The western is a uniquely American movie genre. Born at the turn-of-the-century, at a time when motion pictures were still in their infancy, the western's visual potential was immediately apparent: Gun duels between cowboys, shootouts between heroes and bandits, attacks by Indian warriors, and chases between opponents on horseback were already the stuff of which Wild West shows of the kind presented by Buffalo Bill Cody and the Ringling Brothers were made. Westerns were all the more alluring because of the available talent with which to produce them. Many people were around who had made their living some of the time riding, roping, and branding out on the range; and although many a well known outlaw and lawman, including Doc Holliday, Bill Doolin, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid, had been buried in the settling of the West, legendary figures on both sides of the law were still very much alive at the time, including Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Frank James.

The first western film of any major note was the 1903 Edison production of Edwin S. Porter's, The Great Train Robbery which, with its linear story and carefully sequenced action scenes, is also usually credited as the first movie to tell a complete dramatic story. Its depiction of the robbery of a train and the subsequent pursuit of the bandits took viewers by storm and made a sensation of one of its players, Max Aronson, who later became famous as Bronco Billy Anderson. Rather than a former cowboy, Anderson was a failed vaudeville performer who found his abilities as a stuntman put to good service in early movies. He co-founded the Essenay company, which not only served as a home for some of Charlie Chaplin's best work but produced 400 one-reel westerns with Anderson as star before he retired in 1920.

Much closer to the real West were three actors who came to westerns during the second decade of the twentieth century: Tom Mix, William S. Hart, and Buck Jones. Mix had been a deputy U.S. marshal, Hart had worked on cattle drives as a boy growing up in Texas and Oklahoma, and Jones had seen action in Mexico while serving in the U.S. cavalry. Mix was very much the showman, and his films -- featuring the star in ornate western garb and doing riding stunts and trick shot sequences -- had little to do with reality. Hart, by contrast, was a stickler for realism and tried to re-create the West as he'd known it and seen it in his youth -- his characters were plain-spoken, taciturn figures played against starkly realistic backgrounds. Jones treaded a middle ground between Mix's flamboyance and Hart's realism. All three, however, established the pattern -- a combination of strength, humility, and honesty -- for every western screen hero to appear across the next 50 years. William S. Hart had exceptional influence; as an actor -- he had played Shakespearean roles, and portrayed the villain Messala in a Broadway production of Ben-Hur -- and as a writer and director. In 1925, he made Tumbleweeds, his final film. For modern audiences, Tumbleweeds remains the most watchable of silent westerns, graced by superb acting, a good story -- about the end of the frontier with the opening of the Cherokee Strip and its effect on one rancher and the woman he loves -- and a climactic land-rush scene that is one of the most celebrated spectacles in cinema history. Tumbleweeds is available in many editions on videocassette, the best of which is from Republic Pictures (also available on laserdisc), which includes Hart's 1939 spoken introduction.

The arrival of sound didn't damage the western the way that it did many other genres, mostly because the western hero was a man of relatively few words, western scripts were never too ambitious and thus didn't get bogged down in ponderous dialogue, and western pictures relied on action scenes for much of their appeal -- sound merely added gunshots and hoof beats. Early talkies like The Virginian (MCA/Universal), starring Gary Cooper and Walter Huston, and In Old Arizona (Fox), starring Warner Baxter (in an Oscar-winning role) as the Cisco Kid proved both popular and durable. By the early 1930s, however, the western was in deep trouble -- one big-budget oater, RKO's Cimarron (Turner Home Entertainment), had made money and even won an Oscar, but the ambitious wide-screen production of The Big Trail, starring a young John Wayne, had been a failure. Additionally, there were too many low-budget westerns being made, and audiences seemed to be growing tired even of these exciting if predictable little one-hour programmers.

Salvation came to the genre in the guise of Ken Maynard, a former stunt rider and trick-shot artist who had been making movies since the mid-1920s. In one of his early talkies, Maynard -- although he was by his own admission no singer -- had sung a western song on camera; audiences enjoyed the song, and he'd included songs in his subsequent movies. In 1934, Maynard signed a contract with Mascot Pictures to do a movie called In Old Santa Fe, and Mascot head Nat Levine, noting the audience's enjoyment of Maynard's songs in his earlier movies, decided to try something new by including a song by a professional singer. For his singer, Levine found Oklahoma-born Gene Autry, a young singer who had been enjoying huge audiences and record sales throughout the Southern, border, and Western states since the early 1930s, and brought him out to Hollywood along with another musician, Lester \"Smiley\" Burnette. Their number in In Old Santa Fe proved the high point of the picture, and within a year they were teamed together in their own western for Mascot's successor, Republic Pictures. Autry's quiet, unassuming manner and superb voice and Burnette's antic clowning made them a perfect team for the next eight years, until Autry entered the military during World War II. Their films were among the most reliable money-makers in Republic's history, and Autry was rated as one of the top 10 box-office attractions in the country during the early 1940s.

