Westerns began appearing on movie screens while there was still a real wild west, with such 1898 Edison Company shorts as Poker At Dawson City and Cripple Creek Bar-room. But the breakthrough for the genre -- and for narrative filmmaking -- was director Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903), a fast-moving tale of desperadoes who loot a train and are hunted down by a posse. Unusually long at 12 minutes, the film enthralled audiences with its parallel editing of different levels of activity, its readiness to pan or tilt the camera to follow the action, and its ability to create coherence through momentum rather than by relying on titles. One actor who appeared in small roles in The Great Train Robbery was Gilbert M. Anderson. In 1907 he starred as the cowboy "Broncho Billy" in the two-reeler The Bandit Makes Good, and until his retirement in 1916, Anderson directed and acted in over 400 two-reelers, usually playing a bad man who reforms. With Broncho Billy, Hollywood had not just one of its first movie stars, but also its first cowboy hero.

The 1910s saw westerns from several seminal filmmakers. The great D.W. Griffith made numerous western shorts, depicting the lives of Native Americans (The Song Of The Wildwood Flute, 1910; A Squaw's Love, 1911) as well as whites on the frontier (The Last Drop Of Water, 1910; The Battle At Elderbush Gulch, 1914); Griffith also made a feature-length western, Scarlet Days (1919). Cecil B. DeMille began his career with The Squaw Man (1914), which he would remake in 1918 and again in 1931. In 1917, John Ford began directing actor Harry Carey in western shorts and features (including Ford's first feature, Straight Shooting). However, the filmmaker who turned the western into an international phenomenon was Thomas H. Ince, who began making westerns in California in 1912, such as The Deserter and The Indian Massacre. He soon turned over the directing chores to others (including John Ford's brother Francis), but always kept strict control over the scripts and shooting schedules of his gritty, action-packed films, which employed a Wild West show troupe, Native Americans, and real-life cowboys.

Ince also introduced New York stage actor William S. Hart to the cinema, and soon Hart was starring in and often directing his own westerns, usually playing a badman who comes to stand for law and order. Having grown up in the west during the late-19th century, Hart was able to invest a new realism and maturity to the genre with austere, character-driven westerns such as Hell's Hinges (1916) and The Toll Gate (1920). His popularity began to fade in the 1920s, overshadowed by the action-filled westerns of less complex, more heroic cowboys such as Tom Mix, and Hart retired in 1925, ending his career on a high note with Tumbleweeds.

Mix, a rodeo and riding star of the 1900s, entered films in 1909 and made over 100 one- and two-reelers in the 1910s. By the '20s, his fast-paced, stunt-filled westerns, such as Riders Of The Purple Sage (1925), had made him America's most popular cowboy star. Other western stars who emerged in these years include Hoot Gibson, who had also performed in Wild West shows. Gibson began doing bit parts and stunts in westerns in 1912, and soon moved up to supporting roles in John Ford westerns and leads in his own two-reelers. In '20s films such as The Taming Of The West (1925), Gibson played a somewhat tongue-in-cheek cowboy who rarely resorted to guns. Buck Jones, another Wild West show alumnus, began stunting in westerns in 1917. He soon graduated to leads and developed a loyal following in the '20s with such films as The Desert Outlaw (1924) and The Arizona Romeo (1925).

The western began to enjoy new respect from critics and public alike in the '20s, with the success of the big-budget pioneer epic The Covered Wagon (1923), directed by James Cruze, and The Iron Horse (1924), John Ford's classic about the first transcontinental railroad. But the genre continued to provide a valuable training ground for new filmmakers: William A. Wellman began his career directing such Buck Jones films as Second Hand Love (1923) and The Circus Cowboy (1924); in the years 1925-27, director William Wyler made several western features and over 40 two-reelers. It also continued to produce new cowboy stars in the '20s. Tim McCoy had lived on a Wyoming ranch near a Sioux reservation and was expert in Indian languages and culture; he served as the technical advisor and co-ordinator of Native extras for The Covered Wagon, and wound up starring in his own story-dominated western features, such as The Frontiersman (1927). Trick rider Ken Maynard began appearing in westerns in 1924, and soon was a star as well, with such action-filled oaters as The Demon Rider (1925) and The Red Raiders (1927).

