Western (genre): Difference between revisions

Western is a

• The construction of a railroad or a telegraph line on the wild frontier.
• Ranchers protecting their family ranch from rustlers or large landowners or who build a ranch empire.
• Revenge stories, which hinge on the chase and pursuit by someone who has been wronged.
• Stories about cavalry fighting Native Americans.
• Outlaw gang plots.
• Stories about a lawman or bounty hunter tracking down his quarry.

Many Westerns use a stock plot of depicting a crime, then showing the pursuit of the wrongdoer, ending in revenge and retribution, which is often dispensed through a shootout or quick-draw duel.^[3][4][5]

The Western was the most popular Hollywood genre from the early 20th century to the 1960s.^[6] Western films first became well-attended in the 1930s. John Ford's landmark Western adventure Stagecoach became one of the biggest hits in 1939 and it made John Wayne a mainstream screen star. The popularity of Westerns continued in the 1940s, with the release of classics such as Red River (1948). Westerns were very popular throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the most acclaimed Westerns were released during this time, including High Noon (1952), Shane (1953), The Searchers (1956), Cat Ballou (1965), The Wild Bunch (1969) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Classic Westerns such as these have been the inspiration for various films about Western-type characters in contemporary settings, such as Junior Bonner (1972), set in the 1970s, and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), set in the 21st century.

Themes

The Western genre sometimes 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, Native American, inhabitants of the frontier.

The American Film Institute defines Western films as those "set in the American West that [embody] the spirit, the struggle and the demise of the new frontier."^[7] The term Western, used to describe a narrative film genre, appears to have originated with a July 1912 article in Motion Picture World magazine.^[8] Most of the characteristics of Western films were part of 19th-century popular Western fiction and were firmly in place before film became a popular art form.^[9] Western films commonly feature protagonists such as cowboys, gunslingers, and bounty hunters, who are often depicted as semi-nomadic wanderers who wear Stetson hats, bandannas, spurs, and buckskins, use revolvers or rifles as everyday tools of survival–and as a means to settle disputes using "frontier justice". Protagonists ride between dusty towns and cattle ranches on their trusty steeds.^{[citation needed]}

Western films were enormously popular in the

Western films often depict conflicts with Native Americans. While early Eurocentric Westerns frequently portray the "Injuns" as dishonorable villains, the later and more culturally neutral Westerns gave Native Americans a more sympathetic treatment. Other recurring themes of Westerns include Western treks (e.g. The Big Trail) or perilous journeys (e.g. Stagecoach) or groups of bandits terrorising small towns such as in The Magnificent Seven. Or revisionist westerns like I Walk the Line (1970) depict sheriffs dueling.^{[citation needed]}

Subgenres

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Author and screenwriter Frank Gruber described seven plots for Westerns:^[12][13]

1. Union Pacific story. The plot concerns construction of a railroad, a telegraph line, or some other type of modern technology or transportation. Wagon train stories fall into this category.
2. Ranch story. The plot concerns threats to the ranch from rustlers or large landowners attempting to force out the proper owners.
3. Empire story. The plot involves building a ranch empire or an oil empire from scratch, a classic rags-to-riches plot.
4. Revenge story. The plot often involves an elaborate chase and pursuit by a wronged individual, but it may also include elements of the classic mystery story.
5. Cavalry and Indian story. The plot revolves around "taming" the wilderness for white settlers.
6. Outlaw story. The outlaw gangs dominate the action.
7. Marshal story. The lawman and his challenges drive the plot.

Gruber said that good writers used dialogue and plot development to develop these basic plots into believable stories.^[13] Other subgenres include:

• The Spaghetti Western.
• The epic western
• singing cowboy westerns
• a few comedy westerns such as:
  • Along Came Jones (1945), in which Gary Cooper spoofed his western persona
  • The Sheepman (1958), with Glenn Ford poking fun at himself
  • Cat Ballou (1965), with a drunk Lee Marvin atop a drunk horse.
  • Blazing Saddles (1974)

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Western was reinvented with the revisionist Western.^[14]

Classical Western

The Great Train Robbery (1903), Edwin S. Porter's film starring Broncho Billy Anderson, is often cited as the first Western, though George N. Fenin and William K. Everson point out that the "Edison company had played with Western material for several years prior to The Great Train Robbery. " Nonetheless, they concur that Porter's film "set the pattern—of crime, pursuit, and retribution—for the Western film as a genre."^[15] The film's popularity opened the door for Anderson to become the screen's first cowboy star; he made several hundred Western film shorts. So popular was the genre that he soon faced competition from Tom Mix and William S. Hart.^{[citation needed]}

