Gangster and Western Film

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 h

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him toward something he simply has to do: What he defends, at bottom, is the purity of his own image--in fact his honor. This is what makes him invulnerable. . . The Westerner is the last gentleman, and the movies which over and over again tell his story are probably the last art form in which the concept of honor retains its strength (Warshow 474). Yet the Westerner is also faced with a moral ambiguity in that his honor requires that he kill men (Warshow 475). Warshow notes the changes that came over the Western as time passed and as greater moral and psychological ambiguity was introduced. He contrasts The Gunfighter with its morally flawed hero at the end of his career with High Noon with the upholder of law and order reaching the end of a career. Warshow sees many of these shifts in perspective for the Westerner as violations of the western form rather than as expansions of it. Warshow prefers the parameters of the Western legend, and he sees a preoccupation with style, such as he finds in several films by John Ford, as destructive to the outlines of the Western legend. Ford assimilates the legend into "the more sentimental legend of rural America and making the hero a more dangerous Mr. Deeds" (Warshow 482). He st

Category: Film - G