The Western

'The Great Train Robbery' (1903) is usually called the starting point, but it wasn't really the first Western — footage of cowboys goes back further than that. What these 12 minutes did was invent the formula: chase, shootout, resolution. A genre doesn't start with its first film. It starts the moment its shape sets. 'Stagecoach' (1939) is what lifted the Western out of its long run as cheap, mass-produced B-pictures and into adult filmmaking. John Ford overruled the studio to cast an unknown John Wayne in the lead, and made Monument Valley the genre's face. Then, at the middle of the 20th century, this machine crossed the ocean and back. Akira Kurosawa, who admired Ford, made period films of his own. His 'Yojimbo' was remade in Italy, without permission, as 'A Fistful of Dollars' (the dispute was settled out of court), and 'Seven Samurai' became 'The Magnificent Seven.' By the late 1960s, revisionism arrived to read the genre through the eyes of the Vietnam era ('The Wild Bunch,' 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'). About 120 years — one of the longest spines on this map — building a myth, exporting it, doubting it, and still not finished. 'The Great Train Robbery' can still be watched in full on the Library of Congress's official page.