The movie cowboy has long filled the public imagination with visions of gallant men riding the range and righting wrongs. There have been a series of cinema cowboy heroes throughout the past century. These fictional cowboys were so popular the line between the real and the imaginary cowboy has been permanently blurred in the public mind.
The west, its landscape, its people, and its stories are a reflection of our culture's collective imagination. For 200 years, each generation has conjured up imagery depicting the glories and dangers of this region. Novelists, playwrights, and wild west show producers, carefully manipulated and invented imagery as they presented classic adventure tales of the American frontier. Those "cowboy heroes" we know and love, were created by Hollywood screenwriters and directors. The children of the 1940s and 1950s grew up watching the exploits of Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, or Hoppy in the pursuit of justice and fair play.
The West and the cowboy are very real, but we have created, through literature and film, a mythic West, an ideological landscape filled with heroic figures from our imaginations. These larger-than-life cowboy heroes elevated the public perception of real work-a-day cowboys to a legendary level.
Toward the end of the 19th century, many towns boasted some form of opera house. Players recreated epics of the American West in vaudeville acts. Wild West shows captivated the public as well and gave many western movie stars their start. With the arrival of motion picture technology, a new American pastime developed ~ the Saturday "nickelodeon" theaters.
William F. Cody, know as "Buffalo Bill", was a noted frontiersman and scout who had gained fame in the dime novels of Ned Buntline and others. Hero of more than 1,700 dime novels, Cody performed a dramatized stage version of the first novel in 1872, and made seasonal appearances on stage until 1883, when he organized Buffalo Bill's Wild West, which toured America and Europe for 30 years. He set the standard for the variety Wild West Shows that followed. He brought the real and the legendary together. He satisfied curiosity and created entertainment. His was a circus troupe with a new twist. He did not collect animals from foreign lands but real "western" people from beyond the frontier. Audiences were able to see real cowboys and Indians. This juxtaposition of reality and imagery molded the cultural and racial perceptions of a generation of Americans and Europeans.
The first cowboy movie star, Gilbert M. Anderson, was also known as Bronco Billy. He is credited with developing the notion of a central character in silent western movies. Other cowboy stars included William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard, Tim McCoy, and Harry Carey. The silent movie era lasted almost 30 years. In 1923, The Covered Wagon became the first feature-length western epic. Five years later, The Big Hop earned the distinction of being the first western movie to incorporate sound effects during filming. By the early 1930s, Hollywood had completed the transformation from silent movies to full sound. Many early cowboy heroes like William S. Hart couldn't make the transition, but other actors like John Wayne enjoyed long and successful careers.
From 1930 to 1950, Hollywood studios produced thousands of hour-long "B" western movies. "A" beside the movie title indicated the feature film, while "B" noted the second attraction. Over time, "B" westerns came to mean short, low-budget films appropriate for the double-feature format. They usually were produced as a series, sometimes with the same plot continued from one film to the next.
Clearly the most popular and successful of the "B" westerns were the singing cowboy films. Refined by Gene Autry, these films presented a mixture of action, music, comedy, and often romance. Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter, and Rex Allen soon joined the genre. The momentum of early "B" westerns helped sustain the careers of many veteran actors like Ken Maynard, Hoot Gibson, and Tim McCoy.
The era of Hollywood's classic "A" westerns was signaled by the release of two important movies in 1939; John Ford's Stagecoach, starring John Wayne, and Jesse James, directed by Henry King with Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, and Randolph Scott. Much of the success of these two films, and those that followed, was due in large measure to Hollywood's fusion of history and legend. To the American public, which was still recovering from World War I and the Great Depression, and on the brink of another World War, the west of Hollywood offered a measure of national pride, a source for national identity, and the reassurance that good would triumph over evil. The Hollywood west was composed of equal parts of fact and fiction and was dependent on both for its lasting appeal.
The years 1940 to 1970 proved to be the golden era for the classic western movie. Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, Richard Widmark, and James Stewart all became icons of the western genre, while John Wayne became a superstar and remained one of the top box office attractions until his death in 1979.
Owen Wister's classic novel, The Virginian (1902), was a best seller for several years, and it popularized the notion of the American west as a vanishing frontier. The Virginian retained the dime novel narrative formula of a white frontier hero pitted against the western wilderness, lawless adversaries, and the Indian. Wister then added a pivotal love story between the leading man and leading lady. Perhaps most important, Wister created an archetype western hero through romantic depictions of cowboy life ~ the lone cowboy who is good with a gun.
Early 20th century films refined this hero as a "man's man," an example of masculinity, self-made without the benefit of education or family wealth. At times, he is portrayed as a paternalistic figure that prodded young cowboys through adolescence and epitomized manhood for the genre. The leading man was often a good bad-man resorting to illegal or vigilante actions when defending his honor or beset by corrupt officials. Though always deemed a cowboy, this central figure rarely demonstrates his ability with a rope or his savvy as a cattleman. Instead it is his skill with a gun that is pivotal to the story. Inevitably, the cowboy hero becomes embroiled in the violence of a west where the survival of the fittest was the rule.
It is possible so many western films have been produced that it is hard to comprehend as a single genre, but is reflected as sub-genres such as "gunfighter westerns" and "cavalry westerns." However, a generalized western character has evolved who portrays the classic characteristics of a man fleeing the constraints of the civilized East. Though the western takes its name from a geographical region, it becomes a mythical landscape; an ideological terrain. This fantasyland was created where western imagery became a backdrop for the heroic struggles of man versus man and man versus civilization.