[00:00.49]William S. hart was, perhaps, the greatest of all Western stars,
[00:05.94]fro unlike Gary Cooper and John Wayne
[00:09.38]he appeared in nothing but Westerns.
[00:12.15]From 1914 to 1924 he was supreme and unchallenged.
[00:18.86]It was Hart who created the basic formula of the Western film,
[00:23.78]and devised the protagonist he played in every film he made,
[00:28.42]the good-bad man, the accidental-noble outlaw,
[00:32.98]or the honest-but-framed cowboy, or the sheriff made suspect by vicious gossip;
[00:39.77]in short, the individual in conflict with himself and his frontier environment.
[00:45.53]Unlike most of his contemporaries in Hollywood,
[00:48.61]Hart actually knew something of the old West.
[00:51.97]He had lived in it as a child when it was already disappearing,
[00:56.65]and his hero was firmly rooted in his memories and experiences,
[01:01.65]and in both the history and the mythology of the vanished frontier.
[01:06.64]And although no period or place in American history has been more absurdly romanticized,
[01:12.93]myth and reality did join hands in at least one arena,
[01:18.32]the conflict between the individual and encroaching civilization.
[01:23.44]Men accustomed to struggling for survival against the elements and Indians were bewildered by politicians, bankers and businessmen,
[01:33.02]and unhorsed by fences, laws and alien taboos.
[01:37.99]Hart's good-bad man was always an outsider,
[01:41.88]always one of the disinherited,
[01:44.34]and if he found it necessary to shoot a sheriff or rob a bank along the way,
[01:49.74]his early audiences found it easy to understand and forgive,
[01:54.38]especially when it was Hart who, in the end, overcame the attacking Indians.
[02:00.56]Audiences in the second decade of the twentieth century
[02:04.60]found it pleasant to escape to a time when life,though hard, was relatively simple.
[02:10.60]We still do;
[02:12.12]living in a world in which undeclared aggression, war, hypocrisy, chicanery, anarchy and impending immolation are part of our daily lives,
[02:24.22]we all want a code to live by.
