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| 1918 Cupid's Round Up |
From Wikipedia:
The American Film Institute defines Western films as those
"set in the American West that embody the spirit, the struggle and the
demise of the new frontier.” The term “Western,” used to describe a
narrative film genre, appears to have originated with a July 1912 article in “Motion Picture World” Magazine. Most of the characteristics
of Western films were part of 19th century popular Western fiction and were
firmly in place before film became a popular art form. Western films commonly
feature as their protagonists stock characters such as cowboys, gunslingers,
and bounty hunters, often depicted as semi-nomadic wanderers who wear Stetson
hats, bandannas, spurs, and buckskins, use revolvers or rifles as everyday
tools of survival, and ride between dusty towns and cattle ranches on trusty
steeds.
Western films were enormously popular in the silent era. However, with the
advent of sound in 1927-28 the major Hollywood studios rapidly abandoned
Westerns, leaving the genre to smaller studios and producers, who churned out
countless low-budget features and serials in the 1930s. By the late 1930s the
Western film was widely regarded as a 'pulp' genre in Hollywood, but its
popularity was dramatically revived in 1939 by such major studio productions as Dodge
City starring Errol Flynn,
Jesse James with Tyrone Power in the title role, Union
Pacific with Joel McCrea, Destry
Rides Again featuring
James Stewart in his first western, supported by Marlene Dietrich, and perhaps
most notably, the release of John Ford's landmark Western adventure Stagecoach,
which became one of the biggest hits of the year released though United
Artists, and made John Wayne a mainstream screen star in the wake of a decade
of headlining B westerns.
Early Westerns were mostly filmed in the studio, just like other early
Hollywood films, but when location shooting became more common from the 1930s,
producers of Westerns used desolate corners of Arizona, California, Colorado,
Kansas, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, or Wyoming.
Productions were also filmed on location at movie ranches.
Often, the vast landscape becomes more than a vivid backdrop; it becomes a
character in the film. After the early 1950s, various wide screen formats such
as cinemascope (1953) and VistaVision used the expanded width of the screen to
display spectacular Western landscapes. John Ford’s use of Monument Valley as
an expressive landscape in his films from Stagecoach to Cheyenne Autumn "present us with a mythic vision
of the plains and deserts of the American West, embodied most memorably in Monument
Valley, with its buttes and mesas that tower above the men on horseback,
whether they be settlers, soldiers, or Native Americans".
This is part 1 of a 2-part post on Western / Cowboy film posters:
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| 1919 A Debtor to the Law |
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| 1919 A Debtor to the Law |
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| 1919 When a Woman Strikes |
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| 1923 The Covered Wagon |
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| 1924 "The Passing of Wolf MacLean" |
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| 1925 "The Cowboy Musketeer |
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| 1926 The Great K & A Train Robbery |
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| 1926 War Paint |
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| 1928 King Cowboy |
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| 1928 King Cowboy |
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| 1928 The Wagon Show |
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| 1928 Under the Tonto Rim |
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| 1929 Outlawed |
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| 1930 "The Dawn Trail" |
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| 1931 "Border Law" |
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| 1931 Desert Vengeance |
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| 1932 "Texas Cyclone" |
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| 1932 "Destry Rides Again" |
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| 1932 "The Fighting Fool" |
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| 1933 "Man of Action" |
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| 1933 Riders of Destiny |
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| 1933 "Sagebrush Trail" |
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| 1933 "Diamond Trail" |
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| 1933 The Telegraph Trail |
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| 1933 "Unknown Valley" |
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| 1934 "Blue Steel" |
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| 1934 "Randy Rides Alone" |
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| 1934 "Randy Rides Alone" |
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| 1934 "Terror of the Plains" |
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| 1934 "The Man from Utah" |
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| 1934 "The Star Packer" |
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| 1934 "The Trail Beyond" |
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| 1934 "West of the Divide" |
