For the next four weeks, the ghost of America’s West rides down the canyons of West Houston Street as Film Forum presents “Essential Westerns.” This series of 37 films stretches from the mid-1920s, when the Western movie was still just a few decades ahead of the history that spawned it, to the early 1960s, when Hollywood’s preference for lying about the present, rather than mythologizing the past, began to take over.

Westerns and crime stories were among the first choices for literary sources when the movies began. As film genres, they’ve evolved at about the same speed: surviving the advent of sound, matching increasingly familiar cliches with growing sophistication, and substantially darkening in theme after World War II. But the crime movie has become, at least on a photographic and stylistic level, the most influential genre to emerge from American film, while the Western, once at the heart of American mythmaking, has survived neither the ups and downs of the industry that created it nor the revisions and reinventions of the nation it helped form.

True, Western-obsessed moviemakers like Scorsese and Spielberg hide cowboys and Indians where they can. Was there a faster draw than Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” and how about that Mohawk? Was “Saving Private Ryan” anything more than “The Wild Bunch” in olive drab? But outside of woefully soulless and condescending attempted resuscitations (“Silverado,” “The Missing,” “Open Range,” and so on) and a talky afterlife on cable (“Lonesome Dove” and “Deadwood”-“Dove’s” potty-mouthed younger brother), the real Western photoplay is as dead as Roy and Trigger.

“Essential Westerns” showcases, as it should, nine films by John Ford. Starting with the optimistic silent historical melodrama “The Iron Horse” (playing March 14) and finishing with 1962’s pessimistic frontier fugue “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (March 30-31), the series documents Ford’s growing disenchantment with the legends he did more to multiply than anyone else in film history.

“Stagecoach” (playing this weekend with “The Searchers”), “My Darling Clementine” (March 27-28), and especially the rarely revived “Wagon Master” (March 22) all showcase Ford’s characteristic blend of unostentatious visual precision, subtly complex narrative sleight of hand, and affectionate cornball whimsy. Though time hasn’t changed the beauty and sadness of Ford’s films, it seems as if lately Ford’s reputation as dean of American movies has been tarnished. Was Ford Walt Whitman, Aaron Copland, and Edward Hopper all rolled into one tortilla or a warmongering cheerleader for manifest destiny and Native American genocide? Take “The Searchers” test this weekend and judge Ford for yourself.

Through the 1940s, pictures like William Wellman’s gothic anti-lynching diatribe “The Ox-Bow Incident” (playing with “Clementine”) balanced social outcry with genre recitation. Raoul Walsh’s “Pursued” (March 29) grafted onto Western motifs the same Freud-for-short-attention-spans themes that Hitchcock had tried in “Spellbound.” Then, thanks to a dose of wartime reality and to the contributions of hardboiled writers like W.R. Burnett, whose novel “High Sierra” received its best adaptation in Walsh’s “Colorado Territory” (March 6), the Western took the same turn for the fatalistic that much of postwar American popular culture did.

Leaner, meaner, and pulpier than their predecessors, the best Western films of the 1950s deftly balance elegy with anxiety. Delmer Daves’s brooding proto-Spaghetti western “3:10 To Yuma” (March 8) is a marvelously dark and operatic oater that makes 1880’s town life, family farming, and the outlaw trail all seem equally grim. Film Forum programmer Bruce Goldstein has paired Yuma with an even more focused and compact B-movie gem, Budd Boetticher’s “The Tall T.”

Based on an Elmore Leonard story, this film sustains one of the most brutal tone shifts this side of “Psycho,” when a world-weary cowboy played by Randolph Scott is plunged into a life-and-death war of wits (and a chaste male-male romance of sorts) with charismatic killer Richard Boone. Boetticher, a Ford protege, made a string of Westerns in the late 1950s that starred Scott and contain some of the most eloquent and expedient storytelling in American film.

Boetticher’s “Ride Lonesome” (March 17) features one of the most perfectly deployed plots ever. In just more than 70 minutes, “Ride Lonesome” takes Randolph Scott from generic conflict to personal obsession and finally to transcendent redemption. “Funny,” muses one of “Lonesome’s” genial desperadoes as the film briskly gallops to its climax, “how a thing can seem one way and then turn out to be something else.” Though “Ride Lonesome” remains unavailable on DVD, like many of Film Forum’s essential Westerns, it will be screened in a new 35mm print.

Until March 31 (209 W. Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick, 212-727-8112).