With the impending release of Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger starring Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer, FlickSided thought we’d prepare you for what is sure to be the year’s most exciting western of the year!

Introduction

The western is a genre that has seen better days.

Gone are the glory days of Glenn Ford, John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart saddling up and riding the prairie with a keen eye to the West and some grit in their demeanor. No more are the sweeping vistas on John Ford, Howard Hawks and Delmer Daves. It’s not that films of those caliber don’t exist – they absolutely do – no, it’s their frequency at which they appear in theaters that has truly slowed down the western.

The western was arguably the first genre that Hollywood fell in love with. Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) was a landmark film from a storytelling, editing and action standpoint. The revolutionary angles Porter played with in the twelve minute film apparently had audiences in such a stir, people fainted in the audience when a train came at them at high speed and an outlaw pointed the barrel of his gun right into the stands. Even if those fables of early cinema history were ever proved false, their impact on the medium are undeniable. It was then than the western’s place in Hollywood was cemented for years to come.

Handfuls of gunslinging and stagecoach robbing dramatic, action, romantic, comedy and musical pictures saturated the industry for the next three decades; where-as nowadays, we get about one or two of these fantastic pictures a year (for various reasons).

So come on, cowpokes and take a stroll with us as we examine some of the best westerns ever produced.Honorable Mentions

Tombstone (1993; dir. George P. Cosmatos)

Thrown out of the pits of development Hell, Tombstone is what shouldn’t happen when a production flies off the rails. Russians invented montage so Wyatt Earp and his posse could run the raid on Curly Bill and the Cowboys.

No Country for Old Men (2007; dir. Joel and Ethan Coen)

The Coen brothers take us through mid-80s Texas as a man, having found a bag of stolen money, is chased through the land by a remorseless killer. Unconventional sure, but No Country is undeniably a contemporary western in the greatest sense.

How the West Was Won (1962; dir. John Ford, George Marshall and Henry Hathaway)

A triumph of collaboration, this epic CineRama masterpiece, made up of contained periods of time in a family’s quest to the west, How the West Was Won is as thrilling now as it was then.

Heaven’s Gate (1980; dir. Michael Chimino)

Long, extravagant, pretentious and overindulgent are all perfect adjectives to describe Michael Chimino’s Heaven’s Gate. Lovely, bold, unique and epic are good ones also.

Jubal (1955; dir. Delmer Daves)

I’m a stickler for classic literature done up as American West fable. And Shakespeare’s Othello is a good a tale as any for Delmer Daves to adapt into a tense ranch western. Glenn Ford was never more earnest.

Once Upon A Time In The West (1969; dr. Sergio Leone)

A true masterpiece of the western genre. Everything about this movie is wildly entertaining, even the ten minute opening sequence where nothing at all happens except anticipation. That sets the tone for the movie because after that there’s no predicting what’s coming to town.

10. Open Range (2003; dir. Kevin Costner)

“You the one who killed our friend?”

For a film so widely successful from a critical and financial standpoint, it’s a wonder you never hear a peep about this fantastic, slight picture. The Civil War has recently ended and open range ranchers, “Boss” Spearman (Robert Duvall) and Charley Waite (Costner) along with a couple of cowhands are corralling a herd of cattle across the landscape.

This film had the reluctant hero with a bad past, one of the most brutal gun fights ever captured on film and a pretty sweet love story to round it all up (for the life of me, I swear: no pun intended).

Open Range is a deliberately paced film, but that’s in the spirit of mixing in some old fashion genre tropes with some 1970s revisionism.

And that gunfight! Every shot booms deep in center of your being and echoes out onto the tree-topped mountains of Albert, Canada (standing in for the American range, of course). The first shot fired is as surprising and brutal as the last. And all the while we get character development the likes of which is rarely seen in climactic battles.

Open Range hasn’t seen a high definition release stateside yet, but do yourself a favor and check it out. You won’t be sorry.

9. There Will Be Blood (2007; dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

“I look at people and I see nothing worth liking.”

This one isn’t a traditional western by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it’s one of the strangest, most thought-provoking and cynical pictures to ever be released. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, it isn’t women or cattle that drive people: oil and greed does that.

Daniel Day-Lewis won a very well deserved Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of Daniel Plainview, an oil tycoon with little scruples or anything else resembling human decency. But for whatever reason, we find ourselves transfixed on his journey into a mad state of mind that can only be described as the American Dream corrupted.

Whereas gun play is significant in other, traditional westerns, only a single shot is fired in There Will Be Blood – and blood there is. And it’s spilled in a way that likely has never been seen in this genre.

