The frontier held an important place in American history

He cited as certify census data for 1890 which showed that the country no longer had a frontier settlement:

Up to our own day American narration has been in a large degree the memorial of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its nonstop recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American maturation (Turner 1).

Turner analyzes the significance of the frontier in American history and finds that the frontier helped to form what has come to be known as the American character:

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of muddy importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial eld onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while soften down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded (Turner 37).

The West attracted Americans who wanted to be part of the taming of the frontier. The frontier developed a mythos of its own and stood in sharp contrast to the civilized East. Turner finds that the frontier served as a force to develop democracy in American life.

If the real frontier ended in 1890, the frontier as an image persisted and does to this day. Americans still think of any far- range horizon to which they plan as a frontier. Moviegoers for decades had the flash Western holding

Eastwood, Clint. Unforgiven. Warner Bros., 1992.

In the later period of the Western, though, the sinless genre and all its conventions have been questi oned, often around large social issues such as the problem of violence in American society. The Western is a unique form in which to examine this question and the fact that a nation was created by violence, foremost to the indigenous people of this continent, then to other settlers. Robert Warshow offers an elicit example of genre criticism as he finds relationships amidst what he calls the "two most successful creations of American movies," the mobster and the Westerner, "men with guns" (Warshow 469).

Warshow emphasizes the importance of guns in both the gangster film and the Western, and in so doing he links these two genres first around this objectification of violence and second around the character of the bit serving as the hero of these genres. He says of the first:

This focus is evident in a different form in one of the key Westerns of this period, High Noon (1952), directed by Fred Zinnemann. This is an established town, carved out of the frontier and now reaching its own middle age. This is also a town that has bountiful tired and weak, and complacency and cowardice beset this town as a new evil. The marshal is the sort of man who has created this fraternity and who has staved off the terrors of the frontier so the town could grow. Now, he wants or so of the citizens he is sworn to protect to help him, but they refuse, one after another. The town is shown first as both pietistic and apparently friendly, benign, and supportive. Everyone has gathered for the wedding of the sheriff they all admire and emotional state to respect. The sheriff is about to leave town on his honeymoon when give-and-take of the arrival of the Frank Miller gang changes his plans. He gives up his own interests for the sake of this town, and the town turns on him as if he had brought the danger to them and should leave fo
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