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By this time, the visual language of the basic western had been written. The Good Guy wore a white hat, the Bad Guy wore a black hat. G.G. was clean-shaven, B.G. had 5 o'clock shadow, and an experienced horse fan could predict the depth of the villain's depravity by checking the length of his sideburns. The villain chased the hero from right to left, but when the hero was winning, he was naturally headed right (with his pistol hand closest to the camera). Anybody shot was assumed dead, unless the audience was notified to the contrary. The stock situations had also been worked out—the stage robbery, the Indian attack, the big stampede, the necktie party, the chair-throwing brawl in the barroom—and in the subtitles, the dialogue had been perfected: "We'll head 'em off at the pass!"
Buck Jones, Hoot Gibson, Tim McCoy, Bob Steele had little to add to the formula, and the singing cowboys, Gene Autry and later, Roy Rogers, added little more than a sour note. Nevertheless, during the '30s the oats ripened rapidly. Gary Cooper, a sort of Abe Lincoln in Levi's, and John Wayne, a smoke-wagon Siegfried, represented in different ways a more mature attempt on the part of the western hero to behave like a man. And in such pictures as John Ford's Stagecoach and William Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident, the mythological struggle between Good and Evil was enacted on the personal plane; while in George Stevens' Shane and in Fred Zinnemann's High Noon, the western hero for the first time in movie history had to face what that struggle really means: the necessity of moral choice. For the first time he experienced his free will, his individuality.
The Prima Donnas. TV's Gunsmoke, originally a radio show, carried the revolution a step further. Gifted, Colorado-born Scriptwriter John Meston took pains to place the psychological realism in a setting of regional realism. When the show hit hard, a hasty passel of horse operators tried to follow his lead, but soon got lost in the chaparral cliches. Almost two years passed before a few of the more carefully written shows (Rawhide, Rifleman) began to get trailwise.
Meanwhile Hollywood, where all the television westerns are filmed, had begun to jump like a bronc with a belly full of bedsprings. Every rent-out ranch within a hundred miles was overrun with milling steers, yipping dudes and grinding cameras. The riding academies were booked solid, and the shooting instructors were taking in more money than the psychoanalysts. Horses were making more than people—up to $100 a day, while the average extra was getting $22.05. And the Hollywood hills were alive with "Method Cowboys" who would display their diplomas from the Actors' Studio at the drop of a Stetson.