Sure there are no cowboys or Indians or even much of a plot here, but what we do have is one of the most original, disturbing and most odd-ball westerns to ever see the light of day.

8. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007; dir. Andrew Dominik)

“Don’t that picture look dusty.”

The film is about as long as that glorious title, but you’ll wish it were even longer than that. Andrew Dominik’s sepia-toned outlaw revisionist masterpiece is a wonder of modern storytelling. Unraveling almost like a picture book (complete with gravely narration courtesy Hugh Ross), the film chronicles the final days of the famous outlaw Jesse James (Brad Pitt), his gang and the man who killed James, Bob Ford (Casey Affleck).

This is a film that rewards repeated viewings as the story takes its time to unfold, and some things can get lost in the action and non-linear storytelling. Loyalty, family, love and friendship are all themes Dominik explores in a beautiful and gut wrenching fashion, but it’s the film’s heartbreaking final thirty minutes and freeze-frame that get me every time.

I’m not sure another filmmaker could’ve told this story any better than Dominik, who also wrote the screenplay. The director makes a bold claim about the obsession with celebrity in America –past or present – and he weaves his yarn with a precision and patience that few other working directors would even try. Every scene is a character moment, every word is a mission statement and every action is a nail in a coffin for most every character involved.

This film couldn’t be any more alien to The Lone Ranger’s highflying, swashbuckling action, but it’s an essential film as it represents the kind of thoughtfulness the western genre can exhibit.

7. Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (1969; dir. George Roy Hill)

“The fall’ll probably kill you!”

This is arguably the film most like Verbinski’s Lone Ranger. Director George Roy Hill mastered the buddy film in this off-beat counterculture statement of a film. Paul Newman and Robert Redford star as the titular Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, respectively, and have a ball doing it. Newman has some of his funniest and most iconic moments in the early stages of the picture. The “knife fight” between Butch and Harvey (Ted Cassidy), a disgruntled gang member, is a scene Mel Brooks would’ve gladly included in Blazing Saddles had it not been done to perfection here first!

This film too ends with an iconic freeze-frame – one of cinema’s most recognizable. Cassidy and the Kid are being chased throughout South America and are cornered. All hope seems lost, but their unbridled confidence and tenacity leads them into a fray, faced with hundreds of guns with just four between them. And while we hear their supposed end, we don’t see it. And in fact, the mythology of the two characters says they even got out of that pickle.

6. Unforgiven (1992; dir. Clint Eastwood)

“Deserves got nothing to do with it.”

Clint Eastwood is best known for his “Man with No Name” Spaghetti Western trilogy, but the last time we saw him brandish a rifle and six-gun was in this hard-boiled American legend. Eastwood directs and stars as William Munny, a man who’s killed women and children in his past, but was steered toward an honest life by a woman, at film’s start claimed by disease.

When a working girl is cut up and a her fellow girls put up a bounty for the men who robbed her of her value, Munny and another aging outlaw, Ned (Morgan Freeman) go out for one last killing. The only one standing in their way is local sheriff “Little” Bill Daggett (a revelatory Gene Hackman).

This is a dark film.

Characters are complex and no one is wholly “good”. Liars, cheats, backstabbers and opportunists round out Unforgiven’s cast of characters, Munny himself was at one time all of them combined. But he’s the only one in the film that has a sense of justice in him and its that motor that pushes him to pick up his shotgun one more time for one of the most claustrophobic, unbearably tension-filled saloon shootouts ever staged.

Unforgiven is calculated and wrought with character and is essential viewing for any lover of westerns.

5. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966; dir. Sergio Leone)

“I’ve never seen so many men wasted so badly.”

Set during the American Civil War, three gold hunters (Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach) are hot on the trail of some hidden Confederate gold; the three men stop at nothing to realize their goal. One of the famous Spaghetti westerns (because of their Italian director and place of production), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has established itself as one of the most endearing of classic westerns.

Director Sergio Leone comments on war, greed and loyalty (popular themes in any western) and does so with such a technical mastery, it forever changed the way westerns were viewed. Gone were the cheeky staples of golden age westerns and in rose a newfound realism and bruteness to the world of the western.

Case in point: after three hours of treachery and backstabbing, the final showdown in the middle of a cemetery with a stare down to end all stare downs. It’s a scene of almost orchestral beauty in its composition and pacing; it must be experienced to fathom. Talking and writing about it does it little justice.

4. The Wild Bunch (1969; dir. Sam Peckinpah)

“We all dream of being a child again, even the worst of us. Perhaps the worst most of all.”

