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The 100 Best Westerns of All Time

The western has proved itself a durable, influential way of talking about the human condition.

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The 100 Best Westerns of All Time
Photo: United Artists

The classic western was conceived from an undeniably Euro-centric, colonial perspective, with white characters upholding their supposed birthright of freedom and property. In the western, the immense country beyond the Mississippi River figures at once as the sublime object that exceeds the human grasp and as a quantifiable possession.

As for the cowboy, he, too, straddles paradoxical poles: at home on the dusty, timeless landscape, but also facilitating its incorporation into a society marching toward the Pacific. In King Baggot’s 1925 silent Tumbleweeds, William S. Hart’s herder hero reluctantly makes way for the newly arrived homesteaders; in George Stevens’s Shane, from 1953, Alan Ladd’s eponymous gunslinger rides off after making the West safe for the American family; and in Sergio Leone’s 1968 opus Once Upon a Time in the West, Jason Robards’s Cheyenne sacrifices his life not to end the expansion of the American empire, but to facilitate a more just one.

But this standard narrative mold, to paraphrase John Ford’s 1962 classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, only represents the printed legend. The historical American West was more diverse and less male-dominated than the one Hollywood imagined for many years. Life in the Western territories demanded just as many determined women as it did men, and suffragettes had their first major victories in the West: Wyoming was the first state to grant women the vote, and the first to have a woman governor. A third of all cowboys herding cattle on the Great Plains were Black—a fact that’s only surprising until you consider which groups were most in need of self-reliant vocation and freedom from the long arm of the law in the wake of the Civil War.

Every once in a while, these historical realities break through the filtered screen of the Hollywood western: Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford play no-nonsense saloon owners in, respectively, Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious and Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, while Sidney Poitier’s often overlooked 1972 feature-length directorial debut, Buck and the Preacher, is one of the too-few films that are centered around Black frontiersmen.

When Europeans, influenced by decades of dime novels and Hollywood flicks, got around to making westerns, the resulting films would be part of this swing toward revisionism. By this time, European filmmakers were coping with the aftermath of the most devastating conflict in human history, and Italian westerns like Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence and Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly are infused with the lived-in existentialism of postwar Europe. In them, the American West becomes an otherworldly wasteland of pure brutality and diminished—rather than heightened—agency. Europeans’ estrangement of western film tropes would help spur a revisionist take on the standards of the genre that infuses films produced to this day.

However, for all the observations that such “postmodern” westerns are about the end of the West—in Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales and elsewhere, represented by the arrival of new technologies like the Gatling gun—the western has always been about endings. It’s no coincidence that the genre’s proverbial image is that of a figure “riding off into the sunset.” The American frontier was declared closed after the 1890 census, a decade before the first western on our list (Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery) was produced. Right-wing New Hollywood directors like Sam Peckinpah, Don Siegel, and Eastwood have tended to identify this perpetual fading of the West with the decline of a virile and violent, but honorable masculinity.

The bloodbaths of films like Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch are arguably examples of what Freud called “screen memories,” a compromise between repressed memory and images we’ve invented to defend ourselves against terrible truths. The true bloodbaths in the West were the military campaigns against Native Americans, genocidal conflicts that many big-budget westerns keep on the margins, with natives appearing as stereotypical noble savages or town drunks. Ford’s films, as often as they rely on racist characterizations, were the prestige westerns to look most directly at these wars: The Searchers and Fort Apache explore, in their own flawed fashion, the morally degrading racism in their main characters’ hearts. Some decades later, Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves became the paradigm of a post-’70s cultural sea change: When it comes to “cowboys versus Indians,” the cowboys are no longer the automatic locus of our sympathy.

Today, infusing familiar iconography with new meaning, such revisionist representations of the American West have helped to explode the boundaries of the genre, allowing filmmakers as well as critics to explore cinematic tropes about life on the frontier in non-conventional western narratives. In contemporary films like Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain and Chloé Zhao’s The Rider—and looking back to ones like Victor Sjöström’s The Wind and John Huston’s The Misfits—we can recognize something like a western mode, a broader and more expansive cinematic language that has been suffused by the symbols of the American West. The western has proved itself a durable and influential way of talking about the human condition—one that needs not be confined within the frontiers drawn by the Euro-American colonial imagination. Pat Brown

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Drums Along the Mohawk

100. Drums Along the Mohawk (John Ford, 1939)

If John Ford was, per Jonathan Lethem, “a poet in black and white,” he became a sharp impressionist in color. The finely calibrated stillness of his shots, occasionally ravished by the greens, reds, and blues of the colonial wardrobe, gives Drums Along the Mohawk a painterly quality, as if Ford had animated a William Ranney portrait. Each frame radiates rugged beauty, but this doesn’t soften the filmmaker’s no-bull directness when depicting the eruptive landscape of the Revolutionary War. Frontier man Gil (Henry Fonda) and his new wife, Lana Martin (Claudette Colbert), are without a home of their own for most of the film, their first cabin being burned to the ground during an attack, and when Gil and the troops return from the bloody Battle of Oriskany, the director details their immense casualties and injuries with unsparing detail. Chris Cabin


Tombstone

99. Tombstone (George P. Cosmatos, 1993)

Tombstone succeeds by re-appropriating the stylistic quirks of many a great western before it, from “the long walk” of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch to the candlelit saloons of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs Miller, spitting them out in a spectacle of pure pop pastiche. It tells much the same story as John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, but it reinterprets that film’s mythical, elegiac sense of wonder through bombastic action and performances. There probably isn’t a western as quotable as this one, which also succeeds through its rogues’ gallery of memorable character actors and firecracker script. A drunken Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer), when accused of seeing double, says, “I have two guns, one for each of you.” Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell), as he pistol-whips Johnny Tyler (Billy Bob Thornton), belts out, “You gonna do something? Or are you just gonna stand there and bleed?” The lines between good and evil blur as the law switches sides to fit the plot. Cliché layers over cliché, exposing what the genre is all about: the foundations of American myth, told again and again to suit each generation. The ’90s was the remix era and Tombstone fits it perfectly. Ben Flanagan


True Grit

98. True Grit (Henry Hathaway, 1969)

The Duke casts a large shadow in any instance, but especially here. Rooster Cogburn is one of John Wayne’s most identifiable roles, not just because he won an Oscar for it, or because his True Grit is popular, or because he played the character twice (the second time in 1975’s Rooster Cogburn), but mostly because Rooster’s personality is so intertwined with Wayne’s iconic persona. Wayne’s detractors often note that Wayne lacked range, and that, given his consistent trademark drawl, about the only way to distinguish one Wayne character from another is by observing his costume. But while that’s roughly accurate, it doesn’t mean that every character Wayne ever played had a similar effect. His Rooster is one of those special roles that seemed indelibly Wayne’s—because he wore that eye patch so well, because his inherent presence and stature made him a natural to play the “meanest” marshal around, because his inner softness allowed the bond between Rooster and Mattie (Kim Darby) to feel convincing and because Wayne was born to be the cowboy who puts the reins in his teeth and rides toward four armed men with a gun in each hand. Jason Bellamy


Death Rides a Horse

97. Death Rides a Horse (Giulio Petroni, 1967)

In 1967’s boldly cinematic Death Rides a Horse, Giulio Petroni fixates on the inextricable link between a man’s memory and his thirst for vengeance. In the 15 years since watching his entire family get murdered by bloodthirsty bandits, Bill (John Phillip Law) has carried with him a single physical relic of this trauma: a lone spur. His memories, meanwhile, are filled with haunting and vivid reminders of that moment when his life changed forever, but also with specific visual cues related to each of the bandits: a silver earring, a chest tattoo of playing cards, a skull necklace. Bill’s overwhelmingly obsessive quest for revenge takes on an extra layer of perverseness once he’s paired up with the mysterious Ryan (Lee Van Cleef), an older man who playfully competes with Bill to hunt down and kill these same men first. Through an array of carefully crafted visual and aural motifs, and clever, judiciously employed narrative twists, Petroni weaves together these two crusades, building to an explosive finale that delivers equally cathartic doses of redemption and rage. Derek Smith

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The Violent Men

96. The Violent Men (Rudolph Maté, 1955)

Polish-born filmmaker Rudolph Maté worked for a little over a decade as a cinematographer in Hollywood before starting to crank out potboilers as a director in the late ’40s, many of them marked by a distinct pictorial flair. He was a mainstay by the mid-’50s, and The Violent Men counts among his most ravishingly shot films, and indeed one of the unheralded Technicolor westerns of the golden era. The central California frontier, where the majestic flatland meets the imposing Sierras, has rarely been more reverently photographed, and a single montage of Glenn Ford’s John Parrish galloping from one range to another as Max Steiner’s strings howl on the soundtrack is stirring enough to validate the invention of CinemaScope. Fittingly, the land itself provides the conflict here, with Ford’s Union veteran-cum-landowner trotting out his old fighting spirit when the vicious owners of a neighboring estate—Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson in wonderfully belligerent performances—try to exploit his ranch for pennies. A cathartic war against greed ensues, and the result is finely wrought big-screen entertainment. Carson Lund


Westward the Women

95. Westward the Women (William A. Wellman, 1951)

Based on a story by Frank Capra, William Wellman’s Westward the Women shares the collective triumphalism of Capra’s greatest films but salts it with the grueling hardship and random cruelty that are hallmarks of Wellman’s storytelling. The premise is ludicrous on paper: A large farm in a California valley is suffering a shortage of the fairer sex, so it sends a wagon train headed by Robert Taylor to Chicago to haul back 150 brides for the workers—no short order in the middle of the 19th century. Several treacherous landscapes, bleakly depicted deaths, and a mid-film memorial service later, the plan is fulfilled in grandly hokey fashion, though not without a striking reordering of business-as-usual sexual politics. As the women prove as resilient, if not more so, than the men, ideals of male heroism fall by the cliffside (literally) and members of the ensemble who would normally be relegated to extras emerge as fully shaded and complex heroines. As a result, the film amounts to a portrait of hard-won joy that’s nearly spiritual in its belief in the power of cooperation. Lund


The Gold Rush

94. The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin, 1925)

What’s surprising when one takes a fresh look at The Gold Rush is how serious it is about depicting the hard life of prospectors. The comic soul of the film is, in fact, quite black, even if Charlie Chaplin exploits every opportunity (beautifully) to transform the environment into a vaudeville stage. Lonely as the wastes are, the town in the film is sinister and lurid, full of sex and violence, despite the fact that Chaplin always seems to find a way to invest in it the personality and tone of his early one-reelers. He makes the town funny but retains its barbarism. Chaplin pursues deliverance not in the miracle of hitting pay dirt, but in the promise of a woman, and it’s this promise that Chaplin would keep after, well into his sync-sound period. Around the film’s midpoint comes a sequence that cuts between the townsfolk singing “Auld Lange Syne,” and the Tramp, alone in his cabin, listening, longingly. It’s as perfect a moment as any other in the great silent period. Some accuse the director of succumbing to sentimentality, but he’s never less sublime than when he reaches for ridiculous, grandiose highs in romance, coincidence, and naked emotion. Jaime N. Christley


Destry Rides Again

93. Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939)

Destry Rides Again’s Bottleneck is essentially the same town as the one in “Drip-Along Daffy.” The opening crane shots of Bottleneck show the standard storefronts that western audiences are accustomed to seeing: feed and general stores, the jail, the Saloon. As the camera moves along the street, we see just about every possible vice happening all at once with bullets whizzing about the crowded streets—and all the while, Frank Skinner’s intense score adds to the feeling of utter lawlessness. Every stereotype of the wild western town is represented in George Marshall’s film: crooked gambling above the saloon, land-hungry town bosses, a hot dancing girl named Frenchy who can douse the fires of her rowdy fans with a shot of whisky, and killin’. Lots of killin’. Back when the western was really coming into its own in 1939, the genre had already been around long enough to warrant this satire. Bottleneck is a parody of the western town. Jeffrey Hill

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The Wind

92. The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1927)

So many late silent films are infused with a delirious energy, a sheer delight in the transportive powers of the cinema, and Sweden’s original film genius, Victor Sjöström, was renowned as a master of subjective, otherworldly moving images. With the hallucinatory The Wind, he delivered his most captivating visual play of subjective and objective realities, casting Lillian Gish as an East Coast virgin who’s tormented on an ineffable psychical (and ambiguously erotic) level by the overbearing winds of the Great Plains. After circumstances force her into an unwanted marriage, she’s left alone in the small cottage she shares with her unloved husband as the personified wind blows open doors, whips up dust, and…takes the shape of giant stark-white colts who buck across the open sky. In a career-defining role, Gish grounds the film, giving a performance that humanizes the sensational and sensual inner conflict of a woman left alone in a vast, empty wilderness. Brown


