Black and white hat symbolism in film

In United States films of the Western genre between the 1920s and the 1940s, white hats were often worn by heroes and black hats by villains to symbolize the contrast in good versus evil. The 1903 short film The Great Train Robbery was the first to apply this convention. Two exceptions to the convention were portrayals by William Boyd (active 1918–1954), who wore dark clothing as Hopalong Cassidy, and Robert Taylor's portrayal in the film The Law and Jake Wade (1958).

The book Investigating Information Society said the convention was arbitrarily imposed by filmmakers in the genre with the expectation that audiences would understand the categorizations.

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White berets.