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Popular plots for the western include keeping law and order on the frontier, black hat villain/ savage/ gunslinger vs white hat/ settler / lawman. The basic conflict of good vs evil that permeates the western is often ones good side confronting the evil side.
Typical elements in westerns include hostile elements such as Native Americans, gunfights, train robberies, hold ups and bank robberies.
The typical western hero is usually the local law enforcement officer, rancher, cowboy, or the skilled fast draw gunfighter.
The western was among the first film genres. The earliest cowboy films were Thomas Edison's Cripple Creek Bar Room (1898) and Poker at Dawson City (1898), followed by Edison's publicity film Romance of the Rails (1902). But the 'first real movie' or commercially narrative film that gave birth to the genre was Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) (Dirks,online). It included all of the essential elements of the western genre. The film ended with the first close-up of a gunman firing directly into the camera and audience. It was the most commercially successful film of the pre-nickelodeon era. .
With the coming of sound in the late 1920's, westerns like Victor Flemming's The Virginian and John Fords Stagecoach would set the elements and typify the straightforward heroic tales that would dominate the classic stage of the genre until the 1950's.
In the 1950's, a number of westerns pushed the genre beyond the realm of simple stories, but by the 1960's, the genre shifted into the refinement stage, opening itself up to more complex characters who tended to be extraordinarily violent and even antiheroic compared to the characters of earlier films of the genre. Such films of the refinement stage are Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, A fistful of dollars (1964) and the Good the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Sam Peckinpah's The wild Bunch was released in 1969 and with the appearance of this film, many people argue that the genre reached something of an end.
