The first Western story on film was made in Blackburn, England
The Great Train Robbery of 1903 is often called the first Western, but that is wrong. Edison was filming Wild West performers as early as 1894, and the earliest known Western with a plot is a British short, Kidnapping by Indians, shot in the Lancashire mill town of Blackburn in 1899.
Westerns are set on the American frontier, usually between the mid-nineteenth century, around the California Gold Rush, and the frontier's official closing in 1890, though the American Film Institute avoids fixed dates and instead points to the frontier's spirit and its eventual passing. The imagined landscape is thinly settled and often lawless, full of cowboys, sheriffs, outlaws, settlers, soldiers and Native Americans. The big themes are justice, freedom, rugged individualism and the clash between wilderness and civilisation.
Justice is personal in these stories. Honour codes, feuds and revenge drive the plots, settled by gunfights rather than courtrooms, a sharp contrast with the impersonal law of cities. The wandering hero has been compared to the knight-errant of Arthurian romance and to the ronin of Japan, bound by his own code rather than any institution. The writer Frank Gruber boiled the genre down to seven plots, among them the railroad story, the ranch story, the revenge chase and the marshal story. Older Westerns often cast Native Americans as savage enemies; later ones became more nuanced and sympathetic.
Nearly all of these conventions existed in nineteenth-century popular fiction before cinema. The first films were single-reel shorts made by Edison in 1894 at the Black Maria studio in New Jersey, showing veterans of Buffalo Bill's show, including Annie Oakley shooting and Sioux performers dancing. Early pictures were called Wild West dramas; the label Western seems to date from a July 1912 magazine article. Edwin S. Porter's 1903 robbery film nonetheless set the pattern of crime, pursuit and justice that the genre kept.
Popularity rose and fell. Silent Westerns were huge, but when sound arrived in 1927 and 1928 the big studios largely dropped them, leaving cheap serials to smaller producers. John Ford's Stagecoach in 1939 revived the form and made John Wayne a star, and the years from 1940 to 1960 became known as its golden age. Later films such as Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven traded simple morality tales for ambiguity.
Source: Western (genre)
