of an ongoing guerrilla war against the church as an institution" (Tompkins 35). However, this is not always the case, and indeed it can be argued that the sort of anti-Christian community element Tompkins finds so compelling was not the primary thrust of Westerns in earlier decades. Death was indeed a vital theme, but more often than not, the Christian community was presented as an alternative and as something to be protected and promoted, not countered.
However, the gun is used in service of the community for most of the history of the Western rather than as an alternative to acceptance of the Christian community as Tompkins says and as became more the norm toward the latter half of this century. The key films of John Ford, for instance, elevate the sense of community as an ideal to which the hero tends even when he is excluded from that community. The difference might be seen in a comparison of Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) and Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952) only a few years later. Ford's film includes historical characters and historical events, while Zinnemann's is more a generic Western with an interesting slant on the history of the time in which the film was made. At heart, both films are about a clash between good and evil that ends with a gunfight in the street, with the forces of law against the representatives of disorder. While this may be a timeless battle repeated endlessly in films, how this battle is treated in the two films shows a very different view of the social order
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