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