The Wild Bunch - I'm shocked nobody has named this one, arguably the best Western of all (The Searchers and High Noon come close). It's the first one I remember seeing; I loved it then, and it still holds up well.
Dr. Vollin
Nobody mentioned it because I was too busy WRITING THIS TO GET IT IN BEFORE YOU BROUGHT IT UP Mr. yer-so-thmart!
Ahem. When you talk about westerns you inevitably have to ask what kind you are looking for: The
Traditional ROMANTIC Western (John Wayne-era),
The MODERNIST Western (the more realistic but morally ambiguous), or the
POST-MODERNIST Western (stylized and anachronistic the way
A Knight's Tale might be). I tend to find myself liking the Modernist ones better because they take a stab at historical accuracy and appeal to the moviegoer who doesn't need a gunfight every 3 minutes to stay entertained. But I find that there are some Westerns that retain universally virtues of their genre regardless of what period they fall into, and those are the ones I'll list.
Now keep in mind I haven't seen every Western: I still have to see movies like
Wild Bill, Hondo, Rio Bravo, to name a few. I'll also avoid listing the big ones that people here have mentioned regularly.
STAGECOACH (1939)
The Great Train Robbery (1903) may have been the first Western feature, but this one practically invented the genre for all time, introducing America to John Ford & John Wayne as stars. A stagecoach bound for New Mexico takes on a menagerie of incompatible characters through Apache territory. Along the way, they pick up likeable fugitive Ringo Kid (Wayne) who is on his way to avenge the deaths of his father and brother at the end of the line. This movie has everything that Hollywood movies came to need from then on: action, romance, monologues, chase sequences, revenge, character actors, twist revealings, etc. The only tragedy was that it did it so well that it made it too damn hard for most people to replicate.
THE SEARCHERS (1956)
It took real balls in the 50s to make a morally ambiguous movie that cast heroic archetypes in a villainous light and not kill your career, but Western gods John Ford and John Wayne somehow did it. Ethan Edwards (Wayne) is a shady Civil War vet supporting his nice guy brother's family in Texas until a Comanche raid leaves them all dead except for his young niece, who is taken alive. With a duo of relatives, Edwards spends years searching for the girl, slaughtering Indians needlessly while his obsession with revenge gradually turns him into a monster who may be more interested in killing his niece than in saving her. It frequently ties with
Stagecoach for title of John Ford' magnum opus and is a movie that Martin Scorsese still masturbates to.
HIGH NOON (1952)
Just as newly married Marshal Kane sets off on his honeymoon, a gang of outlaws sits at a train station awaiting the noon arrival of their leader Frank Miller, newly released from prison and hell-bent on causing trouble, including killing Marshal Kane. The incorruptible lawman turns back in hopes of assembling a posse of deputies to confront Miller, but his attempts meet with continual failure as the townsfolk decline to join him on what they consider to be a suicide mission. What's interesting about High Noon is that the movie is more about the motives behind their refusal than about the gunfight at the end. It's more than a moral movie, it's a movie about morality and its complications.
TRUE GRIT (1969)
"If yer lookin' fer trouble I'll accommodate ya."
A diminutive but hardheaded teenager is hell-bent on avenging the death of her horse-trading father by going after the employee who killed him, and hires the services of laconic, hard-drinking, one-eyed Marshal Rooster Cogburn to help bring him in. The movie then becomes an exciting comedy about the crotchety lawman butting heads with a bull-headed teenager whose impatience and temper constantly interferes with his ability to do his job. While this could have been a run-of-the-mill mismatched buddy movie, Wayne and Kim Darby are such a combustible duo that its equal parts exciting and funny. It was followed years later with a less-satisfying sequel
Rooster Cogburn.
THE WILD BUNCH (1968)
"If they move, kill 'em."
The movie that killed the Western...as a mythology anyway. It's 1913; the Wild West is over, WWI is on the horizon, and a team of veteran outlaws (a who's-who of acting legends: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, etc.) have just lost half their crew in a bank robbery shootout courtesy of a railroad baron's posse of hired scalawags. What's more, they were expected, and the money has been swapped for washers, so they have nothing to show for it. With the posse in pursuit, led by a reluctantly recruited former member of the team, they head to Mexico to make a living by working as pillagers for a Mexican army that needs guns and goods. But the work, the pursuit, the unscrupulous general, and the new technology (automobiles, machine guns, telephones) force the Bunch to realize that their days and ways are over, they no longer have a future, and the only thing left to do is choose the way they want to go out. The first "ultraviolent" movie, it shocked audiences of the day with exploding squibs full of fake blood to simulate realistic bullet hits and a seemingly endless series of devastating shootouts where nothing, not even children, were safe.
McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
More of a dark comedy than a bonafide Western, courtesy of the late, great Robert Altman. Warren Beatty is McCabe, an aspiring entrepreneur who decides to establish a *****house in a small mining village. Unfortunately for him, his ambition exceeds his intelligence and he runs his business from tents until former madam Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie) arrives and provides the organization McCabe lacks. In spite of their conflicting personalities, their collaboration turns into a thriving success, but when the mine becomes a bonanza, a corporation interested in taking over everything offers to buy McCabe out; the practical Miller begs him to cave, but the stubborn wannabe big shot McCabe holds out for more money, and the corporation decides to resolve the matter with a team of gun hands to preside over some hostile negotiations. I won’t spoil the ending for anybody, but what I constantly love about this movie is the onslaught of subtle surprises that turn up and the morbid humor they contain all the way up to the credits. Tragically overlooked these days.
THE QUICK & THE DEAD (1994)
"THIS IS MY TOWN! If you live to see the daylight it's because I allow it."
During his transition from horror comedy maestro to blockbuster behemoth, Sam Raimi (of
Evil Dead fame) made a small but truly ingenious little post-modern Western that was as revolutionary to the genre as Heath Ledger was to The Joker. A beautiful gunslinging woman (played by Sharon Stone no less) comes to an isolated town to compete with a rogue’s gallery of oddball gunfighters in a dueling contest being held by the town’s ruthless mayor Judge Herod (Gene Hackman). A former outlaw, Herod is a charismatic but utterly amoral and fearless sociopath who has apparently created the contest for his own sadistic amusement; he’s so fast on the draw that no one can possibly beat him. But that’s not going to stop the woman, a cocky kid (Leonardo DiCaprio), and a mysterious priest in shackles named Cort (pre-
Gladiator Russell Crowe) from doing whatever it takes to stop him. The film’s use of silent cinema tricks and visuals add a surreal effect that would make people today think it the work of Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze. The hipster quality of 90s independent cinema wasn’t kind to the reception of this truly ingenious little Western that has been CRIMINALLY underrated but it thankfully has been gaining attention thanks to airings on TNT and Spike TV.
THE PROPOSITION
"Let us drink, then, to the Irish. No finer race of men have ever... peeled a potato."
One of the best Westerns to come out in recent years isn’t even American at all; it comes from the Australian Outback. In a 19th century Australian frontier town, the vicious clan of bandits The Burns Brothers have been captured or killed in a raid except for the eldest; the quiet, literate, but monstrous Arthur Burns (Danny Huston of
30 Days of Night) who lives in the wilderness where even the Aborigines won’t go. The mild-mannered police captain (Ray Winstone), eager to put the matter to rest, makes a proposition to the middle brother Charlie (Guy Pearce): if Charlie captures Arthur, then he and his meek and child-like younger brother will be released. As the conflicted Charlie goes on his dangerous mission dodging hostile natives, an eccentric bounty hunter (John Hurt) and his former brethren, the town’s resident asshole land baron and bully (David Wenham) learns of the bargain and decides to take matters into his own hands, instigating the story to a catastrophic ending. It seems a combination of Malick and Peckinpah, which makes for strange bedfellows, but a magnificently transcendent genre piece.
DANCES WITH WOLVES (1991)
I almost wanna kick myself for picking this saccharine prairie opera, but you gotta give Kevin Costner credit for managing to get a 4-hour epic made at a time when Westerns were considered a dead genre. His sentimentalist take on a suicidal Civil War vet who ventures out into the West and eventually assimilates into the Sioux culture gains much credibility in my book for finally letting Native American actors portray themselves and for using actual indigenous languages long before Mel Gibson made it popular. It had also been a long-time coming for a movie that showed Native Americans as human beings and that the effects of Manifest Destiny had a devastating price. It's not the
Schindler's List of the Native American people, but it's close enough for now.
DEAD MAN (1995)
“Where’d you get that goddamn clown suit?”