The advent of sound brought new popularity to the western, with two major works released in 1930, both of which attempted early experiments in wide-screen cinematography. Billy The Kid, directed by King Vidor, made a genre star of its lead Johnny Mack Brown, who remained a beloved hero of B westerns until his retirement in 1953. The Big Trail, directed by Raoul Walsh, was a wagon-train drama starring former bit actor John Wayne. The box-office failure of both The Big Trail and the 1930 Academy Award-winner Cimmaron kept studios from making big-budget westerns in the '30s; it also kept Wayne toiling in B pictures until his triumph in Stagecoach (1939), John Ford's classic return to the genre, in which a diverse group of stagecoach passengers fight off an Indian attack. Other outstanding westerns of the '30s include Law And Order (1932), a realistic version of the shootout at the O.K. Corral; Cecil B. DeMille's The Plainsman (1937), with Gary Cooper, and Union Pacific (1939), with Joel McCrea; Destry Rides Again (1939), with James Stewart; and Jesse James (1939), directed by Henry King, with Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda as Jesse and Frank James.

Native Americans, ordinarily the western's stock villains, were featured in several early sound films that attempted a greater understanding of their lives. The Silent Enemy (1930) featured an all-Native cast and a prologue with Sitting Bull's nephew. Laughing Boy (1934) and Massacre (1934) looked at the plight of Native men caught between the worlds of their people and of white America. End Of The Trail (1933) starred Tim McCoy as a white man who feels more at home with the Arapaho. This trend dimmed in the late '30s and '40s, but resumed in the 1950s and took root in the '60s, permanently changing the way films depicted Native Americans.

Over the 1930s, most of the silent cowboy stars saw their celebrity wane. Mix retired from the screen in 1935; Gibson, the following year (although he enjoyed a brief comeback in the early '40s). Jones made many popular western serials in the 1930s, such as Red Rider (1934) and The Roaring West (1935), and even directed some of his films, including Law For Tombstone (1937), but his vogue also peaked at the end of the decade, as did Tim McCoy's. Together with Raymond Hatton, Jones and McCoy began the low-budget "Rough Rider" series for Monogram studios in 1941, but their effort ended tragically the following year, when Jones was killed in a fire while on a tour selling U.S. Bonds. Ken Maynard began including songs in his westerns, paving the way for a singing cowboy whose success eclipsed his own by the end of the '30s: Gene Autry. Autry debuted as a singer in Maynard's In Old Santa Fe (1934), and launched his career with the serial Phantom Empire (1935) and the feature Tumblin' Tumbleweeds (1935). For all his vocalizing, Autry made sure to emphasize action over romance, and relegated comedy to his regular sidekick, Smiley Burnette. William Boyd, a popular leading man in the '20s, also became a beloved cowboy star in the '30s. After starring as Clarence E. Mulford's western hero in Hop-A-Long Cassidy (1935), Boyd began a series of over 60 action-filled Cassidy features (which streamlined his character's name to "Hopalong"), regularly supported by comic sidekick Gabby Hayes. Actor Randolph Scott began his lifelong involvement with the genre in 1932 with Heritage Of The Desert and Wild Horse Mesa, working with fledgling director Henry Hathaway.

The years of World War Two saw a few outstanding westerns, including The Return Of Frank James (1940) and Western Union (1941), both directed by Fritz Lang, and The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), an adaptation of Walter van Tilburg Clark's novel about a lynch mob, directed by William A. Wellman. With Gene Autry serving in the Air Transport Command in the early '40s, his supporting player Roy Rogers became a star in his own right. Rogers surpassed his former mentor with his own tune-filled westerns, such as Don't Fence Me In (1945). Working regularly with his wife Dale Evans and the comic Gabby Hayes, Rogers remained a popular film star throughout the decade.

Two western classics appeared right after the war ended: John Ford's brilliant O.K. Corral film My Darling Clementine (1946), and director Howard Hawks's cattle-drive epic Red River (1946). That same year, Joel McCrea starred in The Virginian, and the actor went on to devote hiself almost exclusively to the western. Writer/director Samuel Fuller began his career with two idiosyncratic oaters, I Shot Jesse James (1949) and The Baron Of Arizona (1950). Other important westerns of the late '40s include King Vidor's sweeping Duel In The Sun (1947) and Raoul Walsh's psychological drama Pursued (1947). John Ford closed the decade with two superb cavalry tales, Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949), and the sentimental Three Godfathers (1949).

The 1950s, arguably the genre's finest decade, starts with three masterpieces. The Gunfighter (1950), directed by Henry King, starred Gregory Peck as a shootist whose notoriety prevents him from sneaking quietly into town to visit his estranged wife and son. High Noon (1952), directed by Fred Zinnemann and written by Carl Foreman, gave Gary Cooper one of his finest roles as a lawman who must battle a gang of killers by himself after he's deserted by the townspeople he has always defended. Shane (1953), directed by George Stevens, brought to the screen Jack Schaefer's heroic loner, who defends homesteaders against a rancher's hired killer.

