According to Peabody, the development went like this: Originally the land was a wilderness, with herds of buffalo, and wild Indians, and to this vast land without law and order came the pioneers, the buffalo hunters, and the adventurers. Stoddard not only is a lawyer and a teacher, 'a champion of law and order,' he is also supposed to have shot the villain, Liberty Valance (even though this was done by another man). Dutton Peabody, sketches out his version of the myth, trying to persuade the delegates to vote for Ransom Stoddard (played by James Stewart), as their Congress representative. This main idea has even been incorporated in the John Ford Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), in which the owner and editor of the local newspaper, Mr.

were born, as different groups of people moved across the continent. Along this line the American way of life, the national character and ideas about freedom etc. Even as the frontier closed, around the end of the 19th Century, its mythological concept was developed and coined, especially by Frederick Jackson Turner, as the westward-moving border between wilderness and civilization. The West, about which we are told in the Westerns, is the North American continent.

'Western' is an American concept, and the Western has been described as the most American of all film genres. Nature plays its own part, and the characters have literally become one with their surroundings. In a good Western, landscape and people belong together, precisely as we see them in the example mentioned above. Furthermore, what are the title and the year of release of the film I have used as starting point? I shall come back to that in a moment, as well as to the discussion of the set pieces of the genre, or the media produced image of 'the Western landscape.' But first, a few words on the Westerns and the West. But is it really as simple as this tradition has it, and has the genre developed so unequivocally from almost naГЇve simplicity, toward growing complexity? In the following discussion and my analysis of characteristic elements of western examples I shall argue that this kind of description of the development of the genre is too simple. Standard elements in a standard formula are in place, as many accounts tell us, in traditional genre descriptions. A Western has begun, and we, the viewers, will follow the hero's fate in the minefield between good men and bad guys, civilization and nature, the lovely lady and loneliness. Next, we see them cross a river on their way to join the rest of the gang in a secret cavern.

As he crosses the bottom of the silver screen from left to right, he turns his head and watches his group of men follow him. Frame from The Big Country (William Wyler, 1958).ДЄ man rides down a hillside and out of the woods, a waterfall streaming from the cliff beside him. Two stars: The location and the main characters.

Elements of a western drama