Western (genre)

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The Western is an American genre in literature and film. Westerns are art works – films, literature, sculpture, television and radio shows, and paintings – devoted to telling stories set in the American West (and sometimes Mexico), often portraying it in a romanticized light.

While the Western has been popular throughout the history of movies, it has begun to diminish in importance as the United States progresses farther away from the period depicted.

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1 Definition
2 Common themes
3 Origins of the "Western idea"
4 Western literature
- 4.1 See also
5 Western movies
6 Influences on and of the Western
7 Television Westerns
8 Notable Western movies
9 Famous actors
10 Quote
11 See also
12 External links

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Definition

Westerns, by definition, are set in the American West, almost always in the 19th century, generally between the 1860's and 1900. Some incorporate the Civil War.

Westerns often involve semi-nomadic wanderers, often cowboys, with life reduced to its elements. Their sole possessions consisting of:

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clothing,
a gun, and (optionally)
a horse.

The high technology of the era – such as the telegraph, printing press, and railroad – may appear, usually symbolizing the coming end of the frontier soon to give way to the march of civilization.

The Western takes these simple 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 lonely isolated forts, ranches, the isolated homestead, the saloon or the jail. Other iconic elements in westerns include Stetsons and Spurs, Colt .45s, prostitutes and the faithful steed.

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Common themes

The western film genre often portrays the conquest of the wilderness and the subordination of nature, in the name of civilization 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 "civilization" is often portrayed as regrettable, if inevitable.

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Origins of the "Western idea"

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The idealized version of the "Wild West" can be traced at least as far back as Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows which began in 1883. In fact Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack Omohundro performed one of the earliest western stage dramas, The Scouts of the Prairie, for eastern audiences in 1872, while the events being dramatized were still occurring on the western frontier. In literature, Owen Wister's The Virginian, published in 1902, was an American start (though not the first Western published in the United States); but the German writer Karl May was writing Wild West stories as early as 1876. His books were a major influence on the founder of Universal Pictures, the German immigrant Carl Laemmle; and May himself traced ideas at least to the American writer James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote Last of the Mohicans in 1826.

The western was a distinct literary genre before the rise of motion pictures; other important writers were Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour and Elmore Leonard.

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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 capitalize 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.

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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 organization that represents them called the Western Writers of America, who present the annual Golden Spur Awards.

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Western movies

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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, 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 Indians are depicted, although "revisionist" Westerns give the natives sympathetic treatment. Other recurring themes of westerns include western treks, and groups of bandits terrorizing small towns such as in The Magnificent Seven. Template:Clear

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The Classical Western film

Image:TEX RITTER.jpg Image:Stamp-ctc-great-train-robbery.jpg The western film traces its roots back to 1903'sThe 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.

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Spaghetti Westerns

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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 chosen for cheapness 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. Clint Eastwood became famous by starring in Spaghetti Westerns, although they were also to provide a showcase for other such considerable talents as Lee van Cleef, James Coburn, Terence Hill, Klaus Kinski, and Henry Fonda.

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Revisionist Westerns

Main article: Revisionist Western

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'Revisionist' is a term used in genre studies to describe films that change traditional elements of a genre.

After the early 1960s, many American filmmakers 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 early 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.

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Contemporary Westerns

Contemporary Westerns, as the name implies, are films that have contemporary American settings but nevertheless utilize 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 John Sayles' Lone Star (1996), Clint Eastwood's A Perfect World (1993), Tommy Lee Jones' The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), and Robert Rodríguez's Once Upon a Time In Mexico (2003)

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Genre studies and Westerns

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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 became 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, e.t.c.. 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 (film) 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 movie. 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."

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Influences on and of the Western

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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 reputably 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 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.

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 revitalize 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.

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