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treated thousands of times. Perhaps tens of thousands. Westerns have been numerically 54 percent of the industry's production since Edwin S. Porter made the Stammvater of them all, The Great K & E Train Robbery, back in 1906.
In Ward's Beyond The Sacramento the law came to an easygoing '49 camp because it tolerated certain blackguards who had once framed our hero, inspiring him to track 'em down and pick 'em off one by one. This is also the central situation of Max Brand's story Destry Rides Again, originally made by Universal as a series vehicle to star Tom Mix. (And if you think Mr. Faust and Miss Ward may have read Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo, you're right.)
The Mix version of Destry Rides Again was of little importance to the industry or its writers. About seven years later, Joe Pasternak proved what creative imagination can do for the most hackneyed and familiar of themes, when he conceived the refreshing, novel and daring woman's version, co-starring Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart.
In our current release, Badman's Territory, the "coming of the law" theme was obligatory, not by producer decision, but by the historical nature of our basic material. Here again, emphasis of the woman's part of the story proved a way out of the groove, although the same woman (Alice Robertson, first Congresswoman from Oklahoma) had already been well exploited by another writer (Edna Ferber in Cimarron). Of course, we would not have discovered this audience character had we not done painstaking historical research.
The preceding instances are chosen to illustrate some of the many possible means of injecting thematic freshness into jaded subject matter. Any good work of literature, treating of an action theme such as the story of a man and his enemies, may be suggestively helpful to the Western writer. So may the yellowed leaves of history, and the yellower journalism of tomorrow's headlines.
"You can't do anything that's new in a Western. Everything good has already been done."
The assumption cited above might well read "You can't do
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