Watch free documentary films &videos. The DIY Filmmaker's Toolkit. Award-Winning Short Films. Forever's Not So Long. Classical Hollywood Cinema. On the most basic level, a genre can be defined as a category or type. When applied to film, the concept gets more complex. Genre films were considered "ordinary" films, modestly aiming for a mild variation of a familiar story. Studios' dependence on genre films embodies the industry's predicament of wanting to standardize its product, while at the same time realizing the product would sell better with some degree of uniqueness. Certain studios, directors and stars got attached to specific kinds of films. John Ford and John Wayne, for example, are linked to the Western, while MGM, with the now-famous Freed unit (headed by composer/lyricist Arthur Freed), excelled at musicals.
While the studios routinely employed loose classifications of subject matter, formal genre designations, such as gangster or melodrama, were applied retroactively by scholars and historians. Isolating a group of films and designating a genre presents a conundrum.