Run of the Arrow

91. Run of the Arrow (Samuel Fuller, 1957)

Writer-director Samuel Fuller’s Run of the Arrow stars Rod Steiger as Private O’Meara, a disaffected Confederate soldier who lights out for the western territories, only to wind up living among (and ultimately adopting the ways of) a Native American tribe. Fuller’s typically two-fisted tale essentially prefigures Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, absent all the bombast and self-aggrandizement. Granted, the film succumbs to the longstanding Hollywood tradition of utilizing a motley crew of decidedly non-native actors in pigment-darkening makeup to portray its Sioux tribe, including a young Charles Bronson and Spanish actress Sara Montiel, but it also endows these characters with a degree of respect and agency practically unprecedented in a 1950s American western. As the film comes full circle with the return of the man O’Meara shot and then saved in the opening scene, Fuller’s story reveals itself as a morality play concerning the destructive nature of hatred and bigotry, as well as a touchingly earnest plea for tolerance. Budd Wilkins


Sergeant Rutledge

90. Sergeant Rutledge (John Ford, 1960)

This court-bound race drama is often overlooked within John Ford’s later period in favor of the self-consciously summative The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. But Sergeant Rutledge contains all of the elements that make Ford’s vision of the American West so remarkable, covering race in fierce terms in the midst the civil rights movement. He finds a hundred ways to frame Woody Strode, whose incredible cheekbones make him every bit the western archetype as Rutledge, a cavalryman accused of the rape and murder of his commanding officer’s daughter. From the vantage point of a court martial, Ford uses extended flashbacks to unfold the case (shades of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon). Going further than establishing any sense of truth, Ford exposes the ways that American systems privilege white people. But the filmmaker resists calling attention to race through dialogue, instead using refined framing and expressive eyelines to illustrate structures of power. Here, even when white and African-American men form some kind of alliance, it’s still to dispel a shared foe: the Native American. Ford’s radical irony won’t be lost on most viewers. Flanagan


Near Dark

89. Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)

The zenith of a career phase defined by sneakily subversive genre films, Kathryn Bigelow’s melancholic Near Dark remains a singular milestone in the evolution of the vampire myth. It’s a delirious fever dream grounded periodically by masterfully constructed scenes of carnage and the rooting of its mythology in the period’s twin boogeymen of addiction and infection. An excellent cast of pulp icons—Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen are particularly unhinged—bring restless energy to the story of itinerant vampires cruising the neon-soaked highways of a beautifully desolate Southwest. It’s Gus Van Sant through a Southern-gothic haze, thrumming with an urgency bestowed by Tangerine Dream’s score and thematic heft alike. Abhimanyu Das

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Django Kill…If You Live, Shoot!

88. Django Kill…If You Live, Shoot! (Giulio Questi, 1967)

An in-name-only sequel to Sergio Corbucci’s Django, the saga of a coffin-dragging hombre bent on revenge, Giulio Questi’s Django Kill…If You Live, Shoot! was to have been called just If You Live, Shoot! until its producers insisted on the last-minute tie-in. By any name, though, it would look as strange. Ultraviolent, especially by 1967 standards, and determinedly weird, Django Kill does to the spaghetti western what Questi’s next film, Death Laid an Egg (with its striking op-art design and frantic Cuisinart editing), would do to the burgeoning giallo genre. Questi and co-writer/editor Franco Arcalli turn audience expectations topsy turvy, orchestrating a demolition derby of generic types, and interlarding the script with mash-ups of archetypal biblical and literary texts: Take a Christ-in-reverse narrative where the protagonist, known only as the Stranger (subgenre fixture Tomas Milian), resurrects from the dead early on and only later undergoes crucifixion, add a dash of Jane Eyre’s “madwoman in the attic,” and fold in a liberal portion of Lady Macbeth. The resultant concoction would most resemble this savage and surreal smorgasbord for cult-film aficionados. Wilkins


The Lone Ranger

87. The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski, 2013)

There’s at least one major wink-wink reference to the old serial when the title character (Armie Hammer) hollers, “Heigh-ho Silver, away!” near the end of The Lone Ranger. For the most part, though, what few recognizable artifacts have been carried over from the source material are practically an afterthought in this large-scale action epic, a monument to the spaghetti western that manages to balance surreal imagery and humor with far more grave concerns, such as the wholesale massacre of Native Americans, and the brute, unscrupulous arm of capitalism as we shaped our westward expansion. Here, Tonto (Johnny Depp) is an unreliable narrator, knocked loopy by long-buried trauma—a pointed comment on our species’ need to combat suffering with imagination and humor. As heavily as he depends on the western genre’s past triumphs to fuel The Lone Ranger’s broad, colorful imagery, Gore Verbinski is an entertainer first and foremost, and leans on the likes of Sergio Leone, Buster Keaton, and D.W. Griffith only hard enough to launch his own, lovingly elaborate set pieces. The dovetailed histories of film and the 19th-century western expansion provides plenty of grist for Verbinski’s mill, but he’s an able enough builder to erect something resembling his own grand design. Christley


Vera Cruz

86. Vera Cruz (Robert Aldrich, 1954)

Across a simultaneously beautiful and dangerous Mexican frontier gripped by political turmoil, Robert Aldrich found the ideal setting in which to place disillusioned outcasts. In the punchy Vera Cruz, the goal of transporting a countess (Denise Darcel) and her gold to the titular port city in the Gulf of Mexico sparks various shifts in alliances and perpetual double-crosses between American rejects like ex-Confederate soldier Ben Trane (Gary Cooper) and the sadistic Joe Erin (Burt Lancaster). Aldrich effectively mirrors their game of wits (marked by the director’s typically blunt depiction of physical and emotional violence) with the unstable balance between various countries in old Mexico, whose leader is suggested to be just as morally dubious as anyone else in the film. Aldrich expanded the western to subversively show the world south of the border as a land of opportunity more promising than America. As such, it’s not surprising that such revisionist genre practitioners as Sam Pechinpah and Sergio Leone would eventually follow in his footsteps. Greene


The Homesman

85. The Homesman (Tommy Lee Jones, 2014)

Just as Tommy Lee Jones’s contemporary western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada displayed a surprising empathy for marginalized figures, so, too, does his belated follow-up, The Homesman, examine the tropes and mythos of the American West through the perspectives of those marginalized within it. The filmmaker and actor plays the titular character, but the true stars of the film are Hilary Swank as Mary Bee Cuddy and Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, and Sonja Richter as the three mentally ill women who Cuddy has been tasked to escort from Nebraska to an asylum in Iowa. Cuddy comes across as a woman who went west looking for the independence and liberty that the frontier promised and found all of the same gender restrictions there that she did back in “civilization,” and she behaves with a steadfast, hard attitude that would be pegged as heroic in a man but makes her merely unfit for marriage. Gradually, it becomes clear that the mentally ill women in Cuddy’s care are every bit as victimized she is by the narrow roles afforded to them, and by the end of The Homesman, even Jones’s taciturn, macho guide is touched by the insanity that occurs from being able to feel these women’s pain. Jake Cole

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Pale Rider

84. Pale Rider (Clint Eastwood, 1985)

The myths of the Old West reverberate with biblical echoes in Pale Rider, a mid-period Clint Eastwood blockbuster that operates as somewhat of a trial run for Unforgiven, toning down the acid-western tricks he learned from Sergio Leone and Don Siegel. Eastwood’s laconic avenger is summoned through prayer by 14-year-old Megan Wheeler (Sydney Penny) when her snowy mountain town of Lahood, California is pillaged in a fight over land ownership in the early Gold Rush. Here, notions of money and property—that is, who owns and owes what in America at this time—spectacularly collide. In playing the spaghetti plotline straight, replete with sweeping vistas and an enormous horn-driven score, Eastwood allows for ruptures into the bizarre. The Preacher often appears out of nowhere, as if he were a religious miracle, while the mountainous club (Richard Kiel) and Marshall Stockburn’s (John Russell) silent, identically dressed deputies suggest something out of a stained-glass tableau. Eastwood’s Preacher, who dons a clerical collar and leads prayer, refutes the pacifist heroes of Destry Rides Again and High Noon with his Old Testament fury. His iconic features project him into myth. Pale Rider’s power rests in how the other characters react to him, placing in Preacher their dreams and fantasies for themselves and a vision of what America should be. Flanagan


The Ballad of Cable Hogue

83. The Ballad of Cable Hogue (Sam Peckinpah, 1970)

The drink had taken Sam Peckinpah fully by 1970 and there’s more than enough evidence that the demon had always been there, but he’d been able to hold it down until the catastrophic production of The Ballad of Cable Hogue, which ended 19 days over schedule and three-million dollars over budget. Set in the isolated desert landscapes of Nevada, the film speaks to a quiet and distinctly American despair, a fear of failure and progress that seems incredibly apt considering the stress that Peckinpah faced following up The Wild Bunch. In The Ballad of Cable Hogue, we see the violent, bloody sturm und drang of The Wild Bunch move inward on Jason Robards’s melancholic title character, but after the considerable loss of money and lateness of the production, Warner Bros. wasn’t very interested in Peckinpah, new or same old, and he was essentially banished from Hollywood and sent across the pond to England. Cabin


Hud

82. Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963)

At the core of Martin Ritt’s elegiac Hud is the thorny generational conflict between Paul Newman’s eponymous antihero—a tortured soul not unlike James Dean’s Jim from Rebel Without a Cause—and his cold, highly principled rancher father, Homer (Melvyn Douglas). Gripped by a sense of unspoken grief since the accidental death of Hud’s brother, father and son repeatedly lock horns over Hud’s boozing, philandering, and general devil-may-care attitude. A clash of ideologies during rapidly changing times exacerbates this friction, and as disease suddenly sweeps in and threatens to potentially wipe out all of Homer’s cattle, the patriarch sees his old free-ranging ways on the verge of extinction. James Wong Howe’s stunning and sparse widescreen black-and-white cinematography emphasizes the vast spaces between people hopelessly unable to connect with or understand one another. The tension between father and son ultimately extends to Hud and his once-idolizing nephew, Lonnie (Brandon de Wilde), whose wide-eyed admiration of Hud’s rebellious spirit gives way to respect for his grandfather’s harsh yet stabilizing virtuousness. As such, Hud is simultaneously a mournful lamentation of the passing of a way of life and a meditation on the possible ways forward. Smith


The Big Country

81. The Big Country (William Wyler, 1958)

The Big Country relates character psychology to a landscape that becomes the stage for highly theatricalized spectacle. When Terrill’s foreman, Leech (Charlton Heston), finally goads Jim (Gregory Peck) into a fistfight to settle their squabbles, they do so with miles of mountain ranges and desert land as the backdrop. William Wyler frames almost the entire event in extreme wide shots, reducing these otherwise towering men to the size of insects, conceiving a hilarious visual metaphor to accentuate Leech having made, as the Southern phrase goes, “a mountain out of a molehill.” Bruised and battered, Jim stares down an equally thumped Leech and utters, “What did we prove?” It’s one of the most satisfyingly homoerotic anti-climaxes to a dick-measuring contest in the entire western genre. The Big Country is stunning for how it meshes the intimate strife of a particularly white American stripe of self-resentment with the epic vista of Technirama Technicolor. Dillard

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Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

80. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (John Sturges, 1957)

Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas bring their considerable star wattage—and physical prowess—to John Sturges’s first take on the oft-filmed events leading up to the legendary gunfight at the O.K. Corral, subject matter he would revisit a decade later with Hour of the Gun. His approach to the material here sits somewhere between John Ford’s mythopoetic My Darling Clementine and Frank Perry’s grittily revisionist Doc, lending a harder edge to many of the characters, like knife-wielding Doc Holliday (Douglas), while still engaging in all the glitz of classical Hollywood, signified here by the presence of glamour girl Rhonda Fleming as the requisite love interest for Wyatt Earp (Lancaster). Proving himself once again a master of the action set piece, Sturges elevates the actual gunfight from the 30 seconds of sheer chaos it really was to a full five minutes of exquisitely choreographed screen time, imbuing the lethal proceedings with an almost balletic gracefulness. Wilkins


