What makes westerns good

Westerns offer a unique scope for the physical background to become another character. But there have been great westerns shot on back lots in Hollywood that make virtually no use of traditional western scenery beyond a western town set— High Noon , for example. Re-watchability : In a way, this is the Cimarron vs. Stagecoach question. Yes for Stagecoach ; not so much for Cimarron. Film-making skills for its time : Most movies are inseparable from the time they were made. Impact on the genre in its time : How was the movie received upon its original release?

How are westerns different if at all because of this movie? Sometimes you can even forgive a clunky story if a movie changed the course of what was made later. This is also a tribute to the genre.

The ground rules of the Western more or less forced Verbinski and company into that treacherous territory. They could make, say, a movie about Caribbean pirates without addressing the slave trade, even though such pirates often held slaves as cargo.

That's fine, because pirate movies are about gold, not slaves. Everyone knows that. Westerns, on the contrary, are traditionally about cowboys and Indians, or at least homesteaders and land and railroad barons, the kinds of men who built the cities we live in today. It's the task of Westerns to address that history, even as decade by decade that history becomes more and more embarrassing to us. In theory, it's a beautiful thing, though in practice it means cowboy movies are easy to bungle, because by now they all take place on contested ground.

Every Western must find its own way reconcile itself to the founding contradictions of America. A certain kind of escapism becomes impossible. Unless, of course, we stop making and watching Westerns. The genres that currently rule the box office do other things well--sci-fi movies can address the ecological crisis and challenges of new technology, for instance, and superhero movies can provide never-ending glosses on the core myth of American exceptionalism--but none are particularly engaged with history, especially pre-World War II.

And none can boast the richness of symbolic language developed by Westerns over the course of a century at the heart of film culture. It would be a terrible thing to give up on that language, especially now, in the wake of The Lone Ranger 's failure. Isn't there anyone, perhaps a female or non-white director, capable of making a great mass-audience Western for the Obama era? Or, if it's too late for that, then for whatever era comes next?

If neither, here's hoping that filmmakers will keep trying at the art-house level and on cable television. The other great theme of the Western, after that of the conquering of native peoples and the establishment of civilization in the desert, is that of loss and of nostalgia for a certain way of life--the early freedoms of the West, the idea of riding across an unfenced landscape, the infinite possibilities of the frontier.

That "West," of course, is already gone, fallen, conquered. It has been for decades, even though holding onto some sense of it seems crucial to our identity as Americans. Movie Westerns have been tracking that loss for a century. The first film to feature an all-Native American cast was Hiawatha , made by the Colonial Motion Picture Corporation and based on Longfellow's poem. Young Cecil B. De Mille's first motion picture was The Squaw Man , usually credited as the first feature filmed entirely in Hollywood.

Thomas Ince , known for inventing the studio system, was the first studio executive who embraced the western in the teen years. He arrived in California in , where he produced detailed scripts with new situations and characters for a vast number of classic westerns. In , his Bison Company production studios known as Inceville purchased the Miller Brothers Ranch and the Wild West Show to use their props and performers for his assembly-line, mass-produced films.

In the early s, famed director John Ford's older brother Francis was directing and starring in westerns in California for producer Ince, before joining Universal and Carl Laemmle in Ince was responsible for discovering and bringing Shakespearean actor William S. Hart served as both actor and director after moving to Hollywood, and was often portrayed as a "good bad man" on the screen with his Pinto pony named Fritz.

He emerged as one of the greatest Western heroes in the mids, until the release of his last film in All rights reserved. Filmsite: written by Tim Dirks. Search for:. Facebook Twitter Email. Westerns Film Plots: Usually, the central plot of the western film is the classic, simple goal of maintaining law and order on the frontier in a fast-paced action story.

Subgenres of Westerns: There are many subgenres of the typical or traditional western, to name a few: the epic Western i. Silent Westerns: The western was among the first film genres, growing in status alongside the development of Hollywood's studio production system.

A few of the earliest western-like films were two shorts from Thomas Edison's Manufacturing Company: the less-than 1 minute-long Cripple Creek Bar Room Scene with its prototypical western bar-room scene, and a barmaid played by a man Poker at Dawson City set during the Alaska Gold Rush, about a crooked poker game with flagrant cheating that led to a fight Edwin S.

Porter's Pioneering Western: But the 'first real movie' or commercially narrative film that gave birth to the genre was Edwin S. I judge he is in his seventies now, and nearer eighty than seventy. They too can benefit from understanding that Western fiction means more than just the Western aesthetic. Shane follows the titular gunslinger as he gets bound up in a conflict between honest homesteaders and a gang of criminals.