John Ford continued his look at the American cavalry with Rio Grande (1950) and The Horse Soldiers (1959); his Wagonmaster (1950) provided a nostalgic account of the Mormon migration. Ford's haunting The Searchers (1956) starred John Wayne as an ex-Confederate soldier who spends years tracking down a white girl raised by Indians. Overlooked in its initial release, The Searchers today is regarded by many as Ford's finest film. It was also one of many '50s westerns which offered a new look at Native Americans. Other efforts included The Devil's Doorway (1950), directed by Anthony Mann; Apache (1954), directed by Robert Aldrich; Across The Wide Missouri (1951), directed by William A. Wellman; and Samuel Fuller's Run Of The Arrow (1957). Director Delmer Daves, who had lived among the Hopi and Navajo, made a powerful drama of prejudice between white and Native Americans in Broken Arrow (1950).

The critical and box-office success of High Noon and Shane encouraged the release of many big-budget, prestige westerns in the late '50s, most notably Rio Bravo (1959), directed by Howard Hawks. In this unofficial riposte to High Noon, sheriff John Wayne proves capable of handling all the badmen headed his way. Other A westerns of this period include Gunfight At The O.K. Corral (1957), directed by John Sturges; producer/director William Wyler's The Big Country (1958), and the offbeat and atmospheric Warlock (1959), directed by Edward Dmytryk. Ironically, several low-budget, unheralded films of the '50s have proven more beloved and influential, such as Henry Hathaway's revenge saga From Hell To Texas (1958); director Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), with its female gunfighters; Samuel Fuller's baroque horse opera Forty Guns (1957); Delmer Daves' suspenseful 3:10 To Yuma (1957); the Billy the Kid tale The Left-Handed Gun (1958), directed by Arthur Penn; the stylish Day Of The Outlaw (1959), directed by Andre De Toth; and Joseph H. Lewis' Terror In A Texas Town (1958), in which a gunslinger has a showdown with a sodbuster whose only weapon is a harpoon!

Two directors who have come to be especially admired for their 1950s westerns are Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher. Mann made several impressive oaters in the '50s, including The Furies (1950), The Tin Star (1957), and Man Of The West (1958); but his finest work was with actor James Stewart, in a series of handsomely filmed dramas with complex characters: Winchester 73 (1950), Bend In The River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), The Far Country (1955), and The Man From Laramie (1955). Boetticher directed Randolph Scott in a group of fast-paced, witty oaters: Decision At Sundown (1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Westbound (1959), and the Burt Kennedy-scripted Seven Men From Now (1956), The Tall T (1957), Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960).

The 1960s marked the end of John Ford's career, with the director entering a new phase of mastery and depth: Sergeant Rutledge (1960) looks at anti-black prejudice; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) dissects the mythology of fame; Two Rode Together (1962) and the epic Cheyenne Autumn (1964), Ford's last western, attack the harsh treatment of Native Americans. The decade also marked the beginning of director Sam Peckinpah's career. He won the admiration of genre fans everywhere with his second film, Ride The High Country (1962), in which Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea gave their valedictory performances as veteran gunmen hired to protect a shipment of gold. Peckinpah's big-budget Major Dundee (1965), a provocative cavalry saga, was badly mangled by the studio, and left its director unemployable for several years. His comeback was The Wild Bunch (1969), a violent saga of a gang of aging desperadoes who agree to work as mercenaries for a vicious general in pre-World War One Mexico. Beautifully shot and stunningly edited, with some of the greatest mass-action sequences in the history of cinema, The Wild Bunch has come to be regarded as one of the genre's masterpieces.

Like their '50s counterparts, audiences of the '60s, were presented with an array of big-budget oaters, including The Alamo (1960), with producer/director John Wayne as Davy Crockett; The Unforgiven (1960), a tale of anti-Indian prejudice directed by John Huston; The Magnificent Seven (1960), director John Sturges' remake of Akira Kurosawa's classic The Seven Samurai (1954); One-Eyed Jacks (1961), directed by its star Marlon Brando (who replaced a fired Stanley Kubrick); the lengthy extravaganza How The West Was Won (1962), with sequences directed by George Marshall, Henry Hathaway, and John Ford; Richard Brooks's action-packed The Professionals (1966); and El Dorado (1967), which reunited John Wayne and director Howard Hawks. But as with the '50s, several smaller, inexpensive westerns of the '60s have emerged as major works: Ride The Whirlwind (1966) and The Shooting (1966), directed by Monte Hellman and starring Jack Nicholson; Burt Kennedy's brutal Welcome To Hard Times (1967), adapted from E.L. Doctorow's novel; and the character-driven Will Penny (1968), directed by Tom Gries.

