies in the 1920s also helped the genre.
In the 1940s several seminal westerns were published including
The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) by
Walter van Tilburg Clark,
The Big Sky (1947) and
The Way West (1949) by
A.B. Guthrie, Jr., and
Shane (1949) by
Jack Schaefer. Many other western authors gained readership in the 1950s, such as
Luke Short,
Ray Hogan, and
Louis L'Amour. The genre peaked around the early 1960s, largely due to the tremendous number of westerns on
television. In the 1970s, the work of
Louis L'Amour began to catch hold of most western readers and he has tended to dominate the western reader lists ever since. Readership as a whole began to drop off in the mid- to late '70s and has reached a new low today, so much so that most bookstores, outside of a few western states, only carry a small number of Western fiction books. Western authors have an organisation that represents them called the
Western Writers of America, who present the annual
Golden Spur Awards.
See also
*
List of Western fiction authors*
List of notable authors of Western novelsA genre in which description and dialogue are lean, and the landscape spectacular, is well suited to film. Early Westerns were mostly filmed in the studio like other early Hollywood movies, but when locations shooting became more common, producers of Westerns used desolate corners of
California,
Arizona,
Utah,
Nevada,
Kansas,
Texas,
Colorado or
Wyoming, often making the landscape not just a vivid backdrop, but a character in the movie. Productions were also filmed on location at
movie ranches.
The Western genre itself has sub-genres, such as the
epic Western, the
shoot 'em up,
singing cowboy Westerns, and a few
comedy Westerns. The Western re-invented itself in the
revisionist Western.
Cowboys and
Gunslingers play prominent roles in Western movies. Often fights with
Native Americans are depicted. In early Westerns, the "Injuns" are frequently portrayed as dishonorable villains; however, many "revisionist" Westerns give the natives more sympathetic treatment. Other recurring themes of westerns include western
treks and groups of
bandits terrorising small towns such as in
The Magnificent Seven.
The Classical Western film
The western film traces its roots back to
1903's The Great Train Robbery, a
silent film directed by
Edwin S. Porter and starring
Broncho Billy Anderson. The film's popularity opened the door for Anderson to become the screen's first cowboy star, making several hundred Western movie shorts. So popular was the genre that he soon had competition in the form of
William S. Hart.
In the United States, the western has had an extremely rich history that spans many genres (
comedy,
drama,
tragedy,
parody,
musical,
science fiction, etc.). The
golden age of the western film is epitomised by the work of two directors:
John Ford (who often used
John Wayne for lead roles) and
Howard Hawks.
Spaghetti Westerns
Main article: Spaghetti Western
During the 1960s and 1970s, a revival of the Western emerged in
Italy with the "Spaghetti Westerns" or "Italo-Westerns". Many of these films are low-budget affairs, shot in locations (for example: the Spanish desert region of
Almería), chosen for inexpensive crew and production costs and for similarity of landscape to those of the
Southwestern United States. Spaghetti Westerns were characterised by the presence of more action and violence than the Hollywood westerns.
But the best of the genre, notably the films directed by
Sergio Leone, have a
parodic dimension (the strange opening scene of
Once Upon a Time in the West being a reversal of
Fred Zinnemann's
High Noon opening scene) which gave them a different tone to the Hollywood westerns.
Charles Bronson,
Lee van Cleef and
Clint Eastwood became famous by starring in Spaghetti Westerns, although they were also to provide a showcase for other noted actors such as
Jason Robards,
James Coburn,
Klaus Kinski and
Henry Fonda.
Revisionist Westerns
Main article: Revisionist Western
'Revisionist' is a term used in
genre studies to describe films that change traditional elements of a genre.
After the early 1960s, many American film-makers began to question and change many traditional elements of westerns. One major change was in the increasingly positive representation of
Native Americans who had been treated as "savages" in earlier films. Audiences began to question the simple hero-versus-villain dualism and the morality of using violence to test one's character or to prove oneself right. Some recent Westerns give women more powerful roles.
Contemporary Westerns
Contemporary Westerns, as the name implies, are films that have contemporary American settings but nevertheless utilise Old West themes and motifs (a rebellious antihero, open plains and landscapes, climactic gunfights, etc.). For the most part, they still take place in the
American West and reveal the progression of the Old West mentality into the late twentieth century. Examples include
Sam Peckinpah's
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (
1974),
John Sayles'
Lone Star (
1996), Clint Eastwood's
A Perfect World (
1993),
Tommy Lee Jones'
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (
2005),
Robert Rodríguez's
Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003), and
Ang Lee's
Brokeback Mountain (2005).
Genre studies and Westerns
In the 1960s academic and critical attention to cinema as a legitimate art form emerged. With the increased attention,
film theory was developed to attempt to understand the significance of film. From this environment emerged (in conjunction with the literary movement) an enclave of critical studies called
genre studies. This was primarily a semantic and structuralist approach to understanding how similar films convey meaning. Long derided for its simplistic morality, the western film genre came to be seen instead as a series of conventions and codes that acted as a short-hand communication methods with the audience. For example, a white hat represents the good guy, a black hat represents the bad guy; two people facing each other on a deserted street leads to the expectation of a showdown; cattlemen are loners, townsfolk are family and community minded, etc. All western films can be read as a series of codes and the variations on those codes.
