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The Western is a film genre defined by the American Film Institute as films which are "set in the American West that [embody] the spirit, the struggle, and the demise of the new frontier." [1] Generally set in the American frontier between the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the closing of the frontier in 1890, [2] : 557 the genre also includes many examples of stories set in locations outside the frontier – including Northern Mexico, the Northwestern United States, Alaska, and Western Canada – as well as stories that take place before 1849 and after 1890. Western films comprise part of the larger Western genre, which encompasses literature, music, television, and plastic arts.
Western films derive from the Wild West shows that began in the 1870s. [3] : 48 Originally referred to as "Wild West dramas", the shortened term "Western" came to describe the genre. [4] Although other Western films were made earlier, The Great Train Robbery (1903) is often considered to mark the beginning of the genre. [2] [5] Westerns were a major genre during the silent era (1894–1929) and continued to grow in popularity during the sound era (post–1929).
The genre reached its pinnacle between 1945 and 1965 when it comprised roughly a quarter of studio output. [6] The advent of color and widescreen during this era opened up new possibilities for directors to portray the vastness of the American landscape. [3] : 105 This era also produced the genre's most iconic figures, including John Wayne and Randolph Scott, who developed personae that they maintained across most of their films. [7] Director John Ford is often considered the genre's greatest filmmaker. [8]
With the proliferation of television in the 1960s, television Westerns began to supersede film Westerns in popularity. [9] By the end of the decade, studios had mostly ceased to make Westerns. Despite their dwindling popularity during this decade, the 1960s gave rise to the revisionist Western, several examples of which became vital entries in the canon. [10]
Since the 1960s, new Western films have only appeared sporadically. Despite their decreased prominence, Western films remain an integral part of American culture and national mythology. [11] [12]
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". [1] The term "Western", used to describe a narrative film genre, appears to have originated with a July 1912 article in Motion Picture World magazine. [13]
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. [14] Film critic Philip French has said that the Western is "a commercial formula with rules as fixed and immutable as the Kabuki Theater." [15] : 12
Western films commonly feature protagonists such as sheriffs, cowboys, gunslingers, and bounty hunters, who are often depicted as seminomadic 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 ]
Film Westerns derive from the Wild West shows that began in the 1870s. [3] : 48 These shows, which included stage plays and outdoor exhibitions, culminated in Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a touring performance that ran from 1883 to 1913. Wild West shows, which were intended for urban audiences, established many of the elements that came to define Western films, such as the blending of fact and fiction and the romanticization of the frontier. [16] These early films were originally referred to as "Wild West dramas", the term "Western" came to describe the genre. The use of this shortened term appears to have originated with a July 1912 article in Motion Picture World magazine. [4]
The first films that belong to the Western genre are a series of short single reel silents made in 1894 by Edison Studios at their Black Maria studio in West Orange, New Jersey. These featured veterans of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show exhibiting skills acquired by living in the Old West – they included Annie Oakley (shooting) and members of the Sioux (dancing). [17]
Western films were enormously popular in the silent-film era (1894–1927). The earliest known Western narrative film is the British short Kidnapping by Indians , made by Mitchell and Kenyon in Blackburn, England, in 1899. [18] [19] The Great Train Robbery (1903, based on the earlier British film A Daring Daylight Burglary ), Edwin S. Porter's film starring Broncho Billy Anderson, is often erroneously 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". [20] The film's popularity opened the door for Anderson to become the screen's first Western 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. [21]
With the advent of sound in 1927–28, the major Hollywood studios rapidly abandoned Westerns, [22] leaving the genre to smaller studios and producers. These smaller organizations churned out countless low-budget features and serials in the 1930s. By the late 1930s, the Western film was widely regarded as a "pulp" genre in Hollywood, but its popularity was dramatically revived in 1939 by major studio productions such as Dodge City starring Errol Flynn, Jesse James with Tyrone Power, Union Pacific with Joel McCrea, Destry Rides Again featuring James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich, and especially John Ford's landmark Western adventure Stagecoach starring John Wayne, which became one of the biggest hits of the year. Released through United Artists, Stagecoach made John Wayne a mainstream screen star in the wake of a decade of headlining B Westerns. Wayne had been introduced to the screen 10 years earlier as the leading man in director Raoul Walsh's spectacular widescreen The Big Trail , which failed at the box office in spite of being shot on location across the American West, including the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and the giant redwoods, due in part to exhibitors' inability to switch over to widescreen during the Great Depression.
