Robert Warshow in his article "Movie Chronicle: The Westerner" offers an interesting example of genre criticism as he finds relationships between what he calls the "two most successful creations of American movies," the gangster and the Westerner, "men with guns" (Warshow 469). When he wrote this article in 1954, he said that the gangster movie no longer existed in its classical form; in our own time, the Western does not exist in its classical form. However, our awareness of the parameters of the classical form for each still infuses how we watch a Western from any time period, and both the gangster film and the Western share the mantle of being essentially American genres--much imitated, but still basically American genres. One of the aspects of genre that is apparent from Warshow's discussion is that a genre is defined by the inclusion of certain elements of character, action, and theme setting out the parameters of what Warshow calls the "classical" style, but at the same time an enterprising filmmaker can twist the conventions of a genre and so produce a hybrid, or an expanded or revisionist form of the genre. What is produced then is perfectly recognizable in terms of its roots while also being clearly identifiable as something more.
Warshow emphasizes the importance of guns in both the gangster film and the Western, and in so doing he links these two genres first around this objectification of violence and second around the character of the man serving as the hero of these genres. He says of the first:
Guns as physical objects, and the postures associated with their use, from the visual and emotional center of both types of films. I suppose this reflects the importance of guns in the fantasy life of Americans; but that is a less illuminating point than it appears to be (Warshow 469).
Warshow is right about this given that many other genres make use of the same central icon, for guns in one form or another are o...