The 1930s almost saw a complete abandonment of the Western genre due to technical difficulties with filming on location as well as a perceived indifference to the genre by the public. However, the renewed faith generated in the mid to late 1930s due to political changes relating to the Depression, revived the American public's appetite for patriotic storytelling. As a result, the late 1930s saw a proliferation of Westerns involving the themes of romanticism, heroism, the triumph of good over evil, and patriotism, all presented in large-scale, epic proportions. The sweeping landscape, after all, stood for a grandiose metaphor symbolizing new prospects and opportunity.

The groundwork for the Western, therefore, evolved from significant societal changes in early 20 th century America . The characteristics (link to home node-down to where we have these listed ) which had previously defined the Western became forever entrenched within the genre. Lawrence Grossberg in Mediamaking: Mass Media in a Popular Culture (1998) defines a genre as “a class of texts which have something in common.” (Grossberg 1998: 159). By sharing a set of conventions, a genre helps classify a body of artistic work. In the case of the Western, Grossberg shows how the genre prescribes a setting in the American west, with characters like the gun-fighting hero and the saloon girl, and events such as the saloon brawl and the guns-a-blazing town shootout. “…The genre specifies both the formula that is reproduced in every western and the limits within which each new example of the genre has to find its own individuality.” (Grossberg 1998: 161). Therefore, bounded within the structures that dictate movie-making form (a climax, a resolution etc), genres provide guidelines that direct the content within the form. Grossberg stresses, however, that the genre is not a stable entity but rather is always changing and evolving as society does the same. See The Maturity of the Western for an example of how changes in the discourse of feminism over the 20 th century altered the portrayal of women's roles in Western films.

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