Broncho Billy Anderson

The fledgling genre proved sturdier than jaundiced industry observers allowed. In 1910 it was given a fresh impetus by the emergence of the first Western film star. Gilbert M. Anderson (originally Max Aronson) had played a part (possibly several parts) in The Qreat Train Robbery.

 In 1907 he formed a partnership with George K. Spoor and the new company was named Essanay after the initials of their last names. Appropriately for a producer of Westerns, the company's trademark was an Indian in feathered head-dress. Anderson made a number of Westerns for his company in Colorado and eventually settled in Niles, California. It was here in 1910 that he made a film based on a story by Peter B. Kyne called 'Broncho Billy and the Baby'. So successful was this film, Broncho Billy's Redemption, that Anderson was henceforth known by the name of the character he played.

Significantly, the first Western star based his character on the image of the cowboy. Broncho Billy usually wears a highly elaborate outfit which includes sheepskin chaps, leather gauntlets, twin pistols in holsters, a large neckerchief and a wide-brimmed hat; his garb derives, however distantly, from the costume of the trail herders of the southern plains. His manner around women is gauche but gallant, around men pugnacious. Anderson, with his bulbous nose and bulky figure, was an unlikely hero. But his geniality and awkward good nature shone through and endeared him to the public. The character he played was that of the Good Badman. Broncho Billy was often an outlaw, as in the initial story, but never hesitated to sacrifice himself if a woman or child was in distress. Of course Broncho Billy isn't a real cowpuncher. What he owes to the traditional image of the cowboy, besides his costume, is a certain simplicity of character, an underlying honesty and a relish for action. And, of crucial importance dramatically, he shares the cowboy's free and easy life-style, which makes him always available for adventure. Even if getting the girl might seem to tie him down (at the end of Shooting Mad we leave him pushing a pram down the street), he is invariably footloose again at the start of the next picture. In the person of Broncho Billy the Western was from its earliest days alert to the advantage of series production based on a character not tied by institutional, professional or domestic constraints. The cowboy as rolling stone was of all possible Western heroes (soldier, trapper, emigrant, miner, etc.) the best adapted to the endless repetition with a difference on which the Western, particularly the B-Western, is founded. Broncho Billy was not the only character to appear regularly at this time. In France an actor called Joe Hamman made a number of appearances as 'Arizona Bill' in 1911 and 191 2 in such films as Les Diables rouges and Aux Mains des brigands. A character called Young Wild West, who originated in Wild West Weekly magazine, appeared in half a dozen films produced by the Nestor company in 1912. But for the crucial formative years up until 1913 Broncho Billy was by far the most coherent and attractive character on the Western screen, as well as, with nearly 300 films, the one who appeared most often. Broncho Billy established a type which others had to follow even while they worked their variations on it.

By 1920 Anderson's career as a Western star was over. The Western had grown, both in length (one of the first Western features, DeMille's The Squaw Man, was made in 1914) and in emotional stature. More serious or at least more self-conscious artists like William S. Hart and D. W. Griffith had taken the form beyond the childlike naivety of Broncho Billy. But Anderson's part in establishing the Western's popularity through the creation of its first recognized persona can hardly be over-estimated.