The genres are rising.(movie genres)

THERE IS NOTHING film-makers find more comfortable than working in a traditional genre. They know, or think they know, that the form, whether it is a gangster movie, western, musical, epic or whatever, has already been accepted by the audience. Writers and directors can then rework the formulas in the hope of making the exploration of character and motive more profound and the action more exciting.

This is what happened in the 1950s with the Anthony Mann-James Stewart westerns (usually written by Borden Chase). Stewart wanted to extend his acting range and Mann responded by making his characters darker and more complex, all the while reworking familiar plot devices of the genre: the trek to find new land (Bend of the River), revenge (Winchester '73), revenge again plus a father-son theme (The Man from Laramie).

The visual style of the westerns was equally familiar to its audiences. There were standing sets all over the USA close to locations where stagecoaches could wind across the prairie, cavalry gallop to the rescue or a lone figure ride across the landscape. One of the best was Old Tucson in Arizona, built in 1939 for the film of the same name. The set was used in scores of westerns, dressed and redressed to suit the themes and style of each particular movie. As I found when I visited in 1988, the standard western compositions came almost automatically as you framed and shot. Of course, the great directors and cinematographers who utilised its riches didn't leave it at that. Howard Hawks wanted slashes of yellow light coming from the doorways for the night scenes in El Dorado. (The idea came from the paintings of Frederic Remington.) For Hour of the Gun, John Sturges used the same settings to create his characteristic formal groupings; all very appropriate for a work that was essentially a tragedy.

None of this was completely authentic. For one thing, almost everyone was clean shaven and much too well groomed, when photographs from the period reveal a proliferation of moustaches and clothes that were distinctly scruffy. This gradually changed in the late 1960s and 1970s. James Coburn's Pat Garrett wears a spectacular moustache in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, as did James Garner both times he played Wyatt Earp.

Throughout the great days of the western there was a community of cinematographers, stunt men, wranglers, technicians and character actors who were familiar with the physical demands of the often arduous locations and the standing sets. (In summer, as Angie Dickinson discovered when she was making Rio Bravo, Old Tucson was brutally hot.) Above all, the leads possessed an impressive range of physical skills. Just about all of them rode well. It's something we all take for granted, but just watch how effortlessly Gary Cooper climbs onto a horse or draws a gun. John Wayne's hard-won expertise with props, guns and horses won him the respect of all the film crews he worked with in his long career. Because of this there is a satisfying continuity in most of the fifties and sixties westerns, when the form was at its greatest.

The same can be said for the gangster movies, although in the thirties most of them were made on the back lot on the same studio sets. Unable to tell the whole truth about organised crime and the official corruption that enabled many gangsters to prosper, writers like W.R. Burnett used as much of the underworld reality they could get past the censors, then adapted the rise-and-fall structure of the classic tragedies. This worked well enough, with the criminal hero usually dispatched in the last reel, even though well-heeled mobsters showing no signs of departing this life were all over Hollywood.

However, when a writer or director created a genuinely innovative film in one of the genres that proved to be successful, it was certain to be copied. This is what happened with High Noon (1952) and its brilliant successor 3:10 to Yuma (1957), now remade fifty years later. Fred Zinnemann's High Noon was very different from the standard westerns of the 1950s. It was in black-and-white, concentrated on characterisation, and was shot in approximately real time. The basic plot device, so good that it is a wonder it was not thought of sooner, was to have a gang of outlaws coming on the noon train to kill Marshal Kane (Gary Cooper) who had cleaned up the town and sent their leader to jail.