Westerns Stills & Poster Gallery

For many decades the Western occupied a central position within the American film industry. From around 1910 until the beginning of the 1960s, films in the Western genre made up at least a fifth of all titles released. No other genre has ever occupied anything like such a dominant position.

Within such a large body of material (maybe about 7,000 Westerns in all), there were bound to be great variations, both in the nature of the films and in their quality. Many of those produced, especially in the twenties, thirties and forties, were cheaply-made B-features, designed for the bottom half of a double bill, or else series Westerns, made by specialist units starring performers who were dedicated to the genre and targeted at audiences such as children and the patrons of small rural cinemas. These films were made to a formula, and in the interests of economy but also of giving their audiences what they knew and liked, they confined themselves to a relatively small number of stock situations.

Having increased its status the Western became more popular, with major stars, there was a greater range of material. The west of America was a large place, home to a wide range of human activity. It is true that the history in which the genre is grounded occupied a comparatively short period of time. Most Westerns taking place at a specified date are set in the period between the end of the Civil War and about 1890, when the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously pronounced that the frontier, the line between settled and unsettled country, no longer existed. Yet within that period, scarcely a generation, we find stories of gold-mining and cattle ranching, of struggles against the Indian, stories of railroad building and pioneering, tales of notorious outlaws and equally celebrated lawmen.

Excerpts from BFI Screen Guide: 100 Westerns by Edward Buscombe