High Noon

79. High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)

Fred Zinnemann’s western was shot on a shoe-strong budget, and it shows, as the pared-down studio settings and emphasis on close-ups and tight interior shots over ponderous vistas are positively televisual. But in a way, its relative lack of material detail and geographic specificity make it groundbreaking: In High Noon, the western becomes the self-conscious space of allegorical mythos. The basis of Carl Foreman’s story is his own experience refusing to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the film casts adored leading man and aging sex symbol Gary Cooper in Foreman’s perceived position as the one man willing to do the right thing. Cooper plays a town sheriff who fails to recruit anyone else to help him confront a gang of vengeful criminals due to arrive in his sweaty desert village on the noon train. If Zinneman’s claustrophobic film remains an effective suspense piece because it simmers with the anxiety of someone watching the clock tick down until they’re called to the stand, it retains its power as drama because it positively boils over with righteous outrage at the cowardice and hypocrisy of nominally decent people. Brown


Bad Day at Black rock

78. Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955)

Bad Day at Black Rock marked MGM’s first release shot in Cinemascope, and John Sturges transforms the expansive emptiness of his frame into an omnipresent character. When Spencer Tracy’s John J. Macreedy arrives in Black Rock, his unexpected and enigmatic presence immediately sets the town on edge. Black Rock hasn’t had any visitors in four years, and this lack of tourism suits bigwig rancher Reno Smith (Robert Ryan) and his thug cohorts Coley (Ernest Borgnine) and Hector (Lee Marvin) just fine, since it allows them to maintain control over a community gripped by guilt over the death of a Japanese farmer named Komoko. Macreedy has come looking for Komoko, yet even before he’s encountered his less-than-hospitable hosts, Sturges presents his perilous position in the town via wide shots that strand Tracy amid the unwelcoming, oppressively vast landscape. A civilized L.A. man out of his element in the primal country, Macreedy is menaced not only by Smith but by the natural world itself, which envelops him like a snake wrapping its jaws around its prey. The screenplay, adapted from Howard Breslin’s short story “Bad Time at Hondo,” is faithfully set in the mold of High Noon, both with regard to its surface narrative about one decent man standing against a band of ruffians and in terms of its allegorical confrontation of the Hollywood blacklist. Nick Schager


The Nightingale

77. The Nightingale (Jennifer Kent, 2018)

Jennifer Kent’s follow-up to The Babadook failed to gain a fraction of the exposure of her breakout hit, yet in nearly every respect it expanded upon her thematic and aesthetic abilities as a filmmaker. This period Australian western isn’t just a tale of revenge, but also a study of the intersecting lines of conflict of gender, race, and colonialism. Irish convict Clare Carroll (Aisling Franciosi), seeking revenge against Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin) for raping and torturing her, teams up with the Aborigine “Billy” Mangana (Baykali Ganambarr) to fight the British who colonized both their lands, only for Clare to reveal her own racism at every turn. As in The Babadook, The Nightingale presents a woman who’s both victim and perpetrator of a monstrous mindset, replacing allegorical horror for that of a literal and historical sort. Undeniably brutal, the film nonetheless marks one of the most scathingly critical westerns of the modern era. Cole

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Doc

76. Doc (Frank Perry, 1971)

As purely cynical a film as the ’70s could produce, Frank Perry’s Doc seeks to ring every last bit of decency and heroism out of the O.K. Corral legend, turning the Tombstone of myth into a squalid den of avarice and cruelty in the middle of a scorched desert. In the typically larger-than-life figures of Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, Stacy Keach and Harris Yulin, respectively, find pitiable smallness, undercutting the icons by emphasizing their callousness and opportunism. Sweat and dirt pour off every face, with an especially de-glammed Faye Dunaway fashioning a haggard version of Katie Elder, and the predominant firelight makes it so that the characters’ pupils flicker with seemingly malicious intent. Sepia-toned and shadowy in its cinematography, the film suggests a Wild West absent of color and joy, an assessment perhaps closer to the truth than the down-home visions of the ’40s and early ’50s and yet still a little a glib. Nonetheless, Perry’s assured, intimate direction turns an act of cheap revisionism into an object of unshakeable potency, a death knell for the cowboy era. Lund


Shane

75. Shane (George Stevens, 1953)

Shot in early-’50s Technicolor, George Stevens’s legendary western has a dreamlike quality, opening with a too-perfect tableau of an innocent deer drinking in a mountain valley. The rustic image is disturbed by the arrival of a solitary gunman, Shane (Alan Ladd), who’s passing through the property of Joe Starrett (Van Heflin) and his family. The arrival of the gunslinger also disrupts the local power struggle: A wealthy cattleman (Emile Meyer) is attempting to force the Starretts and their small, peaceful community of homesteaders out of the valley. But Stevens and screenwriter A.B. Guthrie chip away at our presumptive reading of Shane as a gallant but reluctant knight. The underside of the vigilante who only drinks soda pop comes to the fore in the first of the film’s multiple brutal fistfight scenes. It’s around then that the nuclear family’s idyllic dream morphs into a violent—and surprisingly erotically charged—nightmare. When, in an often misremembered finale, Shane realizes he must leave, he doesn’t ride into the sunset, but into the cold night. Brown


Bad Company

74. Bad Company (Robert Benton, 1972)

Robert Benton’s revisionist western is tinged with a Beckettian wit as it spins a singularly amusing yarn about Drew Dixon (Barry Brown), a straight-edged, Protestant boy who, after dodging the draft, joins up with a rowdy crew of petty thieves on his way to strike it rich in Nevada. What begins as an odyssey to the promised riches of the American West morphs into something more darkly absurd as Drew and his audacious, imperious pal, Jake (Jeff Bridges), are stripped of their dignity, dreams, and possessions across a series of elliptically edited vignettes. Word is out that the land is crawling with vicious natives, but the villains—a roaming band of thieves who rob Drew and company not once but twice, a cantankerous homesteader, and their fellow bandits—are all white men who’ve chased the American dream straight into a dead end. Stuck in a seemingly endless circular loop of recurring violence and humiliation, the duo wanders a barren, unforgiving landscape, discovering that the only currency worth a damn in this cutthroat world comes from the end of a gun barrel. Smith


Django

73. Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)

Caked in mud and spattered with blood, Sergio Corbucci’s classic spaghetti western noodles around with cinema of cruelty, surrealistic imagery, and proto-Peckinpahvian carnage—only without all those erupting squibs. Granted, the emblematic plotline, in which a mysterious stranger who pits opposing sides of an embittered feud against each other, owes a clear debt to predecessors like Fistful of Dollars. Yet Corbucci sets Django on its feet by moving away from the epic sprawl that started creeping into Sergio Leone’s work with Fistful of Dollars, the very title of which suggests his “more is more” approach, into the sort of rough-hewn storytelling and rough-and-tumble pessimism that characterize subsequent Corbucci films like The Great Silence. Likewise, the political dimension is certainly not lacking in the film, readily aligning with more radicalized Zapata westerns like Damiano Damiani’s A Bullet for the General and Giulio Questi’s outlandish in-name-only sequel Django Kill…If You Live, Shoot!. Wilkins

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The Gunfighter

72. The Gunfighter (Henry King, 1950)

Many westerns deconstruct the genre’s mythology to reframe figures and events that have strayed too far into the realm of legend, but few do so with such thought-provoking complexity as Henry King’s The Gunfighter. After notorious gunslinger Jimmy Ringo (Gregory Peck) moseys his way into the town of Cayenne, where his wife (Helen Westcott) and the son he’s never met live, the film becomes a full-blown scrutiny on the nature of reputation in the Wild West. King creates a prismatic portrait of Ringo by focusing on the many different subjective viewpoints of Cayenne’s residents: the idolatry of children, the skepticism of cocky young cowboys, the fears of the town’s mothers. We never truly get to know the real Ringo, but that’s the point of the film. This is the Old West after all, where it’s the stories and legends surrounding a man and not his actual character that leave the most lasting impression. And regardless of notoriety, the ultimate result of Ringo’s violent lifestyle is that it prevents him from developing close relationships, and the burden of his loneliness is elegantly, melancholically conveyed by Peck in one of his finest performances. Wes Greene


The Ox-Bow Incident

71. The Ox-Bow Incident (William A. Wellman, 1943)

William Wellman’s hard-edged, stark style made him ideally suited for adapting The Ox-Bow Incident, a stripped-down moral drama that shows off the director’s facility with both crime fiction and low-budget westerns. In it, two drifters, Gil (Henry Fonda) and Art (Harry Morgan), end up joining a posse of enraged townspeople when one of their local ranchers is murdered by rustlers. The mob immediately whips itself into a frenzy as they seek someone to punish, and though Gil and Art initially join with the crowd to lessen suspicions against them, soon they’re overwhelmed by the bloodlust that surrounds them. The film is shot in deep shadows that make the expanse of the American West feel intensely claustrophobic, and both Fonda and Morgan splendidly project the mounting terror and shame of men who’ve been caught up in something that they cannot escape even as they can see where things are headed. The final act, in which that shame emanates and touches every single character, is still the finest display of disgust with cowboy justice ever put to film. Cole


The Last Movie

70. The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper, 1971)

The Last Movie concerns the worlds within worlds that coexist within a film production, and, by extension, within all of life. Kansas (Dennis Hopper) is a stuntman shooting a western in Peru, and while the western is being directed by Samuel Fuller (playing himself), the footage we see bears a closer aesthetic resemblance to a Sam Peckinpah film. Yet distinctions between The Last Movie and the faux Fuller production immediately grow murky. Hopper shows a film being shot, but the sequences themselves have clearly been through post-production. We don’t see realistically unformed shooting, but set pieces complete with slow motion and crackerjack editing. Hopper’s action scenes are beautiful, worthy of Fuller and Peckinpah, though he also holds such gorgeous violence in contempt, likening it to social pollution. Hopper’s double vision isn’t hypocritical but honest: Cinematic violence, a macho version of dance, is ecstatically stimulating when executed by an artist or even a competent journeyperson. Chuck Bowen


Stars in My Crown

69. Stars in My Crown (Jacques Tourner, 1950)

The strange energy of Jacques Tourneur’s auterist sensibilities is evident from the start of Stars in My Crown, when a preacher, Josiah Gray (Joel McCrea), who’s just arrived in the town of Walesburg brandishes his pistols at would-be parishioners for not paying attention to his sermon at the local saloon. From there, things only get testier as the preacher settles down and weathers first a disease outbreak, then the racist fury that a local tycoon, Lon Backett (Ed Begley), whips up among the town’s out-of-work miners to drive a freed slave, Uncle Famous Prill (Juano Hernandez), off of his property so that the businessman can expand his mine. In films like I Walked with a Zombie and Canyon Passage, Tourneur grappled in more abstract ways with race and the legacy of colonialism that continues to divide whites and people with color. But Stars in My Crown is a straight shot of blunt realism, making clear the way class divisions are obscured by willfully stoked racial strife. Here, the verbal, nonviolent de-escalation of tensions at the film’s climax is as thrilling a catharsis as any shootout. Cole

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Silver Lode

68. Silver Lode (Allan Dwan, 1954)

A tireless, versatile silent-era pioneer who, over the course of five decades, directed everybody from Shirley Temple to John Wayne, Allan Dwan flourished in the 1950s with a series of unusual, low-budget westerns that, if less consistent than those of Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, or Andre de Toth, are just as interesting. The most well-known of these, 1954’s Silver Lode, opens with a premonition of The Wild Bunch (children playacting at violence as ominous lawmen stroll into a frontier town) and proceeds like an uncredited sagebrush transmutation of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story Ragnarök. A daylight nightmare staged in real time, the deceptively modest film has a dynamism and ingenuity that outclass the stolidity of many more established features. In addition to its critique of knee-jerk McCarthyite persecution, the film also abounds in such fascinating items as the sisterly yin-yang of Dan Ballard’s (John Payne) respectable bride (Lisabeth Scott) and his brazen ex-mistress (Dolores Moran), cinematographer John Alton’s masterly lighting and extended tracking shots, and the spiritual exhaustion of a showdown in a church’s bell tower. Fernando F. Croce


Juaja

67. Jauja (Lisandro Alonso, 2014)

Lisandro Alonso specializes in films about solitary, violent men in frightening harmony with unforgiving nature, and Jauja is a continuation of that theme. But it’s also leagues ahead of Los Muertos, Alonso’s 2004 feature about a man’s unclassifiable journey through an Argentinian jungle. Jauja is closer in aim to a deconstructionist western, centered on the Danish Captain Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen), a soldier assigned to Argentina’s Patagonia region. Alien to the land in which he lives and works, Dinesen creates the first dissonance between an Alonso protagonist and his environment, and the film’s gorgeous landscapes are filtered through, and distorted by, Dinesen’s friction with his surroundings. Framed in Academy ratio, the film makes nature unnatural, producing tableaux vivants of frontier archetypes such as native warriors, indentured laborers, runaway lovers. Isolated in the square frame, these figures occupy their own still lives, subtly illuminating colonial and cinematic history. Cole


