William S. Hart was perhaps the greatest of all western star, for unlike Gary Copper and John Wayne, he appeared in nothing but Westerns. From 1914 to 1924, he was supreme and unchallanged. It was Hart to created the basic formula of the western film, and devised the protagnist he played in every film he made, the good-bad man, the accidental, noble outlaw, or the honest but framed cowboy or the sheriff made suspect by varius gossip, in short, the individual in conflict with himself and his frontier envionment.
Unlike most of his contemporaries in Hollywood, Hart actually knew something of the old west. He had lived in it as child, when it was already disappearing and His hero was firmly rooted in his memoried and experiences, and in both the history and the mythology of the vanished frontier. Although no period or place in american history has been more absurdly romanticized, reality and myth 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 politicians, banks, business-men, and unhorsed by fences, laws and alien taboos. Hart's good-bad man was always on outsider, and always one of the disinherited, and if he found it neccessary to shoot a sheriff or rob bank along the way, his early audience found it easy to understand and forgive, especially 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 life, though hard, was releatively simple. We still do; living in world in which undeclared aggression, war, hypocrisy, chicanery, anarchy and impending immolations are part of our daily lives, we all want a code to live by.
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