II.

Historical Perspective

In the days of the studio production lines, placement of films within genres tended to be part of the thinking of studio executives in their decisions about production and marketing policy, and were reiterated in the trade papers. Thus, notions about many film genres actually preceded explicit critical analysis. While critical accounts of a film genre tend, appropriately, to be descriptive, the same ideas in the mind of a producer or accountant are often prescriptive, based on a notion of what audiences will find acceptable in, say, a Western.

When critics started to analyse Hollywood films in depth, this link with the collective, entertainment, money-making aspect of the production system, rather than its initially unrecognized personal, artistic dimension, contributed to an emphasis on the negative aspects of the genres, for example, the limits their conventions imposed on creativity. However, as Colin McArthur argued in his pioneering genre study Underworld USA (1972): “the responses of film-makers and audiences to the genres seem to offer a good prime facie case for believing that they are animating rather than neutral, that they carry particular charges of meaning independently of whatever is brought to them by particular directors.”

Certainly, it seems unlikely to be coincidence that much of the finest work of Howard Hawks, John Ford, Anthony Mann, and, more recently Clint Eastwood, has been in the Western genre. Nevertheless, only minor or mediocre directors can be said to be defined by their relationship to a genre, and each of the four cited has inflected the genre in significantly different ways, both stylistically and thematically, as well as having done important work in other genres.