Wagon Master

66. Wagon Master (John Ford, 1950)

One of the most identifiable tropes of the western is the solitary wandering gunslinger, but another is the ragtag group of frontiersmen with a common goal banding together to work as one. They’re the focus of quite a few John Ford films, never more lovingly rendered as they are in the sunny Wagon Master. As horse trader Travis (Ben Johnson) aids a Mormon wagon train across harsh open country to a new settlement, Ford recurrently halts the narrative with montages showcasing members of the wagon train helping one another through some ordeal, emphasizing the power of community rather than the actions of the individual. From the Mormons’ rejection of the use of firearms to Travis’s jettisoning of his gun into the void of the desert after a shootout, Wagon Faster is the rare western that’s a paean to pacifism. In Ford’s eyes, the film’s central journey, where people of disparate backgrounds learn from one another and rollickingly dance together at the end of the day, is more rewarding than the destination. Greene


The New Land

65. The New Land (Jan Troell, 1972)

Like 1971’s The Emigrants before it, Jan Troell’s The New Land is intensely focused on the brutal material nature of rural life in the mid-19th century, but this de facto sequel breaks from the straightforward linearity of its predecessor’s narrative. With its central couple, Karl-Oscar (Max von Sydow) and Kristina (Liv Ullmann), now firmly grounded in the new world, expressionistic, nostalgia-laden flashbacks of their former life back in Sweden perceptively color their current struggle to build a new life and community from the ground up. Many of the greatest westerns focus on the pioneering spirit that drives people to start new lives away from their homeland as well as the challenges of actually doing so, but few films convey what a massive and exhaustive undertaking it is with such exhaustive specificity as The New Land. In pointing such a discerning, unflinching eye toward the minutest of physical and emotional efforts needed to survive on the frontier, Troell constructs an account of the American West that is warm and humanistic in its approach to characters, yet unwavering in its rigorous detailing of the brutalities of their existence. Smith

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Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

64. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Sam Peckinpah, 1974)

No other director has ever quite managed to have his macho mythos, and eat it too, like Sam Peckinpah. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is something like the director’s ultimate manifesto, as the film is stiflingly preoccupied with debased crumminess: Violent, nihilistic, misogynistic even by the director’s considerable standards, it nevertheless has a brute, blunt, and ultimately honest poetic force. The film’s plot purports to concern a typical thriller story of a down-and-out drunk scoundrel, Bennie (Warren Oates), who has a shot at a once-in-a-lifetime scam that will eventually come to destroy him. Crooks offer Bennie 10 grand if he can bring them the titular head, which is actually worth a million dollars to a big deal Mexican industrialist (Emilio Fernández). But this crime plot is really an ode to egotistical futility. Bennie goes on a killing spree because he couldn’t fully commit to his life with Elita (Isela Vega) while she was alive, and his ensuing acts of violent reprisal for her inadvertent death reveal the film to be one of the more disturbing portraits of an advanced alcoholic to be found in American cinema. Peckinpah understands the relentless loneliness that goes with attempting to medicate your social hang-ups and disenchantments as well as the hopelessness that can lead to rash actions such as the symbolic suicide that concludes this film. Bowen


The Rider

63. The Rider (Chloé Zhao, 2017)

Chloe Zhao’s elegiac drama exposes the material hardships of a fractured South Dakota community, where the ritual celebration of frontier life can no longer disguise an inexorable decline in living standards. Using a cast of local non-professional actors to achieve some profoundly affecting performances, the film tells the mostly factual tale of a former rising star of the rodeo circuit, Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau), who’s suffered brain damage after a bronco riding accident, and who’s been urged by doctors to cut short his career in order to save his life. Spectacular dusk lighting and an earthy sensuality have earned the film comparisons to those of Terence Malick, while its naturalism and attention to detail tease out social concerns without obscuring the human drama, as in Kelly Reichardt’s best work. Revisionist in the most sobering of ways, The Rider shows the western’s ideals of freedom and manifest destiny completely inverted, as people with diminishing prospects and shrinking horizons are forced to abandon heroism in favour of bare survival. Robb


The Beguiled

62. The Beguiled (Don Siegel, 1971)

A true outlier in the filmography of Don Siegel, a director usually more inclined to sinewy, minimalist filmmaking, The Beguiled is a delirious fever dream of Southern Gothic moodiness and repressed sexuality. Like the proverbial fox in the henhouse, wounded Union soldier John McBurney (Clint Eastwood) is brought into the Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies by one of its youngest wards, thereby turning up the flame under the already simmering tensions among its occupants, from headmistress (Geraldine Page) to household slave (Mae Mercer). Incest and statutory rape are only two of the unsavory secrets that come to light as McBurney plies his charms high and low. Throughout, Siegel’s technique segues without warning from expressionist (canted angles, shadow play) to unexpectedly surrealist (a particularly unhinged dream sequence that incorporates Eastwood into imagery drawn from van der Weyden’s Pietà), effectively capturing the seminary’s hothouse atmosphere as it curdles into mutual recriminations and murderous intentions. Wilkins


Duel in the Sun

61. Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946)

Director King Vidor and writer-producer David O. Selznick extract all the mythic elements from John Ford’s My Darling Clementine and blow them up to truly epic proportions. Every aspect of Duel in the Sun, from its scorched Technicolor cinematography to its protracted running time, is resolutely overheated and oversized. Beginning with the mixed-race background of Jennifer Jones’s Pearl Chavez, the film seems organized as a series of binary oppositions. This dual structure is first established as a kind of moral typology that encompasses Pearl’s ambivalent nature (chaste “good girl” versus sexually promiscuous “bad girl”) as well as the stereotypical personality traits of the two McCanles brothers, good guy Jesse (Joseph Cotton) and bad boy Lewt (a seriously cast-against-type Gregory Peck), whose name sounds a lot like “lewd.” The duality extends into the political realm with the struggle for power being waged between cattle-rancher Senator Jackson McCanles (Lionel Barrymore) and railroad man Langford (Otto Kruger). It all culminates in one of the most bonkers finales in classical Hollywood, which can best be described as a double murder-suicide. Wilkins

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True Grit

60. True Grit (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2010)

Despite its preoccupation with retribution, True Grit retains a barbed wit throughout. Joel and Ethan Coen’s deliberately mannered storytelling suggests oral folklore handed down through the generations, shaped by time and the input of countless storytellers into a crowd-pleasing, well-rounded tradition. The film is never less than visually scintillating, but it’s in the frequently held dialectic sparring matches that it most strongly exhibits its subversive American soul. After a shootout gone wrong and a subsequent discussion on Latin terms between the equally verbose LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) and Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) notes that “LaBoeuf has been shot, trampled, and nearly bitten his tongue off, and yet not only does he continue to talk but he spills the banks of English.” Surely, no exchange is more hilarious than the one between Mattie and a squabbling Col. Stonehill (Dakin Matthews), whose eyes light up in mortal terror at Mattie’s machine gun-like tongue and bartering prowess: “I do not entertain hypotheticals, the world as it is is vexing enough.” The Coens’ script frequently takes dialogue verbatim from the page, and the rhythms of such dictate the flow and pacing of most of the scenes; the cast engages with Portis’s prose on an organic level, making it natural and musical all at once. In all ways, it’s a stellar ensemble, comfortable enough in their historic context to make us forget that what we’re watching is culling from times past; rather, the proceedings feel like they exist in a living, breathing present. Rob Humanick


Blazing Saddles

59. Blazing Saddles (Mel Brooks, 1974)

Blazing Saddles is beholden to the truth, and exposing it, and in this farcical western’s sights lies everything from the genocide in America’s history so often ignored by classic genre fare to the simple fact that cowboys eating beans around a campfire will eventually break glorious wind. More than 40 years after Mel Brooks’s box-office smash struck a nerve with audiences, it remains a high-water mark for cinematic hilarity, even if time and influence have inevitably dulled some of its shock value. What stands out now, more so than its calculated taboo-breaking and button-pushing, is its self-reflexivity. The deliberate overloading of wildly anachronistic details, frankly racist and sexist behavior, cartoon violence, and straight-faced absurdity is perpetually disarming, and it’s not for nothing that the film culminates with its own characters showing up at Hollywood’s Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where Blazing Saddles is the main attraction. Humanick


The Outlaw Josey Wales

58. The Outlaw Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood, 1976)

Killings litter the landscape of Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales, many of them done by the titular hero, but very few of them are done strictly in the name of revenge. The men who Josey Wales (Eastwood) guns down in the trading post are attempting to rape a young Navajo woman, , Little Moonlight (Geraldine Keams), before they decide to try and turn in Wales for the bounty on his head. Wales only wants his liberty, but his consolation for his good deeds is a small community that begins to join up with him on the trail, of which Little Moonlight is only the second member. The first comes not long after the ambush on Wales’s Confederate brothers-in-arms, as Wales sneaks up on a disgraced elderly Cherokee warrior named Lone Watie (a very good Chief Dan George). The fraternal bond that builds between Watie and Wales is handled with expert subtlety, devoid of easy politics or rhetoric, but even more impressive is how the script by Sonia Chernus and Philip Kaufman develops this communal aspect of the story and express almost all capitalistic endeavors as wrong-headed, greedy, and ostensibly heartless. Cabin


Ride in the Whirlwind

57. Ride in the Whirlwind (Monte Hellman, 1966)

Monte Hellman grounds his narratives in so much detail that they encourage in the viewer a hyper-awareness of texture that’s vaguely reminiscent of dreams in which one small element comes to govern or define a social situation. Like Clint Eastwood, he barely distinguishes the heroes from the villains, but unlike Eastwood, he doesn’t make a self-congratulatory show of that basic matter-of-factness. Patriotism isn’t celebrated as a talking point; chance and dumb, unfair luck govern these narratives. This element is particularly pronounced in Ride in the Whirlwind, which features characters who’re pursued because they’re mistaken for belonging to a gang they just happened to be crashing with for a night. The pursuit these characters must elude is so relentless, and disproportionate to the crimes they’re believed to have perpetrated, that it grows in existential stature as well as in quasi-timely relevance (there’s a suggestion of a belated, latent communist witch-hunt subtext, though an indirect Vietnam parallel is obviously more likely). Bowen

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Ride the High Country

56. Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah, 1962)

This early Sam Peckinpah effort is a subtle introduction to the fascinating moral complexity that would go on to fuel his best work. Two aging ex-lawmen, Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) and Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott), take a job transporting gold back to a town bank from a mining camp up in the nearby Sierra Nevada hills. They bring along an eager young apprentice, Heck Longtree (Ron Starr), whose entanglement with a local farmer’s daughter (Mariette Hartley) leads to a confrontation that results in all three men awakening to a new sense of duty. Opening with a Wild West show featuring horses racing camels, alongside other gaudy attractions, the film consciously strives to dismantle the glorification of a bygone era. Which isn’t to say that it tolerates the hypocrisies of a more modern society, one where the same old greed and male entitlement have barely been concealed from view and where the rule of law, both secular and religious, is entirely mutable and self-serving. A final gesture of loyalty and forgiveness is suggested as the only way to rise above the pressures of money and solitude that have compromised an entire country. Robb


One-Eyed Jacks

55. One-Eyed Jacks (Marlon Brando, 1961)

One-Eyed Jacks is a deeply introspective western, with most of the hallmarks of the genre, that’s viscerally eaten up with the alienation of director and star Marlon Brando. Those who know Brando less by his acting than by his tabloid reputation as a prodigious indulger, a man given to bountiful food and women, who was prone to endless re-takes on sets, might be astonished by the sense of authorial control that he exhibits here, both as filmmaker and star. The authorship of the film is somewhat debatable, of course, as Brando shot miles of footage, went over budget, and reportedly turned in a five-and-a-half-hour cut that was shortened by Paramount and tamed with reshoots. What scans in the surviving One-Eyed Jacks, however, is a sense of orchestrated chaos and blooming obsession. Brando and his collaborators revel in psychological textures that retrospectively suggest a merging of the sensibilities of John Ford and Michelangelo Antonioni. Bowen


