| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood. By Andrew Brodie Smith. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003. vii + 230 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $34.95.)

This sophisticated, superbly researched and informed book is the first serious study devoted exclusively to the Western film in the silent era. Its focus, sensibly, is on the earliest years of narrative filmmaking, especially from around 1908 though the mid-1910s, when the Western was central to the development of Hollywood. A wrap-up chapter on the cowboy stars of the 1920s is justifiably superficial, as the films became much more routine. Its subtitle notwithstanding, the book is more exclusively a study of the film industry than of American culture, although the role of pressure groups and censorship in the evolutions in the subjects of Western films (away from social bandits, Mexicans, and Indians, toward moralistic Anglo gunfighters) is laid out convincingly. The seven chapters are chronologically organized around most of the key early studios and stars. Some of the stories are relatively familiar (such as those about Thomas H. Ince and William S. Hart), but even these are full of new details. No previous scholar has traced so knowledgeably the evolution of the first Western star, G. M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson (born Max Aronson), toward acceptably middle-class, "family" values. Among Andrew Brodie Smith's large claims for Anderson is that in moving Broncho Billy beyond strict villainy or virtue, he created one of commercial cinema's first modern characters.

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