out of town, it gets him a job on a Western.) The
Western landscape is not limited to background
information. The big skies and wide-open spaces
are used to symbolize both limitless possibility and
an untamable environment. For this reason, West-
erns favor extreme long shots in which the land-
scape dwarfs human subjects and the primitive
outposts of civilization.
The following list contains important Westerns:
The Iron Horse(1924; director: John Ford); Tumble-
weeds(1925; director: King Baggot); The Big Trail
(1930; director: Raoul Walsh); Destry Rides Again
(1939; director: George Marshall); The Ox-Bow Inci-
dent(1943; director: William A. Wellman); Duel in
the Sun(1946; director: King Vidor); Fort Apache
(1948; director: John Ford); Red River(1948; direc-
tors: Howard Hawks and Arthur Rosson); She Wore
a Yellow Ribbon(1949; director: John Ford); The Gun-
fighter(1950; director: Henry King); Winchester ’73
(1950; director: Anthony Mann); The Naked
Spur(1953; director: Anthony Mann); Johnny Guitar
(1954; director: Nicholas Ray); 3:10 to Yuma(1957;
director: Delmer Daves); Forty Guns(1957; director:
Samuel Fuller); Man of the West(1958; director:
Anthony Mann); Lonely Are the Brave(1962; direc-
tor: David Miller); The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(1962; director: John Ford); Major Dundee(1965;
director: Sam Peckinpah); Hombre(1967; director:
Martin Ritt); Once upon a Time in the West(1968;
director: Sergio Leone); Will Penny(1968; director:
Tom Gries); The Wild Bunch(1969; director: Sam
Peckinpah); Little Big Man(1970; director: Arthur
Penn); McCabe & Mrs. Miller(1971; director: Robert
Altman); Silverado(1985; director: Lawrence Kas-
dan); Dances with Wolves (1990; director: Kevin
Costner); The Ballad of Little Jo(1993; director: Mag-
gie Greenwald); Dead Man(1995; director: Jim Jar-
musch); The Missing(2003; director: Ron Howard);
Appaloosa(2008; director: Ed Harris); and True Grit
(2010; directors: Ethan Coen and Joel Coen).The Musical
The musical tells its story using characters that
express themselves with song and/or dance. The
actors sing every line of dialogue in a few musicals,
such as Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
(1964), and those musicals from the 1930s featuring
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers focus more on
dancing than singing. But, for the most part, musi-
cals feature a combination of music, singing, danc-
ing, and spoken dialogue.
Unlike many genres, the musical film genre was
not born out of any specific political or cultural
moment or preexisting literary genre. But musi-
cal performance was already a well-established
entertainment long before the invention of the movie
camera. The long-standing traditions of religious
pageants, opera, operetta, and ballet all present nar-
rative within a musical context. Musical comedies
similar in structure to movie musicals were popular
on British and American stages throughout much of
the nineteenth century.
So it was inevitable that the dazzling movement,
formal spectacle, and emotional eloquence inher-
ent in musical performance would eventually join
forces with the expressive power of cinema. But
two hurdles stood in the way of the union. First, theCivilization and wildernessThis archetypal scene from
John Ford’s My Darling Clementine(1946) demonstrates the
tension (and inevitable attraction) between encroaching
civilization and the wide-open Wild West that lies at the
heart of most Western-genre narrative conflicts. Deadly
gunfighter turned reluctant lawman Wyatt Earp (Henry
Fonda) escorts Clementine (Cathy Downs), a refined and
educated woman from the East, to a community dance
held in the bare bones of a not-yet-constructed church
surrounded by desert and mountains.
SIX MAJOR AMERICAN GENRES 105