I Shot Jesse James

54. I Shot Jesse James (Samuel Fuller, 1949)

As a liberator of the concentration camps, Samuel Fuller certainly saw his fair share of the evil that humans do, and the majority of his films suggest that such collective dis-ease is ongoing, never-ending. Contented happiness, if it comes, is either a deceptive load of bullshit or merely a momentary uplift of the soul, unique to the individual experiencing it—and how often this latter incidence occurs, for Fuller’s characters, at the point of dying. I Shot Jesse James provides one such example of this. Fuller’s debut feature is remarkable for its sophisticated and intuitive treatment of a famed tale of the Old West, viewing Robert Ford’s (John Ireland) cowardly assassination of his friend and fellow thief Jesse James (Reed Hadley) as a quintessentially gay love story. Of the film’s producer, Robert L. Lippert, Fuller observed, “[he was] too uptight to even pronounce the word homosexual,” and Fuller most certainly used this instinctive fear—one not only limited to his business partner—to his advantage. It’s not so much the explicit nature of some of the film’s allusions (James asking Ford to wash his back; the assassination itself, shot in such a way as to evoke rape) as it is Ireland’s interiorized performance and Fuller’s matter-of-fact mise en scène (complete with ripped-from-the-headlines transitional montages) that solidifies the film’s accomplishments. Keith Uhlich


The Great Train Robbery

53. The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903)

An Edison Studios film often called the first western may well have been understood as a simple crime flick in 1903. The gunbelts, bandanas, and wide-brim hats worn by its antagonists weren’t exactly out of date when Teddy Roosevelt was in office. A particularly sensational and violent example of early narrative cinema, this 10-minute adventure cuts right to the point, opening with a gang of thieves committing multiple murders (and dynamiting a safe, in a spectacular early special effect) on their way to hijacking a train and making off with the passengers’ money. Remarkable for the way it—barring a brief interlude in which the oblivious lawmen have a nice little dance—takes the perspective of the criminal gang, The Great Train Robbery is best remembered for the way it turns on its spectator, concluding with a chilling one-shot of the lead criminal firing directly at the camera—as if to prove that the Lumiere brothers’ train has nothing on Thomas Edison. Brown

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The Shootist

52. The Shootist (Don Siegel, 1976)

Playing an over-the-hill Wild West gunman diagnosed with terminal cancer, John Wayne—who would not act in another film before succumbing to cancer himself three years later—reaches into emotional depths his roles too rarely plumbed. Don Siegel’s modernist western counts down the days as, settled arbitrarily in booming Carson City and despised by a society that has moved beyond his brutal but chivalric way of life, Wayne’s gunslinger struggles to accept a death he can see coming. “I’m just a dying man afraid of the dark,” he blurts out in frustration to his sharp-tongued landlady (a radiant Lauren Bacall), averting his tired, red-lined baby blues. The Shootist goes light on plot, coming as close to a character study as a John Wayne film can get. Sure, there’s a shootout at the end, but at its core the film is about a man of action who’s suddenly stuck waiting for the inevitable, grasping for a way to prepare for the end without giving up. Brown


Rancho Notorious

51. Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952)

Rancho Notorious opens with Vern Haskell (Arthur Kennedy) planting a big kiss on his fiancée, Beth (Gloria Henry), but this being a Fritz Lang film, it’s downhill from there for the Wyoming cowpoke. Lang’s fatalism rears its ugly head as Vern, once an innocent rancher who vengefully hunts down the man who abused and killed Beth in a hold-up, becomes the very thing that would appear to be antithetical to his nature. His episodic journey toward a hideout for ruthless outlaws run by Altar Keane (Marlene Dietrich) is pockmarked with eccentric touches, from the ongoing Greek chorus-esque narration sung like a campfire song to the numerous narrative digressions (none more rousing than a flashback of Altar riding the back of a drunken man in a barroom “horse race”). But this wildly entertaining concoction is consistently shot through with a bleak pessimism. Here, any honorable qualities Vern or anyone else may possess is ultimately beside the point, because in Lang’s view, by simply existing in a lawless, violent world, violent behavior is an inevitability. Greene


The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

50. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

Steeped in the lyrical fatalism of that last great decade for the western, the 1970s, Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford owes a debt to myriad spiritual ancestors. And yet there’s something particularly modern about its approach to the doomed relationship between infamous bank robber and murderer Jesse James (Brad Pitt) and his Judas-like accomplice, Robert Ford (Casey Affleck). Throughout, Dominik indulges in a level of self-consciousness and artifice so pronounced that his film stands not as a historical record or even a slice of neo-western revisionism so much as a contemplative mood piece-by-way-of-character study intent on examining the nature of hero worship, capturing the tumultuousness of the American West’s transition from gritty reality to fabled past, and deconstructing the era’s myths even as it upholds them. As with 2007’s other great American work, David Fincher’s Zodiac, Dominik’s triumph focuses on an iconic criminal from the country’s past, and the way in which that personage, refracted through the media’s filter, epitomized our love-hate rapport with fame. Moreover, it shares with Fincher’s film a detail-oriented fascination with procedure, albeit not that of the police or the newspaper, but of fate itself, the director languorously, purposefully depicting the titular act as the culmination of a carefully arranged series of events that could lead to only one, fateful outcome. Schager


Canyon Passage

49. Canyon Passage (Jacques Tourneur, 1946)

Jacques Tourneur’s first color feature, Canyon Passage, at first seems relatively straightforward compared to the borderline experimental black-and-white films that made him one of the classic studio era’s boldest filmmakers. Also his first western, the film tracks roughneck Logan Stuart (Dana Andrews) as he deals with local thug Honey Bragg (Ward Bond) and weighs his relationship to the virginal Caroline Marsh (Patricia Roc) against his budding attraction to Lucy Overmire (Susan Hayward), the girlfriend of his best friend, George Camrose (Brian Donlevy). This plot, a mixture of romantic melodrama and suspenseful action, is a far cry from the supernatural horror and existential noir on which Tourneur’s reputation stands, and the naturalistic hues of the Technicolor cinematography lack the almost avant-garde textural contrasts of his monochrome films. But it gradually reveals strange undercurrents that complicate its seeming normalcy. At every turn, Tourneur’s mastery of visual storytelling and termitic social commentary is evident. The film’s increasingly feverish sexual energy and its handling of racial tensions form a clear link from his work for RKO to his later studio films, proving how well he could smuggle his strange, caustic vision onto a larger canvas. Cole

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Seven Men from Now

48. Seven Men from Now (Budd Boetticher, 1956)

Seven Men from Now is the first and, in many ways, the purest of the “Ranown” westerns. Randolph Scott is an ex-sheriff, Ben Stride, introduced killing two outlaws in a cave—members, it’s later revealed, of a gang who held up a stagecoach and stole a Wells Fargo strongbox full of gold, murdering his wife in the process. Guilt and vengeance simmer equally within Ben, so off he goes into the arid, stripped-down desert to finish his quest; he meets a married couple, Anne (Gail Russell) and John Greer (Walter Reed), on their way to California, as well as the rascally Bill Masters (Lee Marvin), whom he twice locked away. While John Ford envisions the frontier in a constant flux between civilization and wilderness, Budd Boetticher sees nature as the natural extension of the matador’s arena, where the characters’ dilemmas become “floating poker games,” to use Andrew Sarris’s term, staged in a void, far from the eyes of the town. In that sense, Boetticher’s works are far closer to the similarly underappreciated chamber westerns of Monte Hellman, where the endless spaces of the American West show an unmistakable tinge of Beckett as men ride in absurdist circles, looking for serenity. Like Hellman (or Clint Eastwood, another fan), Boetticher is aware of the conventions of the genre—that, for instance, Ben and Anne will fall for each other sooner or later, or that Ben and Bill will have a showdown. Croce


The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

47. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2018)

Joel and Ethan Coen continue to stretch the boundaries of their art, fashioning a distinctive blend of brutal comedy and existential despair, which the filmmakers understand to be one in the same. If many audiences continue to mistake the Coens’ despair for callousness, then that’s their loss, though it’s hard to fathom how one can miss the trembling vulnerability of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. An anthology of six stories emphasizing the oft-sentimentalized cruelty of the American West, the film opens on a misleading note, following a folksy gunslinger as he’s revealed to be a coldly proficient killer. Though this story has the formalist bravura for which the Coens are known, with showy murder sequences that are designed to elicit cheers, the Coens gradually contextualize the character as a sociopath, and the laughs they elicit from you may very well stick in your throat. The story’s mournful conclusion paves the tonal path for the remainder of the film, which emphasizes the loneliness and terror of life in an unformed country riven with savagery. All these stories are astonishing in various ways, but “The Gal Who Rattled” is a particular classic, with the Coens directly confronting the heartbreak that has always secretly driven their cinema. Bowen


The Misfits

46. The Misfits (John Huston, 1961)

John Huston’s The Misfits is a profoundly mournful film that packs a lot of metatextual baggage. All three leads, in the twilight of their respective careers, play variations of their real selves: Montgomery Clift’s Perce references a horrible accident in which he nearly died; Marilyn Monroe’s Roslyn struggles to leave behind her past as a sex symbol; and Clark Gable’s Gay fights to quell his innate hyper-masculinity that was once needed in his cowboy days but now threatens to leave him alone without a wife. Fittingly, the trio’s paths meet in Nevada, the Leave It state, where, according to Thelma Ritter’s Isabelle, “people go to offload their wives, their money, and their nuclear bombs.” As they unite in a joint business venture to capture wild horses, The Misfits evolves into a potent elegy about the people left behind by time. Gable died before the film’s release, Monroe one year after at 36, and Clift a mere four years later at 45. The Misfits endures in part as a fitting swansong for all three, whose tragic lives are here, through some remarkable alchemy, intertwined and enshrined. Smith


Ulzana’s Raid

45. Ulzana’s Raid (Robert Aldrich, 1972)

Ulzana’s Raid is a film concerned with moral relativism, with the essential alien divide between two cultures. Mr. McIntosh (Burt Lancaster), a white tracker who’s married to an Apache woman (Aimee Ecclés), understands that divide, while young Lt. Garnett DeBuin (Bruce Davison) does not, as he shoehorns everything he experiences into the framework of his Christianity. The film’s moral compass resides in its refusal to offer one, and the narrative routinely confounds audience expectation. DeBuin is incredulous at the Apaches’ viciousness, which stems from his obviousness to his complicity in the European invasion and theft of Ulzana’s land. Apache warrior named Ulzana (Joaquin Martinez) responds in turn, and DeBuin’s failure to understand this fact reduces him to a fool. He tries to attach Christian pageantry to events that stem from the madness of war—attempts at gallantry that feel almost as obscene in this context as Ulzana’s violence. When Ulzana is eventually killed, tellingly by Ke-Ni-Tay (Jorge Luke), DeBuin insists on a Christian burial. As a way of diluting this inadvertent violation of his own culture, Ke-Ni-Tay buries Ulzana himself. McIntosh, dying as a result of DeBuin’s incompetency, also refutes him by refusing a white man’s burial, preferring to expire as a man of the land he currently inhabits—the Apaches’ land. These plot turns, especially the casual acceptance of Ulzana as an astonishing and pragmatic tactician, still feel radically matter of fact. Bowen

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The Big Trail

44. The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh,1930)

In his breakout role as a trapper leading a wagon train westward, Marion Morrison—using the stage name John Wayne for the first time—has clearly not yet settled into his trademark breezy swagger, instead shuffling stiffly as he recites stock stalwart-cowboy lines in declarative tones. But if the young Duke struggles to achieve naturalism, director Raoul Walsh’s film turns out to have enough to spare: Shot in an early form of widescreen and featuring audacious experiments with crowded soundscapes, The Big Trail sweeps viewers up in an arduous march to Oregon. Walsh captures the scale of this mythic trans-American odyssey like no filmmaker before or since, marshalling every resource available to filmmakers circa 1930 to transport us back to the 1840s with every dusty, mud-soaked frame. Less thrilling today is the representation of native peoples like the Cheyenne and the Crow. Undeniably told from a white-supremacist historical perspective more dominant in 1930 than today, The Big Trail represents both a technical and aesthetic landmark and a document of the misleading stories white America tends to tell about its origins. Brown


A Fistful of Dynamite

43. A Fistful of Dynamite (Sergio Leone, 1971)

Sergio Leone’s last western is a determined provocation to the post-1968 political climate in Europe, starting with its opening crib from Mao Zedong: “The revolution is not a dinner party.” Setting A Fistful of Dynamite against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution of 1913 allows Leone to take a number of pot shots at the pie-in-the-sky idealism of the insurgent left, as well as the inhumane brutality of the repressive right, especially when it comes to Italy’s Fascist past and collaboration with the Nazis. The first half of the film is almost lighthearted, as Rod Steiger’s blustery bandito and James Coburn’s jaded former I.R.A. dynamiter team up to rob the bank at Mesa Verde, but the film grows progressively more somber: The duo’s triumphant demolition of the San Jorge bridge is followed by the revelation of atrocities committed in the San Ysidro caves, where Steiger finds his entire family has been slaughtered. Leone’s final jab at bourgeois comportment comes when the title finally appears as an ironic riposte to Steiger’s last line of dialogue, an effect that’s totally lost under its rebranding as A Fistful of Dynamite. Wilkins


