The Epic Western in The 20s

On the whole, it is true, major historical themes such as the building of railroads are more common in large-scale Westerns, for the obvious reason that they tend to require money. The biggest films of the 20s and 30s, The Covered Wagon, The Iron Horse, The Big Trail, Cimarron, The Plainsman, Wells Fargo, Union Pacific, all base themselves in some way on actual events.

?Yet although the first Western epic, The Covered Wagon, produced in 1923, was intended to be as different as possible from the series Western of the day starring Tom Mix and others, it did not wholly abandon the narrative structures and character stereotypes which had become so popular. It had fights and Indian attacks, chases and a final shoot-out, of a sort. But it also had seriousness and a weighty theme. It told the story of an emigrant train going west just after the gold strike in California in 1848. At the climactic moment of the film the emigrants split between those who opt for the gold diggings and quick money, and those who decide to go to Oregon to settle the land.

What The Covered Wagon had above all was scope and scale. Following the success of Cecil B. DeMille's feature-length Western The Squaw Man in 1914, William S. Hart had begun making feature-length pictures. By 1917, when John Ford made his first five-reel Western, Straight Shooting, features were common enough. But The Covered Wagon went further. It was ten reels long when originally released and at $782,000 (about $8 million at 1988 prices) it was far and away the most expensive Western to date. Its big set-pieces, such as the crossing of the river by 400 wagons, a buffalo hunt and the Indian attack on the wagon train, were more spectacular than anything yet seen. If James Cruze now appears a rather pedestrian director, the location work, the most elaborate of its time, is still impressive. The Western at last had stature. The success of The Covered Wagon led, as usual in Hollywood, to imitations. Historians have claimed that as a direct result of The Covered Wagon's popularity with both critics and audiences the production of Westerns increased overall. William K. Everson and George N. Fenin, for example, write in The Western from Silents to the Seventies: 'Only fifty Westerns were made in 1923, but the success of James Cruze's film was such that the following year saw the number had almost tripled. Until the elimination of B-Westerns in the Mid-Fifties, the annual Western output never fell below that figure again, and usually exceeded it. It's not clear from what sources these figures are drawn. A calculation based on The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Feature Films, 1921-1930 shows a rise in the total number of Westerns produced, from 98 in 1923 to 173 in 1924 (see Appendix, Table 1). But 1923 had itself been a slack year compared to 1922, which had seen 145 Westerns made. What is true is that 1925 saw the highest number in the whole period 1921-69, 227 in all. (For the record, as Table 1 shows, the number of Westerns made in any one year never in fact reached 150 after 1926, and for much of the 30s did not reach three figures.) But if this increase in 1925 was a direct response to The Covered Wagon, how to explain the two-year delay? What may he more significant is a marked increase from 1923 onwards in the number of Westerns over six reels in length, that is in longer, and presumably bigger-budgeted, films. (The figures for Westerns over six reels during the early 20s are: 1922, 4; 1923, 13; 1924, 12; 1925, 26; 1926, 11.) What does seem possible, then, is that The Covered Wagon led to an increase in the number of longer, more expensive Westerns.

Of the big Westerns which followed in the wake of The Covered Wagon, John Ford's The Iron Horse, made for Fox in 1924 with a similarly epic theme of advancement across the continent, is the best known, and deservedly. It is the summation of Ford's achievement in the Western up to that point, and he was to make only one more (Three Bad Men, 1926) before Stagecoach in 1939. Paramount, who had produced The Covered Wagon, followed up with another large-scale drama. This was North of 36, based, like The Covered Wagon, on a novel by Emerson Hough. If not on quite the same scale as the earlier film (its budget was $350,000, less than half that of The Covered Wagon, though still substantial), it too had some spectacular scenes, such as a river crossing by a herd of four thousand cattle. Most of the epic Westerns of the 1920s are about trail-blazing and conquering new territory, a theme continued into the 1930s with The Big Trail and Cimarron. James Cruze attempted another big Western in 1925, Pony Express, and William S. Hart felt obliged to give an epic dimension to his last film, Tumbleiveeds, which includes some impressive footage of the Oklahoma land rush. But productions on this scale were very much the exception. The history of the Western in the 1920s was, as it has always been, largely the history (admittedly not always told) of those films which were cranked out year after year to a traditional pattern. As Table 4 (Appendix) shows, between 1926 and 1967, apart from a brief period in the early 30s, Westerns consistently formed around a quarter of all feature films made in Hollywood. This one genre, with its highly formulaic content and steady market, can be seen as the absolute bedrock of Hollywood, the foundation upon which its glittering palaces were erected.