Western Movies

The Western Movies are some of the classic American film genres. Western Movies are art works – films, literature, television shows and paintings – devoted to telling romanticized tales of the U.S. West. [1] While the Western Movies have been popular throughout the history of movies, as the United States progresses farther away from the period depicted it has begun to diminish in importance. The recent (August 2003) Kevin Costner western, Open Range, is seen by some as a revival of the genre.

The fundamental plots of Western Movies are simple. Life is reduced to its elements: there are no computers, no cellphones, no cars, no electricity. The complications and technology of modern life are usually limited to those found in rural areas in the mid-19th century. You have:

• The clothes on your back.
• Your gun, and
• Your horse.

And that's usually it. The horse may be optional. The high technology of the era – such as the telegraph, printing press, and railroad – do sometimes appear, occasionally as a development just arriving, and symbolizing that the idealized frontier lifestyle is transitory, soon to give way to the march of civilization. The art of the Western Movies takes these simple elements and uses them to tell simple morality stories, setting them against the spectacular scenery of the American West. With the best Western directors, the scenery essentially became an unpaid star of the movie.

Origins of the "Western idea" for Western Movies: The idea of the "Wild West" traces at least to Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows which began in 1883. In literature, Owen Wister's The Virginian (published in 1902) was an American start; but the German writer Karl May was writing Wild West stories as early as 1876, and he traced ideas at least to the American writer James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote Last of the Mohicans in 1826.

Thus the "western idea" has a long history. They were a distinct literary genre before the rise of motion pictures; other important writers were Zane Grey, and Louis L'Amour.

Popular culture and Westerns: American popular culture loves cultures of honor, as opposed to cultures of law. The Western portrays a society in which persons have no social order larger than their immediate peers, family, or perhaps themselves alone. Here, one must cultivate a reputation by acts of violence; or they can be generous, because generosity creates a dependency relationship in the social hierarchy. These can be easily seen in many Western Movies.

These themes unite the Western Movies, the gangster movie, and the revenge movie in a single vision. In the Western, these themes are fore fronted, to the extent that the arrival of law and "civilization" is often portrayed as regrettable, if inevitable.

The Western Movies go to Hollywood: But a genre in which description and dialogue are lean, and the landscape spectacular, is better suited to a visual medium. Western Movies, usually filmed in desolate corners of Arizona, Utah, Wyoming or Colorado, made the landscape not just a vivid backdrop but a character in the Western Movies.

The Western Movies genre itself has sub-genres, such as the epic Western, the shoot 'em up, singing cowboy Westerns, and a few comedy Westerns. The Western re-invented itself in the revisionist Western. Cowboys play a prominent role in Western Movies, and often fights with American Indians are depicted; though "revisionist" Westerns give the natives sympathetic treatment. Other recurring themes of Western Movies include western treks, and groups of bandits terrorizing small towns such as in The Magnificent Seven.