Western (genre)

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The Western is a genre of various arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the later half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. There are also a number of films about Western-type characters in contemporary settings, such as Junior Bonner set in the 1970s and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada in the 21st century.


The Lone Ranger; a famous heroic gunslinger

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 Americans, inhabitants of the frontier.[1] The Western depicts a society organized around codes of honor and personal, direct or private justice such as the feud, rather than one organized around rationalistic, abstract law, in which social order is maintained predominately through relatively impersonal institutions. The popular perception of the Western is a story that centers on the life of a semi-nomadic wanderer, usually a cowboy or a gunfighter.[1] A showdown or duel at high noon featuring two or more gunfighters is a stereotypical scene in the popular conception of Westerns.


The Western typically takes these elements and uses them to tell simple morality tales, although some notable examples (e.g. the later Westerns of John Ford or Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven) are more morally ambiguous. Westerns often stress the harshness of the wilderness and frequently set the action in an arid, desolate landscape. Specific settings include isolated forts, ranches and homesteads; the Native American village; or the small frontier town with its saloon, general store, livery stable and jailhouse. Apart from the wilderness, it is usually the saloon that emphasizes that this is the Wild West: it is the place to go for music (raucous piano playing), women (often prostitutes), gambling (draw poker or five card stud), drinking (beer or whiskey), brawling and shooting. In some Westerns, where civilization has arrived, the town has a church and a school; in others, where frontier rules still hold sway, it is, as Sergio Leone said, "where life has no value".



The American Film Institute defines western films as those "set in the American West that embod[y] the spirit, the struggle and the demise of the new frontier."[2] The term Western, used to describe a narrative film genre, appears to have originated with a July 1912 article in Motion Picture World Magazine.[3] 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.[4] Western films commonly feature as their protagonists stock characters such as cowboys, gunslingers, and bounty hunters, often depicted as semi-nomadic wanderers who wear Stetson hats, bandannas, spurs, and buckskins, use revolvers or rifles as everyday tools of survival, and ride between dusty towns and cattle ranches on trusty steeds.

Western films were enormously popular in the silent era. However, with the advent of sound in 1927-28 the major Hollywood studios rapidly abandoned Westerns,[citation needed] leaving the genre to smaller studios and producers, who 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 such major studio productions as Dodge City (starring Errol Flynn), Jesse James (with Tyrone Power in the title role), Union Pacific (with Joel McCrea), Destry Rides Again (featuring James Stewart in his first western, supported by Marlene Dietrich) and perhaps most notably, the release of John Ford's landmark Western adventure Stagecoach, which became one of the biggest hits of the year released through United Artists, and made John Wayne a mainstream screen star in the wake of a decade of headlining B westerns. Wayne had been introduced to the screen ten years earlier as the leading man in director Raoul Walsh's widescreen classic The Big Trail, which failed at the box office due to exhibitors' inability to switch over to widescreen during the Depression.


Western set at Universal Studios in Hollywood




Prolific author and screenwriter Frank Gruber listed seven plots for Westerns:[6][7]


Gruber said that good writers used these basic plots to create believable stories.[7] Other subgenres include the spaghetti western, the epic western, singing cowboy westerns, and a few comedy westerns. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Western was re-invented with the revisionist Western.[8]

Classical Westerns

Edwin S. Porter's 1903 film starring Broncho Billy Anderson The Great Train Robbery 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."[9] The film's popularity opened the door for Anderson to become the screen's first cowboy star, making several hundred Western film shorts. So popular was the genre that he soon had competition in the form of Tom Mix and William S. Hart. The Golden Age of the Western is epitomized by the work of two directors: John Ford and Howard Hawks (both of whom often used John Wayne in lead roles).

The Northern genre is a subgenre of Westerns taking place in Western Canada or Alaska. Examples include The Far Country with James Stewart and North to Alaska with John Wayne.
Florida Westerns
Florida Westerns or Cracker Westerns as the title suggests are set in Florida.
Euro Westerns
Euro Westerns are Western 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 1961 Anglo-Spanish film The Savage Guns. Several such films nicknamed Sauerkraut Westerns[10] were made in Germany and shot in Yugoslavia, derived from stories by novelist Karl May (cf. article on film adaptations).
Spaghetti Westerns
During the 1960s and 1970s, a revival of the Western emerged in Italy with the "Spaghetti Westerns" or "Italo-Westerns". The most famous of them is The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Many of these films are low-budget affairs, shot in locations (for example, the Spanish desert region of Almería) chosen for their inexpensive crew and production costs as well as their similarity to landscapes of the Southwestern United States. Spaghetti Westerns were characterized by the presence of more action and violence than the Hollywood Westerns. Also, the protagonists usually acted out of more selfish motives (money or revenge being the most common) than in the classical westerns.
The films directed by Sergio Leone have a parodic dimension (the strange opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West being a reversal of Fred Zinnemann's High Noon opening scene) which gave them a different tone than the Hollywood Westerns. Veteran American actors Charles Bronson, Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood became famous by starring in Spaghetti Westerns, although the films also provided a showcase for other noted actors such as Jason Robards, James Coburn, Klaus Kinski and Henry Fonda. 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.

