A Primer on Westerns

The western is a Hollywood staple that epitomizes the greatest of story themes: good vs. evil, hero and villain, courage, justice, and romance.

Westerns are as old as film itself. In fact, the movie credited with being the first movie to tell a narrative story, The Great Train Robbery (1903), was a western. Early filmmaker D.W. Griffith and others made hundreds of short westerns in the first two decades of the 20th century.

The first feature-length western didn't arrive until 1914, when Cecil B. DeMille directed The Squaw Man. It succeeded at the box office, but it was not a great movie. In 1923, James Cruze directed what may be the first truly great feature-length western, The Covered Wagon. The movie showed the harrowing adventures of two wagon caravans heading west who must survive heat, snow, hunger, and indians. The movie also featured a well-concieved love triangle.

But the western didn't really hit its creative and commercial stride until 1939, when John Ford directed the excellent Stagecoach. The movie also made John Wayne, perhaps the biggest star of the genre, a Hollywood icon. Stagecoach became a template for hundreds of westerns in the 40s and 50s: they were sprawling, simple morality plays with heros in white hats and villains in black hats shooting at each other in main street at noon.

In the 60s, westerns became more psychological and less morally straightforward, especially in the European 'spaghetti western.' Sergio Leone headed this movement, with classics like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

In the 70s, the revisionist western took over, as filmmakers questioned the myths of the Old West and overblown conventions of previous westerns. The movement was led by Sam Peckinpah with The Wild Bunch (1969), Robert Altman with McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), and others.

In the 80s, the western died off as audiences stopped seeing them. They enjoyed a brief resurgence in the 90s with a few more revisionist westerns like Unforgiven (1992) and Tombstone (1993).

Today, westerns are once again a dead genre, which doesn't mean there aren't westerns being made, but they are few and far between, and not financially successful. It may require another revision of the genre to revive it. Perhaps if Quentin Tarantino or Martin Scorsese gave it a shot, audiences might once again find they enjoy a good western.