Cowboy Heaven, in MOMA’s Westerns Series

The series “Universal Westerns,” at MOMA through July 3, reveals the fruitful cinematic idiosyncrasies that Universal Pictures, founded in 1912, fostered in its heyday. John Ford, the supreme director of the Western, got his start there, at age twenty-four; in his first feature, “Straight Shooting” (screening June 6 and June 16), from 1917, his artistic personality is already on sharp display. The story involves a family of homesteaders—small-time farmers portrayed as peaceful and law-abiding—facing the hired guns of a cattle rancher who wants their land for grazing. The lead gunman (Harry Carey) grows disgusted and changes sides, as does a young cowboy, resulting in romantic complications with a farmer’s daughter. Ford, a moralist of high principle, creates an instant legend with his lofty depictions of righteous violence—yet with his next film he quickly punctured the pomp of crowd-pleasing heroism. “Hell Bent” (June 6 and June 16), from 1918, starts with a Western novelist getting a letter from his publisher requesting realistic characters with mixed motives. The rest of the movie involves the novelist’s imaginings, featuring Carey as a gunman whose actions again—and even more ambiguously—veer between noble and ignoble.

In “Trail of the Vigilantes” (June 8 and July 2), from 1940, the freewheelingly inventive director Allan Dwan turns an intricate drama into a hectic comedy, starring the urbane Franchot Tone, as an upper-crust special investigator who heads West, from Kansas City, and awkwardly poses as a cowpuncher in order to find a journalist’s killer. The action, both loopy and violent, features breathtaking rooftop stunt work framed in starkly graphic images; again, the villains are cattlemen seeking to monopolize land.

King Vidor, who, in 1949, had filmed Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” both flaunts and questions his libertarian bona fides in “Man Without a Star” (June 12 and June 28), from 1955. It’s a dashingly flamboyant Technicolor tale of a wandering gunslinger (Kirk Douglas) who heads to Wyoming in search of wide-open spaces and gets embroiled in a range war between a big-time rancher and small cattlemen who fence out big herds—and in the schemes of two powerful women (Jeanne Crain and Claire Trevor). An odd subplot of bathroom humor, involving the invention of indoor facilities, symbolizes the changing times. Vidor envisions irreconcilable conflicts of freedom and order, and shrugs.—Richard Brody