First, through the potential revenge of the criminals he confronts, and then later through the more complex idea that his perfect masculinity is tempting the married Marian. Interestingly, Marian, her husband Joe, and Shane all understand why this is, and work calmly to negate its expected outcome. Shane selflessly leaves the family, his old-fashioned masculinity having been the perfect tool to get them out of trouble but also something which has no place in their everyday lives.

He was a man like father in whom a boy could believe in the simple knowing that what was beyond comprehension was still clean and solid and right. The truth is that any changing way of life maps brilliantly onto the themes and structure of a Western narrative. All you need is a lone protagonist, emblematic of a changing system of belief, who can be used to explore both the benefits and problems of a set of ideas. A bastion of the traditional idea that priests should bind and nurture their community, Father James is viewed with new suspicion and hostility in the wake of the sexual abuse revelations surrounding the church.

Westerns offer a perfect canvas on which to interrogate and explore the place of old values in a new world, but they also offer the temptation to get lost in your own ego. The Old West is a peculiar time period for fiction because it is defined by its own deliberate mythology. This is neither a wholly good nor wholly bad thing.

Few periods of history are remembered with exacting accuracy by the layperson, and society needs both fictional and ideological stories to function.

Where things get tricky for authors is when common fictions or persistent tropes are assumed to be historically accurate. An obvious example is the simplification of the relationship between Indigenous American tribes and frontier settlers, with the former group often depicted as mindless savages.

The solution is to do your research, even if you think you already know everything you need to about the Old West. What does this mean for a traditional Western? Well, it might influence how you understand the economy and history of your Western town, as well as how you think about certain characters. I started by saying that it can seem strange that Westerns are a fully formed genre rather than just a niche topic.

Either way, let me know in the comments. Rob has yet to encounter a bookshop he can walk past, a habit which has become deadly now that you can buy the newest releases digitally at 1am. Thankfully, it also comes in handy for providing the best advice on writing your book. Hence, a western is cowboys with stetson hats, six guns, horses, cattle drives, rustling, stage coach hold ups, etc.

This is what envelopes an American western. Learn your history. Gunfighters, marshals, bad guy, ranchers, townsfolk. Wow, your advice is bdly tainted. You need to get educated! As I said in the article, I think it makes more sense to focus on the ideas behind the genre than a strict time period and aesthetic style — having partially created the idea of the Western setting, it seems odd to then declare it hallowed ground.

At face value, it fits your definition of a Western, but there are enough odd elements that it might get itself disqualified. An interesting read, if nothing else. No Country for Old Men is certainly a western. As Wood elaborated on, a big part of the western genera is the imagery, but it is also the themes. NCFOM uses less of the imagery whilst there still certainly is some , and more of themes. NCFOM is meant to be a somewhat subversive take on the western genera. I mean. Sherriff Ed is the most obvious example of this in the movie itself.

I think your staunch dislike of this film is entirely misinformed and misguided. It severely undermines your points when you take such a staunch stance on something without being able to acknowledge the good points about a film. I have ventured a YA book which I deliberately designed to be read which calls the classic western to mind; a reboot of the Lone Ranger, but with all the identifying serial numbers carefully scoured off — and revamped as an adventure set in Texas when it was an independent republic.

I think most people when then think of a classic western are also being pretty specific as to time and place; post Civil War, and set somewhere west of the Mississippi. My own books aside from Lone Star Sons are sometimes classed as Westerns, which is some ways is a bit limiting.

I prefer to think of them as historical novels set in the 19th century American west; a wagon train on the California trail, with nary a six-shooter in sight, the life of a woman during the Texas war for independence and running a boarding house in Austin — no cowboys there although there is a company of early Texas Rangers.

The settling of the Texas Hill Country — with immigrant German settlers; eventually some cattle drives, with cowboy hats and six-shooters, plus a conflict with a vicious horse-thief and all-around baddie.

A Harvey girl from Boston, working in a railroad restaurant in New Mexico. Two Englishwomen settling in Texas in the s — some classical elements of the Western there, but with a twist. A fantastic question, and certainly one which seems to arouse strong views. Personally, I try to adopt the mindset that genre — like language itself — is just a tool we use to better understand and explore important ideas.

Hi Rob, this is interesting. I write westerns and love the wide range of stories I can tell, but all with a Stetson and a six-shooter. LOL I love the genre. Thanks for the kind words and for commenting. Much, much more. It was a definite time in history when the American West was being settled and it dealt more with the struggles in trying to tame the wild land and about the dreams of those men and women to carve out a place where they could set down lasting roots than it ever was about an idea.

The western is not an idea. It was a way of life—trying to make something from nothing. History is full of the men and women who sacrificed everything in order to reach their goals.