After the renewed commercial successes of the Western in the late 1930s, their popularity continued to rise until the 1950s, when the number of Western films produced outnumbered all other genres combined. [23]
The period from 1940 to 1960 has been called the "Golden Age of the Western". [24] It is epitomized by the work of several prominent directors including:
There have been several instances of resurgence for the Western genre. According to Netflix, the popularity of the genre is due to its malleability: "As America has evolved, so too have Westerns." [25]
During the 1960s and 1970s, Spaghetti Westerns from Italy became popular worldwide; this was due to the success of Sergio Leone's storytelling method. [26] [27]
Although experiencing waning popularity during the 1980s, the success of films such as Dances with Wolves (1990) and Unforgiven (1992) brought the genre back into the mainstream. [25] Back to the Future Part III (1990) was "a full-blown Western" set in 1885; although the least commercially successful of the trilogy and according to some a departure from the 1985 original (a sci-fi) and the 1989 sequel (an action adventure), Part III has been regarded by others as a fitting end to the series. [28]
At the turn of the 21st century, Westerns have once again seen an ongoing revival in popularity. [29] [30] Largely influenced by the recapturing of Americana mythology, appreciation for the vaquero folklore within Mexican culture and the US Southwest, interest in the Western lifestyle's music and clothing, along with popular videos games series such as Red Dead. [31] [32] [33] [34]
Screenwriter and scholar Eric R. Williams identifies Western films as one of eleven super-genres in his screenwriters' taxonomy, claiming that all feature length narrative films can be classified by these super-genres. The other ten super-genres are action, crime, fantasy, horror, romance, science fiction, slice of life, sports, thriller, and war. [35]
Western films often depict conflicts with Native Americans. While early Eurocentric Westerns frequently portray the Native Americans as dishonorable villains, the later and more culturally neutral Westerns gave Native Americans a more sympathetic treatment. Other recurring themes of Westerns include treks (e.g. The Big Trail) or perilous journeys (e.g. Stagecoach) or groups of bandits terrorizing small towns such as in The Magnificent Seven .[ citation needed ]
The Western goes beyond simply a cinematic genre, and extends into defining the myth of the West in American culture. [15] : 21–22
Early Westerns were mostly filmed in the studio, as in other early Hollywood films, but when location shooting became more common from the 1930s, producers of Westerns used desolate corners of Arizona, California, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, or Wyoming. These settings gave filmmakers the ability to depict vast plains, looming mountains, and epic canyons.[ citation needed ] Productions were also filmed on location at movie ranches. [36]
Often, the vast landscape becomes more than a vivid backdrop; it becomes a character in the film. After the early 1950s, various widescreen formats such as Cinemascope (1953) and VistaVision used the expanded width of the screen to display spectacular western landscapes.[ citation needed ] John Ford's use of Monument Valley as an expressive landscape in his films from Stagecoach to Cheyenne Autumn (1965), "present us with a mythic vision of the plains and deserts of the American West, embodied most memorably in Monument Valley, with its buttes and mesas that tower above the men on horseback, whether they be settlers, soldiers, or Native Americans". [37]
Clarence LeRoy Van Cleef Jr. was an American actor. He appeared in over 170 film and television roles in a career spanning nearly 40 years, but is best known as a star of Italian Spaghetti Westerns, particularly the Sergio Leone-directed Dollars Trilogy films For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). He received a Golden Boot Award in 1983 for his contribution to the Western film and television genre.
The Spaghetti Western is a broad subgenre of Western films produced in Europe. It emerged in the mid-1960s in the wake of Sergio Leone's film-making style and international box-office success. The term was used by foreign critics because most of these Westerns were produced and directed by Italians.
Sergio Leone was an Italian film director, producer, and screenwriter, credited as the pioneer of the spaghetti Western genre. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential directors in the history of cinema.
Stagecoach is a 1939 American Western film directed by John Ford and starring Claire Trevor and John Wayne in his breakthrough role. The screenplay by Dudley Nichols is an adaptation of "The Stage to Lordsburg", a 1937 short story by Ernest Haycox. The film follows a group primarily composed of strangers riding on a stagecoach through dangerous Apache territory.
The Western is a genre of fiction typically set in the American frontier between the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the closing of the frontier in 1890, and commonly associated with folk tales of the Western United States, particularly the Southwestern United States, as well as Northern Mexico and Western Canada.
John Martin Feeney, known professionally as John Ford, was an American film director and producer. He is regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers during the Golden Age of Hollywood, and was one of the first American directors to be recognized as an auteur. In a career of more than 50 years, he directed over 140 films between 1917 and 1965, and received six Academy Awards including a record four wins for Best Director for The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952).
Monument Valley is a region of the Colorado Plateau characterized by a cluster of sandstone buttes, the largest reaching 1,000 ft (300 m) above the valley floor. The most famous butte formations are located in northeastern Arizona along the Utah–Arizona state line. The valley is considered sacred by the Navajo Nation, the Native American people within whose reservation it lies.