Meat pie Westerns

The meat pie Western is a slang term to used to describe an American Western-style movie or TV series set in Australia, and especially the Australian Outback. A play on the Italo-western moniker "spaghetti Westerns".[11] Films such as Rangle River (1936), Kangaroo (1952), The Man from Snowy River (1982), Five Mile Creek (1983-85) - TV series, and Quigley Down Under (1991) are all representative of the genre. The terms is used to differentiate more Americanised Australian films from those with a more historical basis, such as ones about bushrangers.[12]
Eastern-European-produced Westerns were popular in Communist Eastern European countries, and were a particular favorite of Joseph Stalin.[citation needed] "Red Western" or "Ostern" films 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. They frequently featured Gypsies or Turkic people in the role of the Indians,[citation needed] due to the shortage of authentic Indians in Eastern Europe.
Gojko Mitić portrayed righteous, kind hearted and charming Indian chiefs (e.g. in Die Söhne der großen Bärin directed by Josef Mach). He became honorary chief of the tribe of Sioux when he visited the United States of America in the 1990s and the television crew accompanying him showed the tribe one of his films. American actor and singer Dean Reed, an expatriate who lived in East Germany, also starred in several films.
Revisionist Western
After the early 1960s, many American film-makers began to question and change many traditional elements of Westerns. One major change was in the increasingly positive representation of Native Americans who had been treated as "savages" in earlier films (Little Big Man, Dances with Wolves, Dead Man). Audiences were encouraged to question the simple hero-versus-villain dualism and the morality of using violence to test one's character or to prove oneself right.
Some recent Westerns give women more powerful roles. One of the earlier films that encompasses all these features was the 1956 adventure film The Last Wagon in which 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. Westward the Women (1951) starring Robert Taylor is another example.
Acid Western
Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum refers[specify] to a makeshift 1960s and 1970s genre called the acid Western, associated with Dennis Hopper, Jim McBride, and Rudy Wurlitzer, as well as films like Monte Hellman's The Shooting, Alejandro Jodorowsky's bizarre experimental film El Topo (The Mole), and Robert Downey Sr.'s Greaser's Palace. The 1970 film El Topo is an allegorical cult Western and underground film about the eponymous character, a violent black-clad gunfighter, and his quest for enlightenment. The film is filled with bizarre characters and occurrences, use of maimed and dwarf performers, and heavy doses of Christian symbolism and Eastern philosophy. Some spaghettis also crossed over into the acid genre, such as Enzo G. Castellari's mystical Keoma (released in 1976), a Western reworking of Ingmar Bergman's metaphysical The Seventh Seal.
More recent films include Alex Cox's Walker, and Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man. Rosenbaum describes the "acid Western" as "formulating a chilling, savage frontier poetry to justify its hallucinated agenda." Ultimately, the "acid Western" expresses a counterculture sensibility to critique and replace capitalism with alternative forms of exchange.[13]
Contemporary Westerns/Neo-Westerns
Although these films have contemporary American settings, 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 American West and reveal the progression of the Old West mentality into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This sub-genre often features Old West-type characters struggling with displacement in a "civilized" world that rejects their outdated brand of justice.
Examples include Hud starring Paul Newman (1963); Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972), Junior Bonner (1972), and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974); Simon Wincer's Quigley Down Under; Robert Rodríguez's El Mariachi (1992) and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003); John Sayles's Lone Star (1996); Tommy Lee Jones's The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005); Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005); Wim Wenders's Don't Come Knocking (2005); Hearts of the West starring Jeff Bridges (1975); Alan J. Pakula's Comes a Horseman (1978); John Sturges's Bad Day at Black Rock (1955); the Coen brothers Academy Award-winning No Country For Old Men (2007); and Justified (2010-present). Call of Juarez: The Cartel is an example of a Neo-Western video game. Likewise, the television series Breaking Bad, which takes place in modern times, features many examples of Western archetypes. According to creator Vince Gilligan, "After the first Breaking Bad episode, it started to dawn on me that we could be making a contemporary western. So you see scenes that are like gunfighters squaring off, like Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef — we have Walt and others like that."[14]
The precursor to these was the radio series (1950–1952) Tales of the Texas Rangers, a contemporary detective drama set in Texas, featuring many of the characteristics of traditional Westerns.
Science fiction Western
This subgenre places science fiction elements within a traditional terran Western setting. Examples include Wild Wild West, Westworld, its sequel Futureworld, Cowboys & Aliens, "Back to the Future Part III", and the hybrid film Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter. Damnation is a video game example of the science fiction Western.
Space Western
Unlike the science fiction Western, the space Western transposes traditional genre themes onto a space frontier backdrop, updating them with futuristic technologies. Examples include Bravestarr, Outland, and Firefly (as well as the film Serenity based on Firefly).
Indo Western
Westerm films in India was first made in Telugu Mosagaalaku Mosagaadu in 1970. Following with films Ganga and Jakkamma starring Jaishankar in Tamil. But those films were more based on Classic Westerns. Spaghetti Westerns laid the groundwork for Sholay in 1975 after which it was called as curry western . Followed by Khote Sikkay and Thai Meethu Sathiyam were some notable films of this genre.
Thazhvaram, 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 production and cinematic techniques.
In modern age Takkari Donga a 2002 Indo western film starring Telugu Superstar Maheshbabu was applauded by critics but an average runner at box office, Quick Gun Murugun a 2009 Indian comedy film which is a spoof on Indian western movies. The movie 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. In 2010 Irumbukkottai Murattu Singam "Western adventure comedy film" based on Cowboy movies and paying homages to the John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Jaishankar.
Horror Western
A developing sub-genre,[citation needed] with roots in films such as Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966), which depicts the legendary outlaw Billy the Kid fighting against the notorious vampire. The Ghoul Goes West was an unproduced Ed Wood film to star Bela Lugosi as Dracula in the Old West.
Recent examples include the 1999 film Ravenous, which deals with cannibalism at a remote US army outpost, and the 2008 film The Burrowers, about a band of trackers who are stalked by the titular creatures. The Red Dead Redemption downloadable content "Undead Nightmare" is an example of a horror western video game.
Weird Western
This subgenre blends elements of a classic Western with other elements. The Wild Wild West and its later film adaptation blends the Western with steampunk and Jonah Hex blends the Western with superhero elements. This subgenre can encompass others, such as the Horror Western and the science fiction Western, e.g. Firefly (see above).
Western satire
This subgenre in its current usage is imitative in its style to mock, comment on, or trivialize the genre's established traits, subjects, auteurs' styles or some other target by means of humorous,satiric or ironic imitation. Such titles include Blazing Saddles, Carry On Cowboy, Three Amigos, The Hallelujah Trail, The Scalphunters, Rustlers' Rhapsody, Support Your Local Sheriff!, Support Your Local Gunfighter and Maverick.
Pornographic Western
The most rare of the Western sub-genres, pornographic Westerns use the old West as a background for stories primarily focused on erotica. The three major examples of the porn Western are Russ Meyer's nudie-cutie Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962) and the hardcore A Dirty Western (1975) and Sweet Savage. The later film starred Aldo Ray, a veteran actor who had appeared in traditional Westerns, in a non-sex role. Some critics may include Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo in this sub-genre.