Heaven’s Gate

42. Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980)

Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate is already the stuff of legend—for its troubled production, its initial critical tar-and-feathering, and its steady rise in reputation. But beyond its fascinating backstory, this big-budgeted auteurist statement remains one of the most beguiling of westerns. In his interpretation of the true Johnson County War, in which the U.S. government sanctioned the killing of the European settlers in Wyoming, Cimino crafts both a critique of the country’s longstanding xenophobic tendencies and the western itself. American manifest destiny is often framed as heroic across the genre, especially in its nascent days, but in Heaven’s Gate it’s seen as having nothing but a corrupting effect—an excuse to take land away from others and keep a region free of outsiders. Throughout, Vilmos Zsigmond’s photography suggests a hallucination, incredibly in sync with Kris Kristofferson’s once-idealistic marshal’s increasing sense of disillusionment. The film is uncompromising agitprop as lavish Hollywood epic—and the guns-a-blazing last stand of the auteur-driven American cinema forged in the 1970s. Greene


Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

41. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969)

Released in 1969, the same year as Sam Peckinpah’s game-changing revisionist western The Wild Bunch, George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ushered in its own quiet revolution of sorts, introducing a playful joie de vivre to the genre that had rarely been seen before. The film’s use of an ananchronistic soundtrack proved to be particularly influential, with Burt Bacharach’s music so effectively rejuvenating its well-trodden setting that McCabe & Mrs Miller and Peckinpah’s own Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid would later pull similar stunts. The meandering plot is carried mostly by the irresistible charm of Paul Newman and Robert Redford, whose friendly banter is itself a subtle rebuke to the western tradition of the lone, laconic gunman. And with the introduction of Katherine Ross to complete an ambiguous ménage à trois, the film hints at the cinematic reconfiguration of gender dynamics presented a few years earlier in François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim. Acting more like anti-authoritarian rebels than ruthless bandits, even Butch and Sundance’s eventual violent comeuppance seems to be a celebration of life lived outside the law. Robb

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El Topo

40. El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970)

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo opens with a passage that could be an existential journey for one’s soul or a spoof of a spaghetti western: The bearded, leather-clad gunfighter El Topo (Jodorowsky) and his young son (Brontis Jodorowsky) ride through the desert and into a hamlet of bloodily decimated people and animals. From then on, it’s a winding, spiraling road of evil bandits, mystical foes, and whip-cracking dykes, spiked with indelible, inexplicable imagery. The hairy outlaws fondle and kiss their dainty Franciscan prisoners, and at one point a monk is arranged in angelic close-up with blood for lipstick; the woman (Mara Lorenzio) El Topo has rescued hugs a cock-shaped bolder amid the unending dunes, and water promptly ejaculates from it; a community of rabbits dies off from the hero’s vengeful vibe, while the old mother of one of the Masters of the Desert cries distorted bird chirps as she steps on broken glass. Bullets provide the stigmata for the hero’s nutty crucifixion midway through, and the film’s second half finds El Topo as a bald-headed holy fool, reborn in a cave full of freaks before emerging into the most corrosive send-up of the western since Godard’s Wind from the East, a hilariously decadent frontier Sodom where Russian roulette is played in church for “miracles.” Croce


The Lusty Men

39. The Lusty Men (Nicholas Ray, 1952)

A mournful modern-day ode to a vanishing way of life, The Lusty Men pits homeward-looking, aging rodeo star Jeff McCloud (Robert Mitchum) against upstart Wes Merritt (Arthur Kennedy), positioning Wes’s wife, Louise (Susan Hayward), as the upright angle in this acute triangle. Stylistically, the film juxtaposes patently false studio sets and process photography—even beyond the usual exigencies necessitated by studio procedures—with a gritty verisimilitude derived from documentary-style location shooting at preeminent rodeo events. The script literal-mindedly—not to mention raunchily—sets up an equivalence between horses and women. Fending off one of Wes’s female admirers, Louise quips, “Beat it, sister. He’s got a horse.” In one key scene, Ray traces the complex web of relations between the characters with a series of sinuous tracking shots, tracing out each strand as the actors cross and re-cross the scene. During the big rodeo finale, Ray uses a brisk high-angle/low angle interchange between Jeff and Wes to highlight the relative shift in stature between the two as Wes becomes his own man. The Lusty Men belongs among a subset of westerns (like Sam Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner) that both celebrate and eulogize the rugged, self-sufficient values of the American frontier, even as they’re in the process of being devoured by the machinery of modern-day capitalism. Wilkins


Yellow Sky

38. Yellow Sky (William A. Wellman, 1948)

William A. Wellman’s films are characterized by their stark formalism, but Yellow Sky is as dry as the arid flatland and sun-baked rocks that make up its settings. Wellman had the versatility, if not the distinctiveness, of Howard Hawks, traversing nearly every genre and producing solid work in each of them. Yet few of his films more clearly demonstrate his skills than Yellow Sky, which exhibits the virtue of his surface-oriented style. Here, the conflicts are primarily internal, but Wellman eschews psychologizing his characters, focusing instead on their primal struggles—their hunger, thirst, lust, and greed—and matter-of-factly filming their madness. Far from simplifying the drama, though, the film obtains a tactile, immediate quality that makes the infighting all the more vicious. Only a coda in which both the laconic, dictatorial Stretch (Gregory Peck) and Mike (Anne Baxter) turn into goody-two-shoes lovebirds detracts from the animalistic nature of the picture, a commercial concession in what is otherwise one of the nastier westerns of the genre’s classic era. Cole


The Tall T

37. The Tall T (Budd Boetticher, 1957)

Director Budd Boetticher was a master of stillness, and his particular stylistic gift—a sturdy, static group shot containing two or three people, often arranged in triangle formation across the widescreen frame, and plenty of unresolved tension—gets a thorough workout in The Tall T, the terse second entry in Boetticher’s “Ranown” cycle of films starring Randolph Scott. Staged largely against a cluster of boulders in the desert, the film finds Scott’s lone horseman stoically weighing his calculus for survival as a group of armed outlaws hold him and a pair of newlyweds hostage in hopes of claiming the bride’s dowry. Over the course of an elegantly compressed 24 hours, codes of conduct are tested and dissected, and what initially seems like the preamble to an explosive conflict ends up oriented more toward hushed verbal combat, with Boetticher uncovering shades of human frailty and relatable longings in Richard Boone’s initially ruthless villain. A clear influence on the existential westerns of Monte Hellman, The Tall T luxuriates in the dead time between negotiations and mind games and ultimately captures something of the essential loneliness of the Old West. Lund

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3:10 to Yuma

36. 3:10 to Yuma (Delmer Daves, 1957)

In the tradition of many American westerns, 3:10 to Yuma is a study in masculinity that dramatizes a man’s struggle to balance the needs of his community—or, in this case, his family—with his personal needs as an individual, though the film is distinctive from a conventional oater in a number of ways, particularly for its spare, naked immediacy. The action in Delmer Daves’s film isn’t rousing, and we’re seldom invited to enjoy the camaraderie that many westerns celebrate as a given of frontier life. Life in this film’s west is lonely and isolating, and work is seen as plain and taxing, informed by a fear of financial collapse that, in turn, leads to feelings of inferiority and emasculation. 3:10 to Yuma is a remarkably tense and concentrated film: Daves never dilutes the desperate tension of the central dilemma with extraneous set pieces. It’s also one of the most beautiful and human of all American westerns. The haunting low-key performances (Glenn Ford, especially, was never better than he is here), the rich, deep shadows, and the ghostly use of the locomotive’s steam quietly undermine the macho posturing of many genre films. Remarkably contemporary in sensibility, 3:10 to Yuma is overdue for discovery among younger cinephiles. Bowen


Day of the Outlaw

35. Day of the Outlaw (André De Toth, 1959)

André De Toth’s Day of the Outlaw is the rare western to take place across a landscape blanketed in snow, whose temperatures are as biting as the long-gestating feud between the homesteaders of the bleak town of Bitters, Wyoming and a local rustler, Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan). Just as these tensions start to boil over, the film pulls a bait-and-switch, shifting gears with the intrusion of a gang of robbers hiding out from a bank heist. The group is led by Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives), an AWOL Army captain who fancies himself a noble criminal. But in a film that’s already established its protagonist as a raging, loathsome man, there’s no room here for romantic notions of crime. No sooner has Jack been introduced as the ringleader of the robbers than the filmmakers underline his powerlessness to control them; as he insists that the other criminals leave the women of the town alone, the men only laugh at him. De Toth’s images are by and large static, and punctuated by slow, deliberate movements of the camera, effectively communicating the pervasive sense of isolation that grips both the occupied townspeople and the marauders, who increasingly reveal their pathetic inability to think further than their immediate desires. Cole


The Proposition

34. The Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005)

Director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave envision civilization’s encroachment into the wild as necessitating an abolishment of coarse impulses, an unavoidable process that is still painfully problematic because of its intrinsic unnaturalness. Charlie’s (Guy Pearce) tortured decision to and sacrifice his madman brother, Arthur (Danny Huston), and save fellow criminal Mike (Richard Wilson) is a symbolic preference for order over disorder. But as with Stanley’s (Ray Winstone) attempts to assume a dignified Christmas feast with his out-of-her-element wife, Martha (Emily Watson), the reconciliation of sophisticated ethical ideals with unsavory (yet pragmatic for survival) eye-for-an-eye, call-of-the-wild principles isn’t achieved without the offering of a sacrificial pound of flesh. In this vein, Hillcoat juxtaposes Mike’s eventual lashing at the bequest of Fletcher (and over the objections of Stanley) with the angelic singing of one of Arthur’s right-hand men, a disharmonious point-counterpoint of agony and ecstasy that encapsulates the despondency of The Proposition’s meditation on personal and national assimilation. And if said integration is ultimately depicted as a crime against nature itself, the film nonetheless also recognizes by its crimson-stained finale that, for man’s continued survival, the sun must inevitably set on such unchecked, unruly human barbarism. Schager


High Plains Drifter

33. High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973)

Sergio Leone’s influence is obvious in the baroque excesses of High Plains Drifter. Clint Eastwood’s aim, though, isn’t to pay homage to the genre but to usher in its apocalypse. The setting is the frontier town of Lago, threatened by three barbarians, but Eastwood’s cowboy hero outdoes them in ferocity; as “the Stranger,” he materializes on the horizon distorted by heat waves, less Shane than angel of death. Where his later gunfighters are pockmarked with an increasingly frail humanity, the “savior” here is a pulverizing creature whose presence exposes the rot of a town that may not be worth saving. The townspeople’s surface respectability gives way to cowardice, treachery, corruption, and venality during his stay. Westerns-for-Vietnam allegories were a dime a dozen in the 1970s, yet Eastwood got to the core of an era’s shameful passivity to suffering, with Lago’s new coat of red paint standing both for intimations of Old Testament retribution and the acknowledgement of collective sanguine hands. (As the Stranger ultimately says to Billy Curtis’s dwarf Mayor, there’s nothing to do but “live with it.”) The Eastwood persona may have been molded by other filmmakers, but High Plains Drifter shows the star-auteur as his own most perceptive critic. Croce

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Forty Guns

32. Forty Guns (Samuel Fuller, 1957)

Though shot in a drum-tight 10 days, and on a low budget, writer-director Samuel Fuller’s raw, punchy noir-western Forty Guns isn’t a film of half-measures. Bold expressionism and brawny physicality were staples of Fuller’s filmmaking career—qualities surely indebted in some part to his experiences as an infantryman and cameraman during World War II—and in Forty Guns the entire cast is synchronized with that sensibility. Shot in black-and-white CinemaScope at a time when the format was largely reserved for color productions, Forty Guns’s deep chiaroscuro anticipates the characters’ deadly impulses and the grave directions that the drama takes. It all leads to a climactic showdown of remarkable savagery that seems to confirm an irrepressible violence within the hearts of even the most upstanding among us—though it’s followed then by a studio-mandated corrective to it, a scene that partially aims to clear the dust churned up by such a bleak capper. Fuller includes a line of dialogue that complicates the uplift, but even if he hadn’t, Forty Guns’s damning treatise on gun infatuation and the incapacity to transcend one’s nature had already landed its heaviest blows, leaving a bitter aftertaste that no smearing of schmaltz could quite undo. Lund