In Autry's wake, there followed a string of singing cowboys into pictures, including Tex Ritter, Eddie Dean, Herb Jeffries (unique as the movies' only black singing cowboy), Dick Foran, Jimmy Wakely, and Rex Allen. Most notable of them all, however, was Roy Rogers (born Leonard Slye), a young musician-turned-actor who stepped into Autry's shoes during a dispute with the studio over a picture called Under Western Skies and emerged a star in his own right. During the next few years, Rogers starred in a series of energetic, entertaining westerns, often teamed up in the 1930s with George \"Gabby\" Hayes (who was the "king of the sidekicks") and later on paired up romantically on screen with his wife-to-be, singer/actress Dale Evans. Other non-singing western stars who emerged during the 1930s and early 1940s included George O'Brien, Tim Holt, and perhaps the most successful of them all, William Boyd, who parlayed a single appearance as Hopalong Cassidy into a series of 66 westerns, a television series, and immortality. Gary Cooper also emerged as a western hero during the 1930s, in such major productions as Samuel Goldwyn's The Westerner (HBO Video) and The Cowboy and the Lady (HBO Video).

In 1939, John Wayne -- who had languished in "B"-westerns and serials for most of the decade -- got his second chance at major stardom in Stagecoach (Warner), an action drama made by independent producer Walter Wanger and director John Ford. Stagecoach electrified everyone who saw it and transformed Wayne into the biggest western star of all -- neither his career nor that of John Ford would ever be the same again. Both together and independent of each other, Wayne and Ford defined the western, bringing it both a dignity and a vigor that it had previously been denied. For the next 30 years, their work largely defined the mainstream perception of the genre.

During the years immediately following World War II, the western underwent many changes as audience perceptions shifted and the arrival of television all but destroyed the low-budget "B"-movie version of the horse opera. While players like Autry, Rogers, and Boyd moved to television, the remaining serious western movies tried to adjust to new sensibilities, embracing serious issues. Early postwar works like Ford's My Darling Clementine (FoxVideo) had a refreshingly gritty realism, while David O. Selznick's Duel In the Sun (FoxVideo) and Niven Busch's Pursued (Republic) delved into sex and psychology, with mixed success. The John Wayne-produced Angel And The Badman (Republic) confronted the issues of violence, religious devotion, and pacifism, and its plot was also was very much precursor to Peter Weir's 1980s thriller Witness. Anthony Mann's Winchester '73 (MCA), starring James Stewart, heralded a Golden Age for postwar western filmmaking with its bracing mix of engaging drama, well drawn characterizations, and vigorous direction -- and Henry King's The Gunfighter deserves credit for its poignant lyricism, bitter irony, and a sterling central performance. But it was Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (Republic) that defined the new manifestation of the genre with its spare, almost minimalist, look and texture and its powerful, topical story about a marshal (Gary Cooper) forced to face down a gang of outlaws on his own -- it won more Oscars and more nominations than any western in memory and took everyone by surprise with its success, although the downbeat story had its critics (John Wayne called it one of the most un-American movies he had ever seen).

By the 1960s, the genre had seemingly run out of steam, mostly through overexposure on television, which had become the new home to the "B"-western, mostly in the guise of television series such as Gunsmoke (Columbia House), Rawhide (Columbia House), Have Gun Will Travel and Bonanza (Republic). After peaking in their work together with The Searchers (Warner) in 1955, John Ford and John Wayne had parted company, with Ford using his last few active years to take a more serious look at issues that he might well have felt he had treated unfairly in his earlier work -- including racism (Sergeant Rutledge) and the destruction of the Native American people (Cheyenne Autumn MGM/United Artists). Meanwhile, Wayne also became more topical in his work both as an actor and producer, releasing The Alamo (MGM/United Artists) -- a pet project that Wayne had nursed for more than a decade -- and McLintock! (MPI). The latter, a boisterous western comedy with some serious undertones about racism and the treatment of Native Americans, became one of Wayne's most popular movies. For the next 16 years, until his death in 1979, Wayne's western movies could be relied upon to deliver action and a good story, although such pictures as The Cowboys -- while hugely successful at the box office -- outraged liberal critics with their seeming endorsement of violence as a solution to the problem of lawlessness. Some of the harshness of the attacks on his movies, however, may well have been a result of Wayne's outspoken conservative views, and his support of the Vietnam War.

While westerns became scarce on the production schedules of American studios, in Europe a very different story was unfolding. Ever since the end of World War II, Europeans had been fascinated by American culture, and in Italy a small industry had grown up around the making of low-budget horse operas. In 1965, an American actor named Clint Eastwood -- best known for the series Rawhide -- went to Italy to star in a series of three westerns made by Sergio Leone. Those three films, A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (MGM/United Artists) became top box-office successes around the world and in their outsized violence (almost parodying the American western) created a new sub-genre -- The Spaghetti western (see separate essay).

The late '60s saw steadily declining audiences for American-made westerns, apart from those made by John Wayne and the occasional film starring James Garner, who proved equally successful in serious topical action vehicles (Duel At Diablo) and satire (Support Your Local Sheriff, Support Your Local Gunfighter, MGM/United Artists). The western languished during the 1970s and 1980s, partly owing to a decline in quality -- Hannie Caulder (Paramount), starring Raquel Welch and Robert Culp, tried unsuccessfully to put a feminist slant on the genre, but only Culp's performance saved an otherwise awkward star vehicle. Lawrence Kasdan's Silverado (1985) attracted lots of critical attention but failed at the box office. Alone among American stars, Clint Eastwood was able to make westerns profitably. His screen characters were rougher, meaner, and infinitely more venal than anything in John Wayne's repertory, and as a result he was transformed into one of the biggest and most admired Hollywood stars in history, later added producing and directing to his activities. Some 25 years after helping to revolutionize the western in Italy, Eastwood fostered the rebirth of the American western with his 1992 film Unforgiven, which won him the Oscar for "Best Picture" and "Best Director."