In the late 1960s, the western got a shot in the arm from the European-made films of Italian writer/director Sergio Leone, who made a star of Clint Eastwood. (See "Spaghetti Westerns," discussed elsewhere.) There were also two very successful American westerns released in 1969, in which the gunslinging heroes are played mostly for laughs, but are ultimately regarded seriously: Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, directed by George Roy Hill, and True Grit, directed by Henry Hathaway, which won John Wayne his only Academy Award. Yet despite the popularity of these films, the western began a long eclipse in the 1970s, as its formost exponents retired or passed away. Howard Hawks ended his career with Rio Lobo (1970), starring John Wayne. Wayne stuck to the genre with several films, most notably The Cowboys (1972), directed by Mark Rydell; Rooster Cogburn (1975), a True Grit sequel; and director Don Siegel's The Shootist (1976), Wayne's last film before his death from cancer in 1979, in which he plays a terminally ill gunfighter. Budd Boetticher and Henry Hathaway made their last westerns with A Time For Dying (1971) and Shootout (1971), respectively. Sam Peckinpah had his final genre efforts with the funny and lyrical The Ballad Of Cable Hogue (1970), and the evocative (but studio-butchered) Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid (1973).

Most other American westerns of the decade were provocative revisionist tales. Traumatized by their failure in Vietnam, Americans came to see in the frontier the inception of all their country's ills: greed, exploitation, racism, and violence. The West is a deathtrap for innocence in Robert Altman's McCabe And Mrs. Miller (1971); Blake Edwards' Wild Rovers (1971); Robert Benton's Bad Company (1972); The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972), directed by Dick Richards; and Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks (1976), written by Thomas McGuane. Frank Perry's Doc (1971), written by Pete Hamill, makes Wyatt Earp the bad guy at the O.K. Corral showdown. Jesse James is overtly psychotic in Philip Kaufman's The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), and Wild Bill Hickock doesn't come off much better in The White Buffalo (1976). Noble Indians confront savage whites in Soldier Blue (1970); Little Big Man (1970), directed by Arthur Penn; Abraham Polonsky's manhunt drama Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1970); and Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill And The Indians (1976).

Only Clint Eastwood seemed committed to keeping alive the western as audiences had come to know and love it. After acting for directors Don Siegel (Two Mules For Sister Sara, 1970) and John Sturges (Joe Kidd, 1972), Eastwood took over behind the camera for High Plains Drifter (1973) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). But by the late '70s, Hollywood's once mighty flood of westerns had dried to a trickle, with the 1978 releases Goin' South, directed by Jack Nicholson; Comes A Horseman, directed by Alan J. Pakula; and China 9 Liberty 37 (aka Clayton And Catherine), directed by Monte Hellman. The Long Riders (1980) and Tom Horn (1980) showed that the western still had life in it; but after the box-office failure of Michael Cimino's epic Heaven's Gate (1980), the genre was virtually extinct for the rest of the decade. Interest flared up in 1985 with Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider and Lawrence Kasdan's Silverado, but it took the success of the youth-oriented Young Guns (1988) to jumpstart a trend.

The stigma against westerns was removed by Dances With Wolves (1990), directed by its star Kevin Costner. The film attracted huge audiences with its tale of a white man joining the Lakota, and won numerous Academy Awards. After similar homors befell Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992), the genre was alive once again. What emerges in recent films is a sense of the western undaunted and perennial. Eastwood's bounty hunter in Unforgiven., as dour as the Hart of Hell's Hinges, is an archetypal good badman. The co-existence of white and Native Americans is central to Dances With Wolves, The Last Of The Mohicans (1992), Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), and Sam Shepard's Silent Tongue (1994). The showdown of good and evil, in the iconography of the O.K. Corral, persists in Tombstone (1993) and Lawrence Kasdan's Wyatt Earp (1994). But the western is also regarded by filmmakers as an effective vehicle for challenging attitudes of agism (Young Guns II, 1990), racism (Posse, 1993), and sexism (The Ballad Of Little Jo, 1993; Bad Girls, 1994; Maverick, 1994). To be so old and so new at the same time is a blessing bestowed on very few genres; one of the lucky ones is the western.