'There are some things a man just can't walk away from' -- The Ringo Kid
The Western Genre
The Western as a film genre was already well established by 1908, after a spate of imitations of Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903). By 1914 reviewers were already complaining that the genre was predictable and old hat. Popularity of B Westerns prompted studios to produce feature Westerns. Western grew in popularity during 1920s, surviving a brief hiccup with the advent of sound. Films became more explicitly epic in theme and form. Rise of the Western bound up with emergence of the new industry -- importance of setting, location shooting and authenticity, centrality of the star. The feature-length Western was virtually abandoned during the Depression and was avoided by the studios for most of the 1930s. [Though B Western production continued unabated]. Why? Perhaps, during economic depression, the heroic myth of progressive development represented by the Frontier was no longer believable: there was no economic or social safety valve in the West (cf. Turner thesis). More prosaically, Hollywood became more interested in other kinds of story. Gangster genre, for example, transferred moral battlefield of western to contemporary urban milieu, in part due to public demand for more contemporary depression-era stories. Revival came in 1939. For the next 30 years the Western remained the most popular form of action film. Renewed interest in positive assessment of American history, particularly with rise of extremist ideologies in Europe and the threat of war. There was a need, then, to revive, strengthen, and celebrate national myths: the heroic expression of America's democratic virtues: freedom and equality, popular rule, hostility to big business. The Frontier was back in vogue as the primary expression of these virtues: the West (nature/America) as embodiment of virtue, in opposition to the East (culture/Europe), with its tyranny, brutality, and class conflict. Westerns of the late 1930s and early 1940s presented, then, either an epic vision of the nation (the progressive march of American democracy and ingenuity Westward) or a populist celebration of the outlaw (the lone individual against impersonal corporate forces).
"The
genre setting contains not only a set of objects signifying a certain time,
place, and milieu; it invokes a set of fundamental assumptions and expectations
about the kinds of event that can occur in the setting, the kinds of motive
that will operate, the sort of outcome one can predict. If setting does
not absolutely determine story, it at least defines the range of possible
plots and treatments. As stories accumulate and are mnemonically linked
to a particular visual setting, the imaginative possibilities of the generic
terrain are both expanded and mapped for future reference." (Richard Slotkin,
Gunfighter Nation, p. 233)
"When fully developed, the mythic space of a genre invests even the sketchiest characterization or setting with resonance, as if it were part of a larger culture, with its own spatial architecture, manners, folkways, and politics. [...] Genre space is also mythic space: a pseudo-historical (or pseudo-real) setting that is powerfully associated with stories and concerns rooted in the culture's myth/ideological tradition. It is also a setting in which the concrete work of contemporary myth-making is done. This is particularly true of the Western, whose roots go deeper into the American cultural past than those of any other movie genre." (Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, pp. 233-234).
Stock Characters and Scenarios
the figure of the melancholy, nonchalant cowboy hero -- Henry, The Ringo Kid the morally ambiguous marshall -- Curly the cultured Eastern lady out of her element in the West -- Mrs. Lucy Mallory [pregnant army wife] the goodhearted prostitute at home in the West -- Dallas the respectable banker who turns out to be a crook -- Gatewood the frontier doctor / the comic drunk -- Doc Boone the southern gentleman / gambler -- Hatfield effeminate eastern whisky-drummer -- Peacock the "bad guys" -- Luke Plummer and his gang -- LARGELY ABSENT Indians -- LARGELY ABSENT landscape and its relation to the men upon it -- Monument Valley, Utah -- very alien looking -- represents the foreignness and wildness of the frontier -- 'civilised' folk are insignificant and vulnerable within it
The
film inverts this binary structure -- the harsh life in the wilderness
undermines social norms. Doc, Ringo, and Dallas have all been despoiled
by living in the West, but it is this despoilation itself that enables
them to come through. Indeed, it is suggested that social convention, far
from being the means of constructing and maintaining a strong community,
is the very instrument for destroying, or attempting to destroy, genuine
virtue and character.