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THE ACTUAL,
William S. Hart, the Farnum brothers, William and Dustin, William Russell, Tom Mix, and Hoot Gibson, the Western film had an air of sincerity in its open stretches of sand, its fleeting horses, its smell of sage and gunsmoke. Not that I suggest that Americans once behaved precisely as did these rustlers and gunmen, but there was nevertheless some element of fact in the idealised cowboy. The spirit of openness seemed to have come quite naturally to the Westerns, and was in itself eminently suited to the functions of the cinema. It will be recalled that the story-interest of these fast-moving pictures was usually negligible; all that mattered was the hard riding, the spreading horizon of the desert, the crumbled canon walls, the dusty hooves of cattle and mustangs, the heat and the cold, the rain and the wind. It was something the Americans understood. It was captured by the cinema with remarkable faith, very different from the studio reconstructions of ' Imperialist Russia ' and ' Medieval England \
From time to time the Western film was stripped of its fictional trappings and was raised to the standard of an epic. It lost its story and became a reconstructed record of some great past achievement. Two examples of this have been mentioned, John Ford's The Iron Horse and Three Bad Men, but the pinnacle was reached in Cruze's The Covered Wagon. This was a film that combined the essence of the Western with the cinematic knowledge of Hollywood; a film of the men and women who set their faces and their wagons to the west in the giant trek across the plains. The production of this film was all the more remarkable in that its makers were the Famous-Lasky Company. It was an odd link in their tradition. It was their first breakaway from the drawing-room movie, a step that has since been followed up by Old Ironsides {Sons of the Sea), also directed by Cruze, and the Chang and Four Feathers type of picture. It was a direct development from the crude Western, but approached in an epic spirit; a sincere attempt to reconstitute past fact.
James Cruze, up to that time a maker of domestic
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