[00:01.55]Lesson 21
[00:03.62]William S.Hart and the early 'Western' film
[00:13.65]How did William Hart's childhood prepare him for his acting role in Western films?
[00:22.05]William S.Hart was, perhaps, the greatest of all Western stars,
[00:27.38]for unlike Gary Cooper and John Wayne he appeared in nothing but Westerns.
[00:33.82]From 1914 to 1924 he was supreme and unchallenged.
[00:40.72]It was Hart who created the basic formula of the Western film,
[00:45.71]and devised the protagonist he played in every film he made,
[00:50.40]the good-bad man, the accidental, noble outlaw,
[00:54.76]or the honest, but framed cowboy, or the sheriff made suspect by vicious gossip;
[01:01.59]in short, the individual in conflict with himself and his frontier environment.
[01:08.12]Unlike most of his contemporaries in Hollywood,
[01:10.84]Hart actually knew something of the old West.
[01:14.11]He had lived in it as a child when it was already disappearing,
[01:18.82]and his hero was firmly rooted in his memories and experiences,
[01:23.72]and in both the history and the mythology of the vanished frontier,
[01:29.09]And although no period or place in American history has been more absurdly romanticized,
[01:35.08]myth and reality did join hands in at least one arena,
[01:40.44]the conflict between the individual and encroaching civilization.
[01:46.83]Men accustomed to struggling for survival against the elements and Indians
[01:51.70]were bewildered by politicians, bankers and businessmen,
[01:56.27]and unhorsed by fences, laws and alien taboos.
[02:01.70]Hart's good-bad man was always an outsider, always one of the disinherited,
[02:08.49]and if he found it necessary to shoot a sheriff or rob a bank along the way,
[02:13.65]his early audiences found it easy to understand and forgive,
[02:18.12]especially when it was Hart who, in the end, overcame the attacking Indians.
[02:25.36]Audiences in the second decade of the twentieth century
[02:28.90]found it pleasant to escape to a time when life, though hard, was relatively simple.
[02:35.01]We still do; living in a world in which undeclared aggression, war, hypocrisy,
[02:41.82]chicanery, anarchy and impending immolation are part of our daily lives,
[02:48.31]we all want a code to live by.