Why 1939 Was the Greatest Year for Hollywood Westerns

Film historians have a shorthand for the most legendary year in Hollywood history: 1939. Gone with the Wind. The Wizard of Oz. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Wuthering Heights. Ninotchka. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Goodbye, Mr. Chips. What's less well-remembered is that 1939 was also the year the Western grew up — graduating from B-picture programmer to A-list prestige cinema.

The state of the genre before 1939

By the mid-1930s, the Western had hardened into a formula. B-budget studios cranked out 60-minute oat-burners. A-list studios largely avoided the genre — it was considered cheap, repetitive, and lowbrow. The last truly prestige Western had been Cecil B. DeMille's The Plainsman (1936), and even that was pulpy melodrama dressed up with stars.

The five films that changed everything

Stagecoach (United Artists, John Ford)

John Ford had been begging to make a Western at A-budget scale for years. After a string of hits including The Informer and Drums Along the Mohawk, producer Walter Wanger gave him the go-ahead — but only if Ford agreed to cast B-Western star John Wayne in the lead. Ford, who had personally known Wayne since the prop-boy days, agreed instantly. Stagecoach elevated the entire vocabulary of the genre: Monument Valley as backdrop, ensemble character work, moral complexity in its outlaws and lawmen. Wayne became a major star overnight. Ford had founded the modern Western.

Dodge City (Warner Bros., Michael Curtiz)

Curtiz brought Errol Flynn to the genre — and Technicolor with him. Dodge City was the first major Western shot in three-strip Technicolor and remains visually stunning. Flynn plays a cattleman turned reluctant sheriff who has to clean up the rowdiest town on the frontier. The picture made a fortune and convinced studios that prestige Westerns could be commercial juggernauts.

Jesse James (20th Century Fox, Henry King)

Tyrone Power as Jesse, Henry Fonda as Frank. Fox spent over $2 million — A-list money — on a sympathetic outlaw biopic. The picture's morally ambiguous treatment of its title character (railroads as the real villains; Jesse as a kind of Robin Hood) set the template for every "outlaw Western" that followed.

Drums Along the Mohawk (20th Century Fox, John Ford)

Ford's second A-list frontier picture of 1939. Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert as Revolutionary War-era pioneers in upstate New York. Less remembered than Stagecoach but every bit as visually accomplished, and the picture that established Ford as the genre's defining auteur (he'd later direct The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and twenty-plus more Westerns).

Union Pacific (Paramount, Cecil B. DeMille)

DeMille's epic of the transcontinental railroad's construction. Joel McCrea and Barbara Stanwyck headline a sprawling production with hundreds of extras and one of the most impressive train-crash sequences of the era. Less artistically refined than Ford's work but bigger in scope.

What 1939 meant for the genre

Before 1939: Westerns were programmers. After 1939: Westerns were Oscar bait. The genre's grammar — wide vistas, moral ambiguity, character ensembles, character-revealing close-ups — got codified by the five 1939 productions and held for the next twenty years. Every Western that followed, from Red River (1948) to Shane (1953) to The Searchers (1956) to Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), works in the language that 1939 invented.

The B-Westerns kept coming

It's worth noting that while the A-list studios were reinventing the form, the B-studios kept doing exactly what they'd been doing all decade. Republic alone released roughly 30 B-Westerns in 1939 — Roy Rogers in Frontier Pony Express, the Three Mesquiteers in The Night Riders, John Wayne in Wyoming Outlaw. These B-pictures are the backbone of our archive and the films most likely to be public domain today. The A-list 1939 prestige Westerns remain in copyright with their original studios — but their B-Western siblings, made for $30,000 and forgotten by the studios that owned them, are now free to watch in our archive.

Bottom line

1939 was the year the Western became important. Watch the prestige titles when you can find them; watch the B-Western contemporaries free in our archive. Together they tell a complete story of an American art form coming into its own.