The Shooting

31. The Shooting (Monte Hellman, 1966)

Monte Hellman is known to have initially garnered producers’ attention with a western take on Waiting for Godot, and that experience explicitly colors The Shooting, a quest narrative that elides any context of the quest until a startling conclusion that shows a man looking into a metaphorical mirror to glimpse his own soul. The prey pursued by bounty hunter Willet Gashade (Warren Oates) and his clan throughout the narrative is revealed to be Willet’s brother, who’s also, pivotally, played by Oates. When the brothers briefly look upon one another, we’re primed to remember the first-person shots that opened the film, and to recall the feelings of pursuit that have hounded Willet from the outset. Though this is literally a bleak story of brothers finding each other, the emotional takeaway is thornier, wilder, as we feel as if we’ve been watching Willet in a no-exit situation, chasing himself in an endless purgatorial loop across the desert, probably as atonement for a career of killing and for his absence from the mining site at the time of the titular shooting. This ending succinctly cuts to the existential heart of Hellman’s art and to the deepest fears of the quickly commercialized and annihilated countercultural movement: of looking into your greatest enemy’s eyes and seeing, simply, yourself. Bowen


Badlands

30. Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)

What is Badlands if not a meditation on the scarcity of identity of a notorious murderous couple mythologized for his charisma and her alleged innocence, and who better to pose such questions than a philosopher? Terrence Malick’s first feature film, written after a brief career in academia and a stint at the American Film Institute, is frequently touted as part and parcel of the 1970s New American Cinema (on the surface, it contains the post-western mythos of road movies and on-the-run-romance flicks like Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde), but it’s also distinct from those films insofar as it presents a new form of storytelling that’s more interesting than its subjects. Based loosely on the nine-day, 10-victim killing spree carried out by the 18-year-old Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Fugate, Badlands charts less a glorified fugitive sexual chemistry than two kids (Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek) playing house in a tree with grandiose visions of escape and normality. Yet the film is understated, underwhelming, its jarring violence always a necessary force in delaying the inevitable and propping up the grand illusion of their continuous existence in the barren landscapes that reflect back at them the inertia of their own essence. Tina Hassannia


For a Few Dollars More

29. For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone, 1965)

Quentin Tarantino once called Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More the best directed film of all time. It sits in the difficult middle of Leone’s “Man with No Name” trilogy, sans the Kurosawa-indebted flair for pastiche that marks Fistful of Dollars and the epic and haunting sweep of The Good, the Bad and The Ugly. This time, Eastwood’s Manco teams up with fellow bounty hunter General Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef) to track down a murderous bank robber, Indio (Gian Maria Volonté). Leone delivers, as usual, sheer entertainment, but this entry’s key innovation is its synthesis of action and music. Ennio Morricone’s most haunting score feeds off of a musical stopwatch that Indio pilfered from one of his victims, his troubled memories delivered through a violently hallucinatory flashback. Leone and Morricone use this score to tease out suspense and wrap it with trauma, manipulating the heroic western into something more damaged and mournful, without withholding the satisfaction of the signature Leone style. Flanagan

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Man of the West

28. Man of the West (Anthony Mann, 1958)

Anthony Mann’s Man of the West carries with it an unshakeable aura of finality in its world-weary temperament, bringing a genre which would quickly find new modes of expression—whether in the mold of a spaghetti, revisionist, neo, or acid western—to its logical endpoint. This simultaneous sense of exasperation and dedication in the face of progress is reflected in the demeanor of Gary Cooper’s aging, reformed outlaw, Link Jones, whose proactive measures to reconcile personal principles and professional pride manifests as a kind of existential crisis. Mann utilized landscape as both pictorial and thematic device, teasing from his jagged geographies an impressionistic nuance directly reciprocal to the mental disposition of his characters. Befitting this approach, much of Man of the West transpires outdoors, from the glorious sun-drenched commencement to the threatening pink dusk left lingering after the central train robbery to the climatic shootout in an abandoned mining town. Mann’s indoor passages prove to be just as impressive, however, consistently helping to consolidate and reanimate character constitution. And from a formal perspective, they’re simply a marvel of physical orchestration and diagrammatic expression. Jordan Cronk


Track of the Cat

27. Track of the Cat (William A. Wellman, 1954)

Generational clashes. Battles to sustain the patriarchy. A magical Native American both loathed and respected. Deadly alcoholism played for laughs. Midcentury westerns don’t get much weirder, darker, or more volatile than Track of the Cat, William A. Wellman’s Strindbergian passion play set in the northern Sierras as winter’s first blizzard rolls in. Fulfilling an idea he had long pondered, Wellman shot the film as a black-and-white movie in color, meaning all sets were painstakingly stripped of pigment so that the selective introduction of colored props and wardrobe pieces—like Robert Mitchum’s brick-red hunting jacket or a set of blue matches—would register with a blunt dramatic force within the expansive CinemaScope frame. A.I. Bezzerides penned the existential screenplay, which is structured around the delayed reveal of a killer black panther that drives the already quarrelsome Bridges family—Mitchum’s alpha middle child, Tab Hunter’s laconic younger brother, Beulah Bondi’s fiery evangelical matriarch, and more—to new heights of hysteria, taking on a role comparable to that of the “great whatsit” in his later Kiss Me Deadly. Lund


Winchester ‘73

26. Winchester ‘73 (Anthony Mann, 1950)

Anthony Mann came to the western in 1950, with no less than three electrifying oaters. The Devil’s Doorway humanizes Robert Taylor’s Native American rebel without condescension or pious speechifying, while The Furies captures the complex, crazy synergy between Barbara Stanwyck’s prairie Electra and Walter Huston’s cattle-ranch patriarch. It was in Winchester ’73, however, that the filmmaker located the ideal actor for his dissections of cowboy heroism. Here, the James Stewart who rides into town seeking “the gun that won the west” is a baleful, haunted version of the actor’s earlier dawdling sopranos, a man who’s been to war and seen horrors and, now back, expects to see more. During a barroom showdown, Stewart damn near decapitates his outlaw opponent with a sucker-punch; there’s a streak of nasty unease, of coiled violence, in this beloved actor that’s still shocking to see spring out. In the astonishing quintet of westerns they made together between 1950 and 1955 (Bend of the River, The Naked Spur, The Far Country, The Man from Laramie), Stewart is never a clear-cut “good guy.” Playing avengers, bounty hunters, and loners in fragile, budding communities, his characters come to heroism grudgingly, and then only as a way to externalize and exorcise the traumas crawling within them. No bronze frontier effigies, the Mann-Stewart protagonists are warped brooders negotiating the impending collapse of terrain, body, and mind. Croce


The Great Silence

25. The Great Silence (Sergio Corbucci, 1968)

The Great Silence depicts an environment where the powerful shamelessly gorge themselves as the average citizen turns to extreme measures simply to survive. If once there was justification for the violence committed across the film’s snow-blanketed Utah, now men embrace violence simply for the pleasure of it—leaving no morally superior side when the government dispatches bounty hunters to clean up the frontier. Indeed, both the outlaws and the bounty hunters at the center of the film are so prone to senseless violence that they’re as likely to war among themselves as with each other. This vision of the Old West contains none of the promise of freedom that even the western’s most revisionist entries indulge before then subverting. And The Great Silence concludes with perhaps the bleakest ending in the history of the western, a final confrontation doomed from the outset but that the hero still performs out of a sense of existential obligation. Silence’s (Jean-Louis Trintignant) shootout with Loco’s (Klaus Kinski) gang has none of the sense of noble sacrifice endemic to western martyrs. His standoff only feels like a farce, as he’s just another body placing itself before a psychotic killing spree. Released at the end of a year of global unrest, of popular rebellions against political, military, and bureaucratic shackles, Sergio Corbucci’s film epitomizes a pervasive liberal dejection over the Vietnam War and conservative rule, a sense of bewilderment and confusion about morality no longer feeling relevant. Cole

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Fort Apache

24. Fort Apache (John Ford, 1948)

John Ford’s films are frequently taken to task for their xenophobic portrayals of Native Americans. But Fort Apache paints both natives and the white man in a complex, diverse light, more so than perhaps any of his films prior to Cheyenne Autumn, implicating the latter not only in the escalation of violence on the frontier, but in the moral decline of the Native Americans as well. Along with castigating Henry Fonda’s Colonel Thursday for the complete disregard he shows for Native American rights and his bull-headed, mindless following of U.S. government codes and laws, Ford also shines a harsh light on the frontier tradesmen who illegally sell weapons and near-poisonous whiskey to the Native Americans. In Fort Apache’s final act, in which a terrible military decision, responsible for the senseless death of men on both sides, is ultimately transformed into a misguided celebration of heroism, Ford offers a stirring condemnation of the mythification of the American West, something he himself helped to accomplish. With Fort Apache, Ford looks unflinchingly into the face of imperialism, and the ritualistic celebration of the sheer force which accompanies it, and responds with a startlingly unmitigated disgust. Smith


A Fistful of Dollars

23. A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964)

A Fistful of Dollars feels as if it hasn’t aged a day since its initial release in 1964. The film’s opening credits sequence is more vigorous and exciting than most entire modern movies for its simplicity and boldness—for its willingness to risk ludicrousness so as to inspire an operatic level of emotion. An illustrated silhouette of a man on a mule gallops against a blank backdrop while Ennio Morricone’s score whips up a fevered tone of comic malevolence. The colors of the man and the backdrop alternate between red and black, foreshadowing the switchback motif of the film’s narrative. The credits sequence brings the audience onto the film’s tonal wavelength, signaling that A Fistful of Dollars is in no way “real” and will in fact operate in a kind of unofficial comic-book style, as it was thought of decades before Disney gentrified it for mass consumption. True to the promise of these credits, Leone offers imagery with a spartan directness, which achieves a homemade epic quality through chutzpah and force of will. As in many comic books, the film’s frames pivot on a highly tangible and often diagonal axis, contrasting bold foreground close-ups with menacing figures hiding in foreboding landscapes. The characters’ faces—memorably vicious, hairy, panicky, and sweaty—feel legendary even before Morricone’s score seals the deal, granting them an authority of iconography that serves as the cinematic equivalent of dedicating someone a spot on Mount Rushmore. Bowen


There Will Be Blood

22. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

A fiery cauldron of internal and external calamities, Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s Oil! pivots around Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), whose ambition, greed, and heartlessness make him a literal (to his son) and figurative (to the capitalist nation) daddy dearest. Clashes of religion and business, sanity and lunacy are nothing short of explosive, with Anderson’s formal dexterity and Jonny Greenwood’s otherworldly score lending malevolent majesty to this slow-burn portrait of individualism’s simultaneously creative and destructive power. As cemented by its concluding chapter, Daniel ultimately embodies the notion that individualism created this country one frontier at a time and then, having done so, was deemed to have no place in the nation’s communal social fabric. Wealthy beyond his dreams, Day-Lewis’s former titan—having forever craved escape from society—is transformed, by 1927, into a Howard Hughes-style alcoholic recluse, his contempt for mankind now free to consume him in the empty corridors and opulent rooms of his tomb-like mansion. This diminished form of Plainview is vile and pitiful in equal quantities. Yet There Will Be Blood doesn’t allow him to simply fade away, instead providing him—via a seethingly vitriolic showdown at his residence’s bowling alley with his son, Eli (Paul Dano), now a popular radio preacher—with a batshit-crazy blaze-of-glory climax that detonates with the force of an erupting geyser. Schager


Ride Lonesome

21. Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher, 1959)

Ride Lonesome begins with Randolph Scott’s Ben Brigade capturing a young gunman, Billy John (James Best), in thrilling fashion, intending to use the man as bait to lure his older brother, Frank (Lee Van Cleef), who hanged Ben’s wife so long ago that “I almost forgot,” into confrontation. Budd Boetticher’s low-budget westerns, often shot in just a couple of weeks, accentuate feelings of loss with remarkable quietude. As the various pawns move toward an inevitable showdown across 73 trance-like minutes, Boetticher uses his budgetary limitations to his advantage, emphasizing minimalism through spacious staging that draws out the sadness of the text. That vast emptiness induces a paranoia that forces the characters together. The aging Ben becomes a kind of existential figure, unmoored from anything but his own sense of forward momentum. Frank and company are violent cowboys, but within the flat Olancha Dune landscape they are, at the very least, recognizably human. For my money, this is Boetticher’s crowning achievement. Flanagan

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She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

20. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford, 1949)