The Golden Age of the Western is epitomized by the work of several directors, most prominent among them, John Ford (My Darling Clementine, The Horse Soldiers, The Searchers). Others include: Howard Hawks (Red River, Rio Bravo), Anthony Mann (Man of the West, The Man from Laramie), Budd Boetticher (Seven Men from Now), Delmer Daves (The Hanging Tree, 3:10 to Yuma), John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven, Last Train from Gun Hill), and Robert Aldrich (Vera Cruz, Ulzana's Raid).^[16]

Acid Western

Film critic

More recent Acid Westerns include Alex Cox's film Walker (1987) and Jim Jarmusch's film Dead Man (1995). Rosenbaum describes the Acid Western as "formulating a chilling, savage frontier poetry to justify its hallucinated agenda"; ultimately, he says, the Acid Western expresses a counterculture sensibility to critique and replace capitalism with alternative forms of exchange.^[18]

Charro, Cabrito or Chili Westerns

Charro Westerns, often featuring musical stars as well as action, have been a standard feature of Mexican cinema since the 1930s. In the 1930s and 1940s, these were typically films about horsemen in rural Mexican society, displaying a set of cultural concerns very different from the Hollywood meta-narrative, but the overlap between 'charro' movies and westerns became more apparent in the 1950s and 1960s.^[19][20]

Comedy Western

This subgenre is imitative in style in order to mock, comment on, or trivialize the Western genre's established traits, subjects, auteurs' styles, or some other target by means of humorous, satiric, or ironic imitation or parody. A prime example of Comedy Western includes The Paleface (1948), which makes a satirical effort to "send-up Owen Wister's novel The Virginian and all the cliches of the Western from the fearless hero to the final shootout on main street. The result was The Paleface (1948) which features a cowardly hero known as "Painless" Peter Potter (Bob Hope), an inept dentist who often entertains the notion that he's a crack sharpshooter and accomplished Indian fighter".^[21]

Contemporary Western

Also known as Neo-Westerns, these films have contemporary U.S. settings, and they utilize Old West themes and motifs (a rebellious anti-hero, open plains and desert landscapes, and gunfights). For the most part, they still take place in the

Examples include

The precursor to these^[citation needed] was the radio series Tales of the Texas Rangers (1950–1952), with Joel McCrea, a contemporary detective drama set in Texas, featuring many of the characteristics of traditional Westerns.

Electric Western

The 1971 film Zachariah starring John Rubinstein, Don Johnson and Pat Quinn was billed as the "first electric Western."^[23] The film featured multiple performing rock bands in an otherwise American West setting.^[23]

Zachariah featured appearances and music supplied by rock groups from the 1970s, including the James Gang^[23] and Country Joe and the Fish as "The Cracker Band."^[23] Fiddler Doug Kershaw had a musical cameo^[23] as does Elvin Jones as a gunslinging drummer named Job Cain.^[23]

The independent film Hate Horses starring Dominique Swain, Ron Thompson and Paul Dooley billed itself as the "second electric Western."^[24]

Epic Western

The epic western is a subgenre of the western that emphasizes the story of the American Old West on a grand scale. Many epic westerns are commonly set during a turbulent time, especially a war, as in Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), set during the American Civil War, or Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), set during the Mexican Revolution. One of the grandest films in this genre is Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), which shows many operatic conflicts centered on control of a town while utilizing wide scale shots on Monument Valley locations against a broad running time. Other notable examples include The Iron Horse (1924), Duel in the Sun (1946), The Searchers (1956), Giant (1956), The Big Country (1958), Cimarron (1960), How the West Was Won (1962), Duck, You Sucker! (1971), Heaven's Gate (1980), Dances with Wolves (1990), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), Django Unchained (2012) and The Revenant (2015).

Euro-Western

Euro Westerns are Western genre films made in Western Europe. The term can sometimes, but not necessarily, include the Spaghetti Western subgenre (see below). One example of a Euro Western is the Anglo-Spanish film The Savage Guns (1961). Several Euro-Western films, nicknamed Sauerkraut Westerns^[25] because they were made in Germany and shot in Yugoslavia, were derived from stories by novelist Karl May and were film adaptations of May's work. In the 2010s some new euro-westerns emerged like Kristian Levring's The Salvation, Martin Koolhoven's Brimstone and Andreas Prochaska's The Dark Valley.