Director/screenwriter Sam Peckinpah had dabbled in the western genre on television with “Gunsmoke”, “Broken Arrow” and “The Rifleman”, but it was with this epic revisionist monster of a film that earned him international fame.

Notable for its brutal depictions of violence and rapid-editing (a technique not often used in the late 1960s), Peckinpah told a story of outlaws that made everything that came before it look like Sunday morning child’s play. Indeed, this was a gritty tale of vengeance and survival, some of it so endearing in the western lexicon, its almost unbelievable that so many modern tropes of the genre came from this one film.

If you’ve played Rockstar Games’ masterpiece Red Dead Redemption, a lot of this stuff will look very familiar. Not the very least of which is that whole Gatling gun story line – completely lifted from this picture.

This film is all about the epic spectacle of the Wild West gun battle and it delivers that in spades, but its how we get to know its characters that make every death in The Wild Bunch hurt all the more.

3. Stagecoach (1939; dir. John Ford)

“There are some things a man just can’t run away from.”

This was it.

There had been westerns before it, sure. John Ford had made plenty of silent westerns before Stagecoach. Hell, its stars were genre regulars. But come 1939, this was The Western that everyone had been waiting for. This was the film that changed the western from B-movie into a legitimate genre worthy of critical praise and audience adoration.

It popularized a number of western archetypes – the outlaw, the shamed working girl, the drunk, the law, the goof, the crooked banker, the gunslinger, the doctor, the military wife – that would be used in pictures for years to come. The famous cowboys and Indians theme was evident throughout the film. Native American portrayal in the film was a sign of the times and entire films in the genre, in later years, would dedicate their entire being to contradicting and revising the Native American’s place in the western genre (1990’s Dances with Wolves for one).

It introduced Arizona’s famous Monument Valley and John Ford as the go-to director of the western. And of course, it was also the film that introduced the world to John Wayne, who’d go on to do hundreds more films in and outside of the genre.

Stagecoach is essential for those reasons. But it’s timeless for its sweetness, tension, ambition and excitement.

2. High Noon (1952; dir. Fred Zinnemann)

“If you’re honest you’re poor your whole life and in the end you wind up dying all alone on some dirty street. For what? For nothing. For a tin star.”

Films shot in real time were a new thing back when High Noon was released. And where other films used it simply as a backdrop for the action, Zinnemann used it as a source of story and immense tension.

It’s 10:30 in the morning when the film begins. In just an hour and a half, four outlaws will make their way into town. But who will face them? The lowly Marshall (Gary Cooper) is charged with dispensing of the criminals, but the townsfolk around him are not too enthused about the notion of gun slinging in the streets Hadleyville.

In the end, he’s forced to face them himself. High Noon is scathing in its social commentary before, during and after the subsequent encounter and at the time of its release was seen as an attack on the Hollywood blacklist, anti-Communist views and even America. It also happened to be absent a great deal of violence and other western tropes that were featured in so many of the day’s genre pictures.

Because of this, actors such as John Wayne condemned the picture (and even went on to remake it in a more “American” way with Rio Bravo), but it has endeared the test of time and today stands as one of the genres towering achievements, if also one of its most divisive.

1. The Searchers (1956; dir. John Ford)

“So, we’ll find ’em in the end, I promise you. We’ll find ’em. Just as sure as the turnin’ of the earth.”

Was there really any doubt what number one was going to be? This is the western to end them all. With its beautiful VistaVision photography, moving score, commanding performances and thoughtful direction, John Ford’s The Searchers is what the western is all about.

Beginning with the opening of a door, we are instantly transported to a time just after the Civil War as a family tries to find its way back to normalcy, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) has a past that doesn’t seem to separate itself from him.

When Ethan’s niece is taken by a tribe of Indians, he sets out with his “half-savage” nephew (Jeffrey Hunter) to find her. Themes of family and loyalty are ever-present and Ethan’s struggle to see Indians as human beings rather than savages only good for killing provides the story its major arc. Wayne and Hunter both give stunning career performances that, in my eyes, are two of the strongest ever captured on film.

There’s little I can say here about The Searchers that hasn’t already been said a million times before me. You owe it to yourself, as a fan of film, to see it.

A truly life-changing experience.

Conclusion

I love westerns because they are uniquely American.

Sure, they got in the habit of adapting Japanese samurai pictures into this genre, but they started out as true and blue American as can be. Often they are the introduction into our history as children and they do good to transport their audience to a time that was at once simpler and harsher. Contemporary issues have all but killed the genre (horses are expensive and the language doesn’t suit the PC landscape of modern American living), but we should never stop admiring, watching or making westerns.

We might lose ourselves if we do.