The 30s: Changes in The Industry 

 The  30s has the reputation of being a poor decade for the Western,  but production statistics show that this is an over-simplification. Certainly, as Tabic 5 (Appendix) shows, there was a slump in A-Westerns in the middle of the decade, and a falling off in production of Westerns generally both at the beginning of the decade and again during the middle.

Cause and effect cannot be assigned with certainty, but it seems reasonable to attribute the slump in 1930 and 1931 to the introduction of sound. The second dip in numbers can most easily be explained as the result of tightening belts in Hollywood, as the deepening Depression began to bite into theatre attendances. From 1935 the growth of the double-bill increased demand for cheap fillers which the B-Western was ideally placed to fill. The consolidation of several small companies under the umbrella of Republic stabilized this side of the industry, with the result that the production of Westerns by independents jumped from 59 in 1934 to 106 in 1935. The Western has rarely been at the forefront of stylistic innovation in Hollywood. On the other hand it has generally been in the vanguard of technical advance. One of the first feature films to be shot in two-strip Technicolor was Paramount's Wanderer oj the Wasteland in 1924. The Trail oj the Lonesome Pine (1936) was the first picture to be shot on location in the new three-colour Technicolor process. Two big-budget Westerns at the beginning of the 30s, The Big Trail and Billy the Kid, were made in experimental wide-screen processes, and later when Hollywood was to move more decisively towards wide screens with CinemaScope, Westerns such as River of No Return were again among the first films to use the new technology. In the 1960s two Westerns, Custer of the West and How the West Was Won, were shot in the Cinerama process. When 3-D became a vogue in the mid-50s, Westerns such as Hondo and The Charge at Feather River seized the opportunity to unleash a shower of projectiles at their audiences. Sound was to prove a less tractable technology at first. Westerns had always been known for their location work. As we have seen, one of the reasons why production companies moved to California in the early years of the century was in order to exploit the advantage which genuine Western scenery could bring. But the early sound equipment was studio-bound. It required cameras to be heavily insulated so that the noise of their movement would not register on the recording apparatus. This inhibited the transport of the equipment to distant locations, or at least rendered it less mobile. In addition, sound equipment required a heavy financial outlay. This was at first beyond the capacity of the small companies responsible for a large proportion of Western production. And the small movie theatres in rural neighbourhoods which provided many of the outlets for Westerns also found it hard to lay their hands on the necessary cash to wire for sound. The natural response was to cut back on production while waiting to see what would happen. Eventually, of course, when it became clear that the change-over to sound was complete and irreversible, both producers and exhibitors had to follow suit or go out of business, and production revived. The second half of the 30s proved in retrospect to be the golden age of the B-Western, which, in addition to meeting a new demand on the bottom half of double-bills, discovered a novel attraction in the form of the singing cowboy. Gene Autrv wasn't the first Westerner to warble, but he was the most successful. Beginning with In Old Santa Fe in 1934 Autry, accompanied by his guitar and his horse Champion, had strolled amiably through more than ninety films by 1953. For the purist it's hard to see what Autry's films have in common with The Covered Wagon; can the term 'Western' really cover two things so dissimilar? But the line from Tom Mix is clear enough if we look at Autry's costume or the scrubbed-clean morality of his films. There can be no simple explanation of why so few A-Westerns should have been produced in the middle years of the 30s, since the scarcity continued until well after the industry had adjusted to sound. Critics are fond of attributing such shifts in taste to the Zeitgeist. The 30s, beset as they were with problems as pressing as the relentless growth of unemployment and the rise of fascism, simply could not find time for the Western, which however much or little it attempted to ground itself in history was always more or less escapist. In other areas of artistic production, goes the argument, the 30s were as realistic and documentary a decade as you could wish for; small wonder that Westerns were out of fashion. But such an explanation doesn't stand up if we look at the rest of Hollywood's output during this period, which, a few gritty exercises in realism from Warner Bros, apart, can scarcely qualify as socially concerned. The 30s, after all, were the great age of the Busby Berkeley musical and the screwball comedy. Nor does the argument convince if we look at the Western as a whole, since in the B-Western production boomed, and moved even further away from reality with delirious fantasies such as Phantom Empire, in which the singing cowboy is grafted on to the science fiction movie and Gene Autry battles with the denizens of a strange subterranean civilization. If the audience for 'A' pictures was affected by the sober climate of the times, why not that for the B-Western too? A more plausible reason for the small number of A-Westerns can be found in the box-office returns of the Westerns which were made at the start of the decade. Fox's The Big Trail (1930), which was intended to launch John Wayne as a star, did badly, condemning Wayne to Poverty Row for the rest of the decade. rko's ambitious Cimarron (1930) cost $1,433,000 and despite winning an Academy Award for best picture (the only Western ever to do so), it lost some $565,000. Such costly disasters must surely have made the industry think twice about investing heavily in the Western. Eventually things picked up; not solely, as the legend has it, because of the success of Stagecoach in 1939, though that undoubtedly helped. More successful financially and just as influential was Fox's Jesse James (1939). Its popularity led not only to a sequel the next year (The Return of Frank James) but to a rush of outlaw biographies, including When the Daltons Rode (1940), Bad Men of Missouri (1941) - about the Younger gang - Belle Starr (1941) and Billy the Kid (1941), as well as Republic's attempt to cash in by starring Roy Rogers in Jesse James at Bay (1941). Other important factors in the renewal of the A-Western were Warners' discovery in Errol Flynn of a star who looked good in period costume and Cecil B. DeMille's rediscovery of the genre he had first entered with The Squaw Man in 1914. DeMille's second remake of The Squaw Man in 1931 had not been a financial success. But commencing in 1936 with The Plainsman he made three Westerns in quick succession, following up with Union Pacific (1939) and North West Mounted Police (1940). All did well at the box office, helping to re-establish the genre as a major attraction.