Since the 1970s, the western genre has been unraveled through a series of films that used the codes but primarily as a way of undermining them (
Little Big Man and
Maverick did this through comedy).
Kevin Costner's
Dances with Wolves actually resurrects all the original codes and conventions but "reverses the polarities" (the Native Americans are good, the U.S. Cavalry is bad).
Clint Eastwood's
Unforgiven uses every one of the original conventions, only reverses the outcomes (instead of dying bravely or stoically, characters whine, cry, and beg; instead of a good guy saving the day, irredeemable characters execute revenge; etc.).
One of the results of genre studies is that some have argued that "Westerns" need not take place in the American West or even in the 19th Century, as the codes can be found in other types of movies. For example, a very typical Western plot is that an eastern lawman heads west, where he matches wits and trades bullets with a gang of outlaws and thugs, and is aided by a local lawman who is well-meaning but largely ineffective until a critical moment when he redeems himself by saving the hero's life. This description can be used to describe any number of Westerns, as well as the action film
Die Hard.
Hud, starring
Paul Newman, and
Akira Kurosawa's
Shichinin no samurai (
The Seven Samurai), are other frequently cited examples of movies that don't take place in the American West but have many themes and characteristics common to Westerns. Likewise, it has been pointed out that films set in the old American West, may not necessarily be considered "Westerns."
See the main article at
The Western Genre in other Media. The Western genre has touched all of
comic books to
computer games and
role playing games.
Many Westerns after 1960 were heavily influenced by the
Japanese samurai films of
Akira Kurosawa. For instance
The Magnificent Seven was a remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and both A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing were remakes of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, which itself was inspired by Red Harvest, an American detective novel by Dashiell Hammett. It should also be noted that Kurosawa himself was heavily influenced from American Westerns, especially the works of John Ford. Senses of Cinema
Despite the Cold War, the western was a strong influence on Eastern Bloc cinema, which had its own take on the genre, the so called 'Red Western' or Ostern
. Generally these took two forms: either straight westerns shot in the Eastern Bloc, or action films involving the Russian Revolution and civil war and the Basmachi rebellion in which Turkic peoples play a similar role to Mexicans in traditional westerns.
An offshoot of the western genre is the "post-apocalyptic" western, in which a future society, struggling to rebuild after a major catastrophe, is portrayed in a manner very similar to the 19th century frontier. Examples include The Postman and the Mad Max series, and the computer game series Fallout.
Many elements of space travel series and films borrow extensively from the conventions of the western genre. Peter Hyams' Outland transferred the plot of High Noon to interstellar space. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek series, once described his vision for the show as "Wagon Train
to the stars". More recently, the space opera series Firefly used an explicitly western theme for its portrayal of frontier worlds. Anime shows like Cowboy Bebop, Trigun and Outlaw Star have been similar mixes of science fiction and Western elements. The science fiction Western can be seen as a subgenre of either Westerns or science fiction.
Elements of western movies can be found also in some movies belonging essentially to other genres. For example, Kelly's Heroes is a war movie, but action and characters are western-like. The British film Zulu set during the Anglo-Zulu War has sometimes been compared to a Western, even though it is set in South Africa.
Stephen King's The Dark Tower is a series of seven books that meshes themes of westerns, high fantasy, science fiction and horror. The protagonist Roland Deschain is a gunslinger whose image and personality are largely inspired by the Man with No Name from Sergio Leone's films.
In addition, the superhero fantasy genre has been described as having been derived from the cowboy hero, only powered up to omnipotence in a primarily urban setting.
The western genre has been parodied on a number of occasions, famous examples being Support Your Local Sheriff, Cat Ballou, Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, and Rustler's Rhapsody.
George Lucas's Star Wars films use many elements of a western, and indeed, Lucas has said he intended for Star Wars to revitalise cinematic mythology, a part the western once held. The Jedi, who take their name from Jidaigeki, are modeled after samurai, showing the influence of Kurosawa. The character Han Solo dressed like an archetypal gunslinger, and the Mos Eisley Cantina is much like an old west saloon.
See also:''
Weird WestSee Television Westerns and List of TV WesternsSee Notable figures in Western films"As far as I'm concerned, Americans don't have any original art except Western movies and jazz." :—
Clint Eastwood, classic actor in Westerns
Image:TEX RITTER.jpg|Tex Ritter, a singing cowboy who sang the theme from High NoonImage:TMS Poster.jpg|Movie poster for The Magnificent SevenImage:US postal service john wayne.jpg|John Wayne, actor in countless WesternsImage:Stamp-ctc-great-train-robbery.jpg|The Great Train Robbery, the first narrative film produced in the United States, was a Western*
American Old West*
American West*
Dime Western*
Frederic Remington*
Golden Boot Awards*
History of United States continental expansion*
"Gibanica" Westerns*
List of movie genres*
List of Western fiction authors*
List of Western movies*
Notable figures in Westerns*
TV Western*
Movie ranches*
Native American fighting styles*
Adam Wright - Author* Yezbick, Daniel.
The Western, St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture
*
Top Fifty Westerns*
Golden Boot Awards*
Hall of Great Western Performers at the
National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum*
Steele Review* The
Western Writers of America website: http://www.westernwriters.org/
*
Cowboy Pal
