新概念第四册 Lesson 21 William S. Hart and the early ’Western’ film

　　Men accustomed to struggling for survival against the elements and Indians were bewildered by politicians, bankers and businessmen, and unhorsed by fences, laws and alien taboos. Hart's good-bad man was always an outsider, always one of the disinherited, and if he found it necessary to shoot a sheriff or rob a bank along the way, his early audiences found it easy to understand and forgive, especially when it was Hart who, in the end, overcame the attacking Indians.

　　Audiences in the second decade of the twentieth century found it pleasant to escape to a time when life, though hard, was relatively simple. We still do; living in a world in which undeclared aggression, war, hypocrisy, chicanery, anarchy and impending immolation are part of our daily lives, we all want a code to live by.

　　CARL FOREMAN Virtue and a Fast Gun from The Observer

　　New words and expressions 生词和短语

　　supreme

　　adj. 首屈一指

　　protagonist

　　n. 主角

　　outlaw

　　n. 逃犯，亡命之徒

　　framed

　　adj. 遭到陷害的

　　vicious

　　adj. 恶毒的

　　mythology

　　n. 神话

　　vanished

　　adj. 消失了的

　　absurdly

　　adv. 荒诞地

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