Western fiction is a genre of literature set in the American Old West frontier and typically set from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Well-known writers of Western fiction include Zane Grey from the early 20th century and Louis L'Amour from the mid-20th century. The genre peaked around the early 1960s, largely due to the popularity of televised Westerns such as Bonanza. Readership began to drop off in the mid- to late 1970s and reached a new low in the 2000s. Most bookstores, outside a few west American states, only carry a small number of Western fiction books.
The revisionist Western is a sub-genre of the Western film. Called a post-classical variation of the traditional Western, the revisionist subverts the myth and romance of the traditional by means of character development and realism to present a less simplistic view of life in the "Old West". While the traditional Western always embodies a clear boundary between good and evil, the revisionist Western does not.
Western music is a form of country music composed by and about the people who settled and worked throughout the Western United States and Western Canada. Western music celebrates the lifestyle of the cowboy on the open ranges, Rocky Mountains, and prairies of Western North America. Directly related musically to old English, Irish, Scottish, and folk ballads, also the Mexican folk music of Northern Mexico and Southwestern United States influenced the development of this genre, particularly corrido, ranchera, New Mexico and Tejano. Western music shares similar roots with Appalachian music, which developed around the same time throughout Appalachia and the Appalachian Mountains. The music industry of the mid-20th century grouped the two genres together under the banner of country and western music, later amalgamated into the modern name, country music.
The Ostern is a film genre created in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc as a variation of the Western films. The word "Ostern" is a portmanteau derived from the German word Ost, meaning "East", and the English word "western". The term now includes two related genres:
Lemonade Joe, or the Horse Opera is a 1964 Czechoslovak musical comedy film, directed by Oldřich Lipský and written by Jiří Brdečka, based on his novel and stage play.
Western lifestyle or cowboy culture is the lifestyle, or behaviorisms, of, and resulting from the influence of, the attitudes, ethics and history of the American Western cowboy. In the present day these influences affect this sector of the population's choice of recreation, clothing, and consumption of goods.
Space Western is a subgenre of science fiction that uses the themes and tropes of Westerns within science-fiction stories in an outer space setting. Subtle influences may include exploration of new, lawless frontiers, while more overt influences may feature literal cowboys in outer space who use rayguns and ride robotic horses. Although initially popular, a strong backlash against perceived hack writing caused the genre to become a subtler influence until the 1980s, when it regained popularity. A further critical reappraisal occurred during the 2000s due to critical acclaim for Firefly.
A singing cowboy was a subtype of the archetypal cowboy hero of early Western films. It references real-world campfire side ballads in the American frontier, the original cowboys sang of life on the trail with all the challenges, hardships, and dangers encountered while pushing cattle for miles up the trails and across the prairies. This continues with modern vaquero traditions and within the genre of Western music, and its related New Mexico, Red Dirt, Tejano, and Texas country music styles. A number of songs have been written and made famous by groups like the Sons of the Pioneers and Riders in the Sky and individual performers such as Marty Robbins, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, Bob Baker and other "singing cowboys". Singing in the wrangler style, these entertainers have served to preserve the cowboy as a unique American hero.
Tony Anthony is an American actor, producer, screenwriter and director best known for his starring roles in Spaghetti Westerns, most of which were produced with the aid of his friends and associates Allen Klein and Saul Swimmer. These films consist of The Stranger series - A Stranger in Town (1967), The Stranger Returns (1967), The Silent Stranger (1968) and Get Mean (1975) - and the Zatoichi-inspired Blindman (1971). Anthony also wrote, produced and starred in Comin' at Ya! (1981) and Treasure of the Four Crowns (1983), the first film being largely credited with beginning the 1980s revival of 3D films in Hollywood.
Django is a fictional character who appears in a number of Spaghetti Western films. Originally played by Franco Nero in the Italian film of the same name by Sergio Corbucci, he has appeared in 31 films since then. Especially outside of the genre's home country Italy, mainly Germany, countless releases have been retitled in the wake of the original film's enormous success.
Western comics is a comics genre usually depicting the American Old West frontier and typically set during the late nineteenth century. The term is generally associated with an American comic books genre published from the late 1940s through the 1950s. Western comics of the period typically featured dramatic scripts about cowboys, gunfighters, lawmen, bounty hunters, outlaws, and Native Americans. Accompanying artwork depicted a rural America populated with such iconic images as guns, cowboy hats, vests, horses, saloons, ranches, and deserts, contemporaneous with the setting.
Gothic Western is a subculture, artistically similar to gothic Americana, but blends goth and Western lifestyles that are notably visible in fashion, music, film and literature.