The Great Train Film Analysis

America’s history or an interpretation of the nation’s history has been played out throughout the decades in film, the Western is no different. While other countries have adopted their own versions, the American Western has qualities can only be interrupted as American. While playing out the the fight against evil, greed, and taming of the frontier, the Western was also depicting America’s thoughts about itself. Like the films, the nation was fraught with conflict for what ideals it should stand for. As time went on the Western took on other themes that were coming to the forefront in the nation’s identity. Films like The Great Train Robbery, depicted good over bad, basic values that were evident. Others that came after it were also illustrating “much about America’s past, glorifying the past-fading values and aspirations of the mythical by-gone age of the West” (Dirks Part 1). Was America trying to escape the new ideas coming to the forefront of American life or trying to make sense of it? The Western genre tried to convey it’s own message on ever changing times about equality, individualism, and justification for the conflicts in which the nation was a part of. When a movie like the first American Western, The Great Train Robbery, are revisited, there is only one battle going on. This battle is between “a basic moral opposition between good and evil” (Cawelti 36). The movie basically conveys right and wrong. There are no additions of “others” are not …show more content…
People watch Westerns in order to escape an evolving nation or to make sense of all the changes around them. The Western film genre does attempt to hold on to the old ways when it comes to equality, individualism, and conflict. In the Western film, America is not only taming the new frontier and saving the day, it is trying to tame and save its own ideals and