Cinema audiences would sense that the description of the Western as ‘Le cinéma américain par excellence’ is apt, but the quintessentially American qualities of the genre have never been defined in a manner satisfactory to historians, sociologists and film critics. Doubtless it reflects, as sociologists say, American admiration for rugged individualism and yearning for primitive innocence. To say so, however, takes no account of developments within the genre and the degree to which the sub-structure of ideas becomes part of the fabric of one Western while remaining on the level of plot in another. To sort out such complexities is the job of the film critic and the first part of that task, at least, has been competently done, less in the standard work in English, The Western: From Silents to Cinerama by Fenin and Everson, than in two French works, ‘The Evolution of the Western’ by André Bazin (1918–58) and La grande aventure du western by Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout (1923–92). However, Bazin is quite perfunctory in the way he relates the Western to American society, suggesting casually that the increased stature of the genre in the period 1937–40 might have been due to increased awareness of national identity in the pre-WWII Roosevelt era. Even Rieupeyrout, having traced the origins of the genre to dime novels, rodeos and Wild West shows, does not deal with the main social ideas in the Western and, more especially, to what degree they have become part of the respective statements made by some films while remaining dormant in others. This essay is an attempt to confront these questions. Its method is to take two closely interrelated factors, American responses to the West and American responses to Industrialism, and to relate these to several Western films. In doing so, this essay attempts to define, firstly, how the main social ideas of the Western are implicit within the two factors and, secondly, to indicate illustrative instances where one or other of them seems particularly integral to this or that individual Western film.