Fantasy Western

Fantasy Westerns mixed in

Florida Westerns, also known as Cracker Westerns, are set in Florida during the Second Seminole War. An example is Distant Drums (1951) starring Gary Cooper.

Horror Western

A developing subgenre,^[

(2016) one of the most recent entries in the genre received wide critical acclaim for its chilling tale of cannibalism but, like many other movies in the genre, it wasn't a commercial success.

Indo Westerns

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The first Western films made in India - Mosagaalaku Mosagaadu (1970), made in Telugu, Mappusakshi (Malayalam),^[citation needed] Ganga (1972), and Jakkamma (Tamil)^{[citation needed]} - were based on Classic Westerns. Thazhvaram (1990), the Malayalam film directed by Bharathan and written by noted writer M. T. Vasudevan Nair, is perhaps the most resemblant of the Spaghetti Westerns in terms of production and cinematic techniques. Earlier Spaghetti Westerns laid the groundwork for such films as Adima Changala (1971) starring Prem Nazir, a hugely popular "zapata Spaghetti Western film in Malayalam, and Sholay (1975) Khote Sikkay (1973) and Thai Meethu Sathiyam (1978) are notable Curry Westerns. Kodama Simham (1990), a Telugu action film starring Chiranjeevi and Mohan Babu was one more addition to the Indo Western genre and fared well at the box office. It was also the first South Indian movie to be dubbed in English as Hunters of the Indian Treasure^[26]

Takkari Donga (2002), starring Telugu Maheshbabu, was applauded by critics but an average runner at box office. Quick Gun Murugun (2009), an Indian comedy film which spoofs Indian Western movies, is based on a character created for television promos at the time of the launch of the music network Channel [V] in 1994, which had cult following.^{[citation needed]} Irumbukkottai Murattu Singam (2010), a Western adventure comedy film, based on cowboy movies and paying homages to the John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Jaishankar, was made in Tamil.

Martial arts Western (Wuxia Western)

While many of these mash-ups (e.g.,

Kung Fu TV series, which ran from 1972 to 1975. Comedy examples include the Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson collaboration Shanghai Noon (2000). Further sub-divisions of this subgenre include Ninja Westerns and Samurai Westerns (incorporating samurai cinema themes), such as Red Sun (1971) with Charles Bronson and Toshiro Mifune

.

Meat pie Western

Main article:

Meat pie Western

The Meat pie Western (a slang term which plays on the Italo-western moniker "

The Northern genre is a subgenre of Westerns taking place in Alaska or Western Canada. Examples include several versions of the Rex Beach novel, The Spoilers (including 1930's The Spoilers, with Gary Cooper, and 1942's The Spoilers, with Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott and Wayne); The Far Country (1954) with James Stewart; North to Alaska (1960) with Wayne; Death Hunt (1981) with Charles Bronson; and The Grey Fox (1983) with Richard Farnsworth.

Ostern

Osterns, also known as "Red Western"s, are produced in Eastern Europe. They were popular in Communist Eastern European countries and were a particular favorite of Joseph Stalin, and usually portrayed the American Indians sympathetically, as oppressed people fighting for their rights, in contrast to American Westerns of the time, which frequently portrayed the Indians as villains. Osterns frequently featured Gypsies or Turkic people in the role of the Indians, due to the shortage of authentic Indians in Eastern Europe.

After the early 1960s, many American filmmakers began to question and change many traditional elements of Westerns, and to make Revisionist Westerns that encouraged audiences to question the simple hero-versus-villain dualism and the morality of using violence to test one's character or to prove oneself right. This is shown in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969). One major revision was the increasingly positive representation of Native Americans, who had been treated as "savages" in earlier films. Examples of such revisionist Westerns include Ride the High Country (1962), Richard Harris' A Man Called Horse (1970), Little Big Man (1970), Soldier Blue (1970), Man in the Wilderness (1971), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Dances with Wolves (1990) and Dead Man (1995). A few earlier Revisionist Westerns gave women more powerful roles, such as Westward the Women (1951) starring Robert Taylor. Another earlier work encompassed all these features, The Last Wagon (1956). In it, Richard Widmark played a white man raised by Comanches and persecuted by whites, with Felicia Farr and Susan Kohner playing young women forced into leadership roles.