Genre studies[edit]


In the 1960s academic and critical attention to cinema as a legitimate art form emerged. American Westerns of the mid 20th Century romanticize the ideas of loyalty and virtue.[citation needed] Westerns of the late 20th Century possess a more negative view of the early American frontier. 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[who?] have argued that "Westerns" need not take place in the American West or even in the 19th century, as the codes can be found in other types of films. For example, a very typical Western plot is that an eastern lawman heads west, where he matches wits and trades bullets with a gang of outlaws and thugs, and is aided by a local lawman who is well-meaning but largely ineffective until a critical moment when he redeems himself by saving the hero's life. This description can be used to describe any number of Westerns, but also other films such as Die Hard, Top Gun, and Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai which are frequently cited examples of films that do not take place in the American West but have many themes and characteristics common to Westerns. Likewise, films set in the American Old West may not necessarily be considered "Westerns."






John Wayne (1948)

The character played by Humphrey Bogart in film noir films such as Casablanca, To Have and Have Not or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre—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.




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, transplanted Western themes into modern settings for both purposes of parody and homage.[16]

A most recent example of a Western-genre film is Django Unchained - a 2012 American film (characterized as a "Southern" as it takes place in the antebellum era of the Southern United States rather than the Old West) written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. The film starred Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Samuel L. Jackson and was released on December 25, 2012 in North America.


Television Westerns are a sub-genre of the Western. When television became popular in the late 1940s and 1950s, TV Westerns quickly became an audience favorite. Beginning with re-broadcasts of existing films soon a number of movie cowboys had their own TV shows. As the Western became more in demand new stories and stars were introduced. A number of long-running TV Westerns became classics in their own right. Notable TV Westerns include Bonanza, Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, Have Gun – Will Travel, Maverick, Rawhide, The Virginian, The Big Valley, and Wagon Train.

