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The Western is an American 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 ocassionally 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.
Definition
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.
Perception
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.
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.
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.
Common themes
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 literature
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
Western movies
A 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 Red Indians are depicted, with "revisionist" Westerns give the natives 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
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
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)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."
Westerns in other Media
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.
Influences on and of the Western
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, and Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles.
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 West
Television Westerns
Famous actors
Quote
- "As far as I'm concerned, Americans don't have any original art except Western movies and jazz."
- — Clint Eastwood, classic actor in Westerns
Gallery
See also
- 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
External links
- 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
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"Western (genre)"