Science fiction Western

The science fiction Western places science fiction elements within a traditional Western setting. Examples include Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (1965), The Valley of Gwangi (1969) featuring cowboys and dinosaurs. John Jakes's "Six Gun Planet" takes place on a future planet colonized by people consciously seeking to recreate the Old West (with cowboys riding robot horses...) [2]^{[permanent dead link]}. The movie Westworld (1973) and its sequel Futureworld (1976), Back to the Future Part III (1990), Wild Wild West (1999), Cowboys & Aliens (2011), and the TV series Westworld (2016, based on the movie). Fallout: New Vegas (2010) is an example of a video game that follows this format, with futuristic technology and genetic mutations placed among the western themes and desert sprawl of the Mojave Wasteland.

Space Western

The

The Western films directed by Sergio Leone were felt by some to have a different tone than the Hollywood Westerns.^[31] Veteran American actors Charles Bronson, Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood^[31] became famous by starring in Spaghetti Westerns, although the films also provided a showcase for other noted actors such as James Coburn, Henry Fonda, Rod Steiger, Klaus Kinski, and Jason Robards. Eastwood, previously the lead in the television series Rawhide, unexpectedly found himself catapulted into the forefront of the film industry by Leone's A Fistful of Dollars.^[31]

Snow Western

The Snow Western subgenre is a western based during mid to late winter, and set in the

The

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.

One of the results of genre studies is that some^[

]

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 films can be found also in some films belonging essentially to other genres. For example, Kelly's Heroes is a war film, 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.^{[citation needed]}

The character played by Humphrey Bogart in film noir films such as Casablanca and To Have and Have Not—an individual bound only by his own private code of honor—has a lot in common with the classic Western hero. In turn, the Western has also explored noir elements, as with the films Pursued and Sugar Creek.^{[citation needed]}

In many of

interstellar teleporter portal across the galaxy, in Conestoga wagons, their captain sporting mustaches and a little goatee and riding a Palomino horse—with Heinlein explaining that the colonists would need to survive on their own for some years, so horses are more practical than machines.^{[citation needed}

]

George Lucas's Star Wars films use many elements of a Western, and 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.^{[citation needed]}

Meanwhile, films such as The Big Lebowski, which plucked actor Sam Elliott out of the Old West and into a Los Angeles bowling alley, and Midnight Cowboy, about a Southern-boy-turned-gigolo in New York (who disappoints a client when he doesn't measure up to Gary Cooper), transplanted Western themes into modern settings for both purposes of parody and homage.^[36]

Literature

Visual art

A number of visual artists focused their work on representations of the

Western comics have included serious entries (such as the classic comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s (such as Kid Colt, Outlaw, Rawhide Kid, and Red Ryder), cartoons, and parodies (such as Cocco Bill and Lucky Luke). In the 1990s and 2000s, Western comics leaned toward the Weird West subgenre, usually involving supernatural monsters, or Christian iconography as in Preacher. However, more traditional Western comics are found throughout this period (e.g., Jonah Hex and Loveless).

Games

Western

Western radio dramas were very popular from the 1930s to the 1960s. Some popular shows include The Lone Ranger (first broadcast in 1933), The Cisco Kid (first broadcast in 1942), Dr. Sixgun (first broadcast in 1954), Have Gun–Will Travel (first broadcast in 1958), and Gunsmoke (first broadcast in 1952).^[46]

Web series

Westerns have been showcased in short episodic web series. Examples include League of STEAM, Red Bird and Arkansas Traveler.

See also

• 5-in-1 Blank Cartridges
• AFI'S 10 Top 10
• Boss of the plains
• Cowboy
• Crime fiction
• Dime Western
• Golden Boot Awards
• History of Movie Ranches
• History of United States continental expansion
• Native American History
• Native American history of California

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• Sombrero
• TV Western
• List of film genres
• List of genres
• List of Western computer and video games
• List of Western fiction authors
• Lists of Western films
• Western lifestyle
• Western Writers of America
• Earl W. Bascom
• Frederic Remington
• Charles Russell

References

Further reading

• Buscombe, Edward, and Christopher Brookeman. The BFI Companion to the Western (A. Deutsch, 1988)
• Everson, William K. A Pictorial History of the Western Film (New York: Citadel Press, 1969)
• Kitses, Jim. Horizons West: The Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (British Film Institute, 2007).
• Lenihan, John H. Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film (University of Illinois Press, 1980)
• Nachbar, John G. Focus on the Western (Prentice Hall, 1974)
• Simmon, Scott. The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre's First Half Century (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Westerns, Wild West in art and Native Americans in art.

• 500 Classic Western Films on DVD
• Most Popular Westerns at
  Internet Movie Database
• Western Writers of America website
• The Western, St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, 2002
• I Watch Westerns,
  Ludwig von Mises Institute
• Film Festival for the Western Genre website