Joel Albert McCrea was an American actor whose career spanned a wide variety of genres over almost five decades, including comedy, drama, romance, thrillers, adventures, and Westerns, for which he became best known.
McCrea in Four Faces West (1948)
Ad of Joel McCrea and Dolores del Rio from Bird of Paradise in The Film Daily, 1932
McCrea with Fay Wray in The Most Dangerous Game (1932)
McCrea in Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940)
The Western is a film genre defined by the American Film Institute as films which are "set in the American West that [embody] the spirit, the struggle, and the demise of the new frontier." Generally set in the American frontier between the California Gold Rush of 1849 and the closing of the frontier in 1890, the genre also includes many examples of stories set in locations outside the frontier – including Northern Mexico, the Northwestern United States, Alaska, and Western Canada – as well as stories that take place before 1849 and after 1890. Western films comprise part of the larger Western genre, which encompasses literature, music, television, and plastic arts.
Gary Cooper in Vera Cruz from 1954.
John Wayne in The Comancheros (1961)