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TRITE, STAL E — A ND PROFITABLE?
"Any good Western has got to be all about the coming of the law."
Let us not toss this one off by glibly citing the many good Westerns that were not at all concerned with the arrival of John Law — such memorable stories as Peter B. Kyne's Three Bad Men and Emerson Hough's The Covered Wagon. There is a certain quantum of truth in this assumption, and has been, ever since Owen Wister's The Virginian. Which, incidentally, is not a Western in the technical sense of being an outdoor action melodrama.
The Virginian is a drama of social conflict during a transitional period. Really, the only difference between The Virginian and A Tale of Two Cities is that in the former the characters wear Stetsons and carry six-guns. By the Hollywood standard, any outdoor action film is basically a Western. Grover Jones and Bill McNutt created a Western in the Khyber Pass when they wrote The Lives of a Bengal Lancer. Robin Hood is a great Western, from which screen writers have cheerfully borrowed more than merely the charm and impudence of outlaws in rebellion against injustice.
Let's get back to the assumption that any good Western must necessarily concern itself with the coming of the law. That is already proved a false limitation, and further discussion may seem to be tilting at windmills.
The real limitation involved, and a very important one to the writer, is the producer himself and not the truth or falsity of his statement. How is one going to get an assignment, and various checks, from this gentleman?
How is one going to treat "the coming of the law" when that theme is not self-elected but is arbitrarily handed down from above
— for an entire series of films?
It all depends on the writer — and the state of his indigestion
— whether he accepts the unnecessary limitation as a discouragement or a challenge.
To whom does the law come — and why?
The writer who asks these questions, and examines the answers
— and does a little honest toil in the research department — will discover possibilities of originality even in a theme which has been
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