The peak year for television Westerns was 1959, with 26 such shows airing during prime-time. Increasing costs of American television production led to most action half hour series vanishing in the early 1960s to be replaced by hour long television shows, increasingly in color.[17] Traditional westerns died out in the late 1960s as a result of network changes in demographic targeting along with pressure from parental television groups. Future entries in the genre would incorporate elements from other genera such as crime drama and mystery whodunit elements. Western shows from the 1970s included McCloud, Hec Ramsey, Little House on the Prairie, and Kung Fu. In the 1990s and 2000s, hour-long Westerns and slickly packaged made-for-TV movie Westerns were introduced. Examples include Lonesome Dove and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. As well, new elements were once again added to the Western formula, such as the Western-science fiction show Firefly, created by Joss Whedon in 2002. Deadwood was a critically acclaimed Western series which aired on HBO from 2004 through 2006.


Western fiction is a genre of literature set in the American Old West and most commonly between the years of 1860 and 1900. The first critically recognized Western was The Virginian by Owen Wister. Well-known writers of Western fiction include Zane Grey from the early 1900s and Louis L'Amour from the mid 20th century. Many writers better known in other genres like Elmore Leonard, Leigh Brackett, and Larry McMurtry have also written Western novels The genre's popularity peaked in the 1960s, due in part to the end of many pulp magazines, the popularity of televised Westerns, and the rise of the spy novel. Readership began to drop off in the mid- to late 1970s and has reached a new low in the 2000s. Most book stores, outside of a few Western states, only carry a small number of Western novels and short story collections.

Literary forms that share similar themes include stories of the American frontier, the gaucho literature of Argentina and tales of the settlement of the Australian Outback.

Visual art[edit]

A number of visual artists focused their work on representations of the American Old West. American West-oriented art is sometimes referred to as "Western Art" by Americans. This relatively new category of art includes paintings, sculptures and sometimes Native American crafts. Initially, subjects included exploration of the Western states and cowboy themes. Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell are two artists who captured the "Wild West" on canvas. Some art museums and art collectors feature American Western Art.

Other media[edit]

The Western is popular in comics, computer and video games, anime, role-playing games, and radio dramas.

Western comics have included serious entries (such as the classic comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s), and cartoon and parody (such as Lucky Luke and Cocco Bill). In the 1990s and 2000s, the Western comic leaned toward the Weird West sub-genre, usually involving supernatural monsters, or Christian iconography as in Preacher. However, more traditional western comics are found throughout this period, from Jonah Hex to Loveless.

With anime, genre entries tend towards the science fiction Western (Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Outlaw Star, etc.) although contemporary Westerns also appear (El Cazador de la Bruja, set in modern day Mexico).

Western computer games are often either straight Western or a Western-horror hybrid. Some Western themed-computer games include the 1970s game The Oregon Trail, the 1990s games Sunset Riders, Outlaws, Mad Dog McCree, and the 2000s-era Gun, Red Dead Revolver, Red Dead Redemption and Call of Juarez. Other video games adapt the science fiction Western or Weird West subgenres (Gunman Chronicles, Fallout, Mass Effect and Darkwatch).

Western radio dramas were very popular from the 1930s to the 1960s. Some popular shows include The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid, Doctor Six-Gun, Have Gun–Will Travel, and Gunsmoke.[18]

In the present times there have been movies and television series (miniseries including) created that are not strictly westerns, since kept in the contemporary times, but their general plot, set and atmosphere clearly refer to the ones of traditional westerns. That includes Sylvester (1985), Wildfire (2005-2008), The Horse Whisperer (1998) and many others.

See also[edit]


  1. ^ a b c Newman, Kim (1990). Wild West Movies. Bloomsbury. 
  6. ^ Gruber, Frank The Pulp Jungle Sherbourne Press, 1967
  10. ^ p. 118 Brookeman, Christopher & British Film Institute The BFI Companion to the Western A. Deutsch, 1993
  12. ^ "HOLLYWOOD." The Australian Women's Weekly 4 Nov 1981: 157 accessed 28 Dec 2011
  14. ^ "Contemporary Western: An interview with Vince Gilligan". News (United States: Local IQ). 27 March 2013. Retrieved 31 May 2013. 
  15. ^ Patrick Crogan. "Translating Kurosawa." Senses of Cinema.
  16. ^ Robert Silva. "Not From 'Round Here... Cowboys Who Pop Up Outside the Old West." Future of the Classic.
  18. ^ Old Time Radio Westerns site dedicated to the Radio Western Genre

External links[edit]