D. W. Griffith

The only man making Westerns in the early days which could rival in sheer scale and in dramatic verve those emanating from Inceville was D. W. Griffith. Of the 571 films made by Griffith's studio, Biograph, between July 1908 and November 1912 74 were, on a broad definition, Westerns.

?Though the Biograph studios were in New York, from 1910 Griffith regularly took his company to California for the winter. Thus one of Griffith's most successful Westerns, The Last Drop of Water (1911), benefits greatly from being shot in what is recognizably a Californian desert. The story concerns two rivals for the love of the heroine, played by Blanche Sweet. She marries the weaker of the two, and his fondness for liquor causes their marriage to deteriorate. A year later the couple and the disappointed suitor join a wagon train of settlers going west. Indians attack them in the desert when they are running out of water. The suitor, still in love with Blanche Sweet, nobly volunteers to go in search of the nearest waterhole. The husband eventually finds him nearly dying of thirst. At first the husband jeers at him, but then redeems himself by giving up his last drop of water before expiring. The suitor revives and fetches the cavalry, who arrive in the nick of time, in the usual manner of a Griffith cliff-hanger ending.

The scenes of the wagon train wending its way through the desert are on an impressive scale. Like Ince's films for Bison, Griffith's Westerns offered higher production values and an emphasis on visual spectacle. This undoubtedly gave a further boost to the genre's popularity. Griffith redefined the possibilities of the genre, grafting on an 'epic' dimension which was to bear fruit later in The Covered Wagon and The Iron Horse, and which increased the Western's prestige. The Western proved the ideal vehicle for Griffith's skill in creating narrative tension through cross'Cutting and also gave full rein to his ability to wring emotion from the audience by placing innocent young women in jeopardy. In his most elaborate early Western, The Battle of Elderbush Qulch (1913), Mae Marsh and Lillian Gish play two young sisters who come out west to live. The local Indians go on the warpath and attack the town. A huge battle ensues, directed with all Griffith's customary elan. At the end of the picture it seems as if the Indians must break through into the cabin in which the girls have taken refuge (in an early example of what would become a stock device, one of the women inside is told to save the last bullet for herself)- Then at the last moment the cavalry arrive and the Indians are routed It may seem strange that the director ofRamona or A Squaw's Love, with their individually realized and sympathetic Indian characters, could also make a film like The Battle of Elderbush Quick which portrays the Indians as a horde of screaming savages. But the Western has always spoken with a forked tongue, now willing to treat Indians as characters in the drama, now lumping them together en masse as an alien threat. Even in the 1970s, after an unprecedented wave of 'pro-Indian' pictures, a film such as Ulzana's Raid, apparently sympathetic to the Apache, rubs its audience's noses in details of Indian torture. That a deep-seated racism has been responsible for the reduction of the Indian to a faceless 'Other' is scarcely in doubt. But we should not underestimate the more immediate requirements of dramaturgy. Both the Western's inheritance from the popular culture of the 19th century and the early success of those films which stressed action and spectacle created the expectation that conflict would be resolved through physical struggle. How could the hero be brave unless there were danger? The plot required a threat, and what better than Indians? Hostility arising from racial difference was an attractively simple trigger for violence, requiring no very complex explanation of motivations.