One of the last remaining truly independent filmmakers Jim Jarmusch virtually stole the critical spotlight in 1995 with this understated hypnotic masterpiece. A meek and inept widower clerk in a truly ridiculous checkered suit named William Blake (Johnny Depp) has left the East for a clerking position in a desolate and remote Western town called Machine, where the mud is ankle-deep, alleyway blowjobs are given at gunpoint, and a shotgun-toting land baron (
the Robert Mitchum) tells him (with both barrels) that the position has been filled. Broke and stranded, he finds brief solace with a prostitute until her boyfriend walks in on them and kills her and mortally wounds Blake. Blake kills him and escapes into the wilderness where he meets an English-educated re-naturalized Indian named Nobody (Gary Farmer) who mistakes him for the dead poet William Blake. The two go off on a bizarre and dangerous journey to the coast as they wait for Blake’s heart go finally give out, but a trio of bounty hunters are intent on capturing them first. Morbid, bleak, dark, and unusual with an equally unusual score by Neil Young and absolutely stunning black & white photography make this a must see. This is something I cannot WAIT to see on Blu-Ray.
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1967)
“People scare better when they’re dyin’.”
You can have your
Searchers and your
Good, Bad & The Ugly…but for my money, the best Western ever made is this nigh-perfect masterpiece by Mr. Spaghetti Western himself Sergio Leone. A mysterious man known only as “Harmonica” (Charles Bronson) makes an ominous arrival at a train station (following 7 minutes of absolutely riveting boredom) on a mission; a little while later, a newly wedded Jill McBane (Claudia Cardinale) arrives to reunite with her family only to find they’ve been slaughtered by unknown assailants wearing duster jackets. An escaped outlaw named Cheyenne (Jason Robards who makes acting look easy) gets his band together to find out who’s been impersonating them, and railroad baron Morton, horribly crippled by tuberculosis, is desperate to extend his railroad to the pacific before he dies. All these characters will converge at the end in a Western that manages to combine revenge, land grabbing, unrequited love together instead of focusing only on one. The brilliance of Leone is that he was able to distill the Western to its purest and indispensible fundamentals and present them in a very European style that basically shows the western that broke all the rules is the purest one of all. The film is stolen however, by two unlikely stars: Ennio Morricone, the film’s composer who wrote probably one of his best works here, and Henry Fonda (the Tom Hanks of his day), who plays Frank, the psychopathic gunfighter whose handsome, cheerful face and baby blue eyes hide the nature of a soulless, sadistic monster. Watch them both make their entrance in this scene below:
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Honorable Mentions Already Mentioned:
Open Range
Unforgiven
A Fistful of Dollars
The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
The Searchers
Shane is not listed because it's WAY too cliche to mention it in a best-of list. Just watch it.
(dis)Honorable Mentions:
The Magnificent Seven (1960)
Highly overrated re-telling of Akira Kurosawa's
Seven Samurai starring the Rat Pack of 60's tough guys (Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, etc.) transplanting the 7 rogue warriors into American gunfighters defending a Mexican village. The casting coolness is what gives it its longevity, but it underperforms and never achieves the epic power its sets out to achieve, and when you consider the source material and what Leone did only a few years later, that makes the disappointment all the more obvious.
Wild Bill (1995)
A movie that doesn't just scream WTF, it blasts it like a set of Ted Nugent's speakers into a megaphone from the Empire State Building. Normally reliable Western director Walter Hill apparently watched
Natural Born Killers too many times, thought it was the new cinematic grunge, and decided to try it out on his new movie about legendary Wild Bill Hickock. The result is one of the worst and most historically INACCURATE fucking westerns of all time: he switches film stocks, uses unnecessary Dutch angles, unbelievably terrible casting, and merges them all together into a mishmash clusterfuck of psychedelic NBK-rip off cliches that looks like the kind of movie-within-a-movie that parodies Hollywood cliches (like
Tropic Thunder).
Tombstone (1993)
Sorry, but yes, overrated. In a day and age when archaeology is revealing the devastating depths of deception to the original Western histories--especially concerning the famous Earp family--Tombstone feels like the stylized, sanitized child of early 90s optimism that it is. And Val Kilmer is NOT the rock that holds the movie together, he's merely the 4th wheel eccentric whose accent and mannerisms make him stand out above the other interchangeable actors.
The Outlaw Josie Wales (1976)
Yeah, I know...I'm sorry, but this one just doesn't live up to the quality of other Clint Eastwood work in the same vein. Kudos for telling a story from a Confederate POV, but there's still too much Man With No Name to this movie where it doesn't belong.
