Westerns, perhaps the most important, recognized and popular genre of Hollywood movies worldwide, are as old as narrative film itself. Many scholars consider The Great Train Robbery (1903) to be the first important narrative film, which coincidentally established cinematic themes that would define westerns to this day: outlaws and lawmen, a train robbery a chase on horseback and a shoot-out, all within a wilderness setting. These motifs, which along with those of cowboys, cattle, Native Americans, cavalry, settlers and covered wagons had been established in American culture since the nineteenth century through the popularity of dime-store novels, wild-west shows and the writings of authors such as James Fennimore Cooper and Bret Hart, sustained the genre through to the era of the Second World War, when more mature and complex themes surfaced.

The era of the classic western feature film was ushered in with Stagecoach (1939), by veteran director John Ford, regarded by many critics and fans as the premier western film-maker in American cinema. Ford’s westerns had an epic quality that, along with an attention to characterization and dialogue, marked most western films throughout the 1940s and 1950s. This was the period of the epic western, filmed on location, which dealt with the broad sweep of American myth and history yet found time to confront the social problems and psychological torments which were the root causes of the conflicts between such groups as ranchers and homesteaders (Shane, 1953), whites and Indians (The Searchers, 1956), lawmen and badmen (High Noon, 1952) and cattlemen and society (Red River, 1948). Many of these films transcended the confines of the western genre to deal with issues relevant to contemporary America, but did so in ways which did not confront the mythical roots of the western itself.

The 1960s brought the anti-hero to westerns in films where protagonists, doomed in a West that could not survive a civilizing America, turned to violence as mercenaries (The Magnificent Seven, 1960), outlaws (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kïd, 1969), or sociopathic killers (The Wild Bunch, 1969). These “end of the frontier” themes paralleled growing American alienation in the 1960s and 1970s, which led western filmmakers and authors to question the accuracy of western history and the role of the West in the origins of American culture. As a result, views of Native Americans, long portrayed as the stereotyped “other” in the Manifest Destiny sagas of the epic western, were revised in such films as Little Big Man (1970) and Dances With Wolves (1990). This grittier approach to the people and events of the filmic West, both Old and New, has been mirrored in the novels of Elmore Leonard, Larry McMurtry and Thomas McGuane.

Many great directors of western films such as Ford, Howard Hawks and Anthony Mann won critical acclaim and fame in other movie genres. Some, like Sam Peckinpah and Budd Boetticher, seemed most at home in the West. This was also true of actors, like John Wayne, whose career was inextricably linked to his celluloid image as a Westerner, and Clint Eastwood, famed over the last four decades for his western film acting and directing.