Even those of us who have devoted tens of thousands of hours to watching films have blind spots — important pathways of cinema history that we’ve never ventured down, or, perhaps even more embarrassingly, major movies whose greatness we’ve never quite grasped. But being shut in is the perfect time to open doors. So here is a new column, focusing on gateway movies. If you’re unfamiliar with an essential director, I will recommend the ideal place to start. If you’ve always felt a particular type of movie was not for you, the goal is to change that.

Let’s start with wide-open spaces and a genre that has repeatedly been written off for dead: the western, which undoubtedly lives on in revisionist variations (“Unforgiven,” “Deadwood”) and the most enduring of all parodies, “Blazing Saddles.” When people say they hate westerns, I always think they’re imagining something like “Bonanza” or a movie like “Shane.” Without too much disrespect to “Shane,” the best westerns are rarely so clear-cut in their delineations of right and wrong. They deal in moral gray areas; they take place when society is still establishing basic laws and codes of honor.

The cycle of westerns that the director Budd Boetticher made with the actor Randolph Scott from 1956 to 1960 are a great entry point.