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Lesson 21 |
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William S.Hart and the early 'Western' film |
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How did William Hart's childhood prepare him for his acting role in Western films? |
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William S.Hart was, perhaps, the greatest of all Western stars, |
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for unlike Gary Cooper and John Wayne he appeared in nothing but Westerns. |
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From 1914 to 1924 he was supreme and unchallenged. |
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It was Hart who created the basic formula of the Western film, |
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and devised the protagonist he played in every film he made, |
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the good-bad man, the accidental, noble outlaw, |
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or the honest, but framed cowboy, or the sheriff made suspect by vicious gossip; |
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in short, the individual in conflict with himself and his frontier environment. |
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Unlike most of his contemporaries in Hollywood, |
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Hart actually knew something of the old West. |
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He had lived in it as a child when it was already disappearing, |
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and his hero was firmly rooted in his memories and experiences, |
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and in both the history and the mythology of the vanished frontier, |
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And although no period or place in American history has been more absurdly romanticized, |
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myth and reality did join hands in at least one arena, |
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the conflict between the individual and encroaching civilization. |
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Men accustomed to struggling for survival against the elements and Indians |
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were bewildered by politicians, bankers and businessmen, |
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and unhorsed by fences, laws and alien taboos. |
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Hart's good-bad man was always an outsider, always one of the disinherited, |
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and if he found it necessary to shoot a sheriff or rob a bank along the way, |
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his early audiences found it easy to understand and forgive, |
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especially when it was Hart who, in the end, overcame the attacking Indians. |
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Audiences in the second decade of the twentieth century |
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found it pleasant to escape to a time when life, though hard, was relatively simple. |
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We still do; living in a world in which undeclared aggression, war, hypocrisy, |
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chicanery, anarchy and impending immolation are part of our daily lives, |
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we all want a code to live by. |