What begins as a lighthearted, if reflective, film about a soldier’s impending retirement becomes one of John Ford’s most elegiac depictions of the American West. John Wayne stars as Nathan Brittles, a cavalry captain tasked with one last mission to tame a group of natives still rebelling after the Battle of Little Big Horn. Though sent to suppress the tribes, Brittles laments both the end of his service career and the likelihood of violence against the Cheyenne, with whom he has enjoyed a respectful, peaceful relationship. Ford’s vistas Monument Valley are among his finest, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon’s slow shifts in color and shadow from bright, naturalistic landscapes to wild, blood-red skies mark some of the filmmaker’s most boldly expressionistic work. Cleverness, not brutality, saves the day in the end, but one is left with a wistful nostalgia, a feeling that the American West that Ford himself helped define as a mythic entity is filled with as many hollow mirages as chances for real self-fulfillment. Cole


No Country for Old Men

19. No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)

Joel and Ethan Coen’s concise, efficient script proficiently captures Cormac McCarthy’s melancholic view of the disparities between the old and the young, whether it be Ed Tom Bill’s (Tommy Lee Jones) utilization of horses to scour the desolate desert for clues, or his bafflement at the callous disregard for the dead (and propriety) shown by a guy transporting corpses to the morgue. Meanwhile, their economical, decidedly un-flashy direction (mimicking McCarthy’s writing, and aided by longtime collaborator Roger Deakins’s beautifully severe cinematography) repeatedly conveys narrative undercurrents in entrancingly subtle ways, such that the plethora of animal carcasses, instances of man-versus-beast violence, and Ed Tom’s yarn about a slaughterhouse mishap coalesce into a chilling portrait of anarchic interspecies warfare. Brusque exchanges and austere violence are the story’s stock in trade, with both elements so downbeat and harsh that they occasionally veer close to absurdity, thereby providing the Coens with opportunities to wryly alleviate the oppressive despair and viciousness that hovers over the proceedings in the same way that the enormous western landscape and its weighty silence hang over its human inhabitants. As Ed Tom says in reference to a particularly grim anecdote, “I laugh sometimes. ‘Bout the only thing you can do.” Schager


The Man from Laramie

18. The Man from Laramie (Anthony Mann, 1955)

Anthony Mann didn’t fulfill his desire to make a western based on King Lear, but you wouldn’t know it from watching The Man from Laramie. Waggoman patriarch Alec (Donald Crisp) is to King Lear as his lifelong employee, Vic (Arthur Kennedy), who believes his loyalty deserves greater reward than Dave’s (Alex Nicol) genetic birthright, is to both Regan and Edmund. However intentional these similarities were, they matter less than the psychological intensity that Mann mines from his material. The desolate, sparsely adorned landscape shots emphasize the hollowness of Alec’s kingdom and the cold expansion-at-all-costs mentality of the old baron and his heirs. Shadows darken nearly every frame as Alec goes blind, Dave impatiently waits for his coming inheritance, Vic wrestles with his own greed, and Lockhart (James Stewart), the brother of a cavalry soldier murdered by armed Apaches, grapples with his anger. In one of the film’s best moments, Lockhart sits in a cell at what appears to be dusk, with cool lighting and deep shadows as he and Alec exchange tense words. When the camera follows the latter outside, however, it emerges into the blinding daylight of mid-afternoon, a sudden reorientation to an objective reality after spending time in the two characters’ headspace. Cole


Stagecoach

17. Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)

The first sound western by the director who would become the genre’s consummate poet laureate, Stagecoach is nevertheless less a blank-slate beginning than a crystallizing crossroads. The genre staples on display—the cowboy’s instinctive courtliness, the saloon Magdalene-cum-Madonna, the Southerner’s doomed gallantry—were already familiar to the screen from the sagas of William S. Hart and Tom Mix, to say nothing of John Ford’s own earlier westerns starring Harry Carey. Yet there’s a purity to the way Ford films them, lovingly detailing a populist camaraderie emerging as the characters travel through a young nation fluxing between the danger and freedom of the wilderness and the order and prejudice of civilization. If this is the Old West of our dreams, it’s one that exists in an outsider’s limbo, away from society’s rules, alternating between the breathtaking breadth of the American landscape and the Germanically shadowy lighting of Ford’s claustrophobic interiors. From Apache warriors to narrow-minded biddies to the social barriers separating the characters, Ford never fails to perceive the fragility of his utopia. Croce

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Meek’s Cutoff

16. Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010)

After stripping and reassembling the male-bonding journey movie with Old Joy and the neorealist weepie with Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt set her sights on the western, perhaps the hoariest and most loaded of American genres. In Meek’s Cutoff, her barebones approach is impressively realistic, imagining a cross-country journey through arid, featureless Eastern Oregon as an exercise in numbing frustration, an approach that more importantly lays the groundwork for the film’s core gender conflict. Preserving the mystical status of the Old West as a place for allegorical fables and origin stories, she shapes this dusty journey into a parable of feminist agency. The westbound wagons of Meek’s Cutoff represent not only the creeping vines of a still-growing nation, but the occasion for one woman’s development, as Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) progresses from dissatisfied frontier wife to rifle-wielding voice of reason, a welcome corrective to decades of decisive, bravely trailblazing male heroes. Jesse Cataldo


The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

15. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)

John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance examines the often untold, sometimes shaming, truth behind the legendary heroes of the West—the sort of men John Wayne spent his entire career playing. Here, the actor again stars as the quintessential skilled gunman, with Jimmy Stewart as a fumbling and reserved lawyer who tries to bring law and order to the town of Shinbone. The film is bookended by Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard as an old man, telling the story of the man who shot the outlaw Liberty Valance, with Lee Marvin marvelously playing the titular character with beady-eyed menace, snarling his famous opening line from behind a bandana with equal parts authority and venom: “Stand and deliver!” The film maintains itself as one of the most original western films ever made as Wayne, ever the on-screen hero, becomes a drunk by the third act, and Stewart, ever the scrawny second fiddle, turns out to lead the heroic life. It’s a Ford western that manages to turn the usual Ford western on its head by inverting these classic roles, and leaves the audience wondering if they would truly want to be the man who shot Liberty Valance. Len Sousa


The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

14. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948)

There lies a certain irony in the fact that Humphrey Bogart, the most highly paid star of his era, would use his hard-earned creative freedom to play against type as a down-on-his-luck loser blinded by greed in a movie about gold digging that would, in turn, prove a box office dud. But where there is irony, there is truth, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre remains one of the most insightful films ever made about greed and the thorny effects of temptation on human nature. Adapted from Berwick Traven’s explicitly anti-capitalist novel (published in 1920s Europe, in non-capitalist societies only), John Huston’s film cuts back on those overt sentiments, but the indictment of the profit motive remains the same. One could even argue that the film’s thesis is all the more potent for avoiding such explicit pronouncements, thereby elevating the material to that of the universal versus more specific allegory. Whether it’s nomadic bandits killing for goods or supposedly civilized men choosing to murder another (or each other) rather than share a gold claim, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre bears witness to man’s contemptible willingness—nay, eagerness—to subjugate his brother in the name of short-term material advancement. Humanick


The Naked Spur

13. The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, 1953)

The Naked Spur is the third of five westerns on which director Anthony Mann and star James Stewart collaborated, a loosely linked series of incisively psychological films that allowed Stewart to explore a harsher, darker edge to the affably loose-limbed screen persona he had hitherto established. Here his Howard Kemp is bent on bringing murderer Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan) to justice for the murder of a marshal, not owing to any deep-seated moral code, but out of a desire for the reward money. Mann pares the film down to essentials, with rugged location shooting in the Rocky Mountains, and a cast of only five characters, whom Vandergroat pits against each other in a Hobbesian “war of all against all.” The film is bookended by two standoff set pieces, where the action is aligned vertically up sheer rocky slopes, with Vandergroat ironically inhabiting the high ground on both occasions. The ending is almost obligatorily upbeat, but the sight of Kemp arguing over possession of Vandergroat’s waterlogged corpse is certainly not a scene you’d ever see in Harvey. Wilkins

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Dead Man

12. Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995)

Like most great westerns, Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man holds the American West and its (white) inhabitants up to close scrutiny, and in this sense its radicalism surpasses virtually every earlier example. The ultimate goal for Johnny Depp’s William Blake is one of consciousness. He must come to an understanding of his own life and death as he lumbers through the American West like a wounded animal in search of solitude. His existence here is a veritable transition from innocence to experience. Eventually he must resign himself to his fate and, as his famous namesake put it in “The Book of Thel,” he will “gentle sleep the sleep of death.” More than simply being critical of a West that great artists have already attacked for decades, Jarmusch is interested in suggesting something distinctive and otherworldly, where Blake’s visionary poetry and New York hipsterism might commingle in a setting alien to them both. He tears down one mythopoetic image of West and in its place resurrects his own, which valorizes nothing so much as the agonizing flirtation one has with an enlightenment that might never come. Zach Campbell


Unforgiven

11. Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)

Mythologies haunt Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. Set primarily in 1880 and 1881 along a trail between Wyoming and Kansas, the elder characters of the film talk of their violent pasts while younger men eagerly listen, waiting to prove themselves. Here, moments of violence shatter the younger generation’s illusions of the masculine grandeur of killing. At times, Eastwood goes out of his way to emphasize the pitiful and demoralizing chaos of murder, particularly when one of the film’s villains is shot to death in an outhouse, his eyes alive with unforgettable terror. Twenty-five years after Unforgiven’s initial release, it’s still distinctive to watch an American revenge film in which violence is accorded this sort of awful and surreal weight. Looking to the notorious William Munny (Eastwood) for comfort after his initiation into murder, the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) says that the killing doesn’t feel real, evincing a poetically human response to atrocity that’s unusual for genre cinema. Eastwood and Peoples often juxtapose legendary killers, the protagonists and primary antagonists of the film, with outsiders, supporting characters such as the Schofield Kid and the writer W.W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), who blithely echo our own distanced and worshipful embrace of violence in pop art, as a transmitted energy that’s divorced of the ramifications of the destruction it simulates. Bowen


Red River

10. Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948)

In Red River, an intimate moral study forged from the extreme impositions fostered by such an unforgiving environment as the Old West, the psychology behind the rebellion between hard-nosed cattle rancher Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) and his would-be son turned adversary, Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift), is expertly built and realized by Howard Hawks. The relationship between Garth and Tess Millay (Joanne Dru), who’s introduced 90 minutes into the film, is given ample time to develop, and by the time of our male protagonists’ inevitable showdown, Tess will have become such a force that her instincts will prove key in alleviating any lingering bad blood between them. This climax—or rather, anticlimax—is one of Red River’s most unexpected detours. Rather than devolve into significant violence or outright tragedy, the conclusion to the film is abrupt yet accommodating, based largely around reasoning and respect, two qualities which deflate much of the male posturing which has led to this point. Hawks’s intuitive sympathies and rejection of divine rationale ground his characters in their given environment, eliciting nascent displays of humanity which transcend the confines of narrative. It’s a seemingly antithetical approach which separates Hawks’s cinema from its contemporaries and, in the case of Red River, shifted the moral viability of the western genre all at once. Cronk


Pat Garret and Billy the Kid

9. Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)

One would be hard-pressed to find an original song that better crystallizes the tone of the film it was written for than Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” whose sardonic sense of resignation and doom perfectly encapsulates the feeling hanging over Sam Peckinpah’s mournful Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Dylan’s narrator is Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson), and the “long black cloud comin’ down” on him is fate, personified by James Coburn’s corrupt lawman. The latter has been hired by wealthy landowners to snuff out his old friend, a mission forestalled and complicated by Billy’s elusiveness. Peckinpah made more explosive films—the spurts of violence here register like faint, halting echoes of The Wild Bunch’s grisly set pieces—but few that were this achingly sad and funereal, with Kristofferson and Coburn conveying deep reservoirs of pain and regret in their silences and eliciting nothing so much as pity in their poses of machismo. Lund

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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

8. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)

It seems inconceivable now that spaghetti westerns, specifically those served up by Sergio Leone, were once considered to be somehow less faithful to the western tradition than Hollywood’s crippled efforts of the same time period. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is surely one of the most compelling validations of the western genre’s most elemental touchstones: the quiet stoicism of men who were islands unto themselves, the necessity of according respect to that unforgiving bitch that is the Land, and the malleable but unquestionably unbreakable divisions between good and evil. Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name might have a latently (postmodern) unscrupulous streak in his race against Lee Van Cleef’s “Bad” and Eli Wallach’s “Ugly” to find $200,000 worth of buried gold, but the scene where Eastwood covers a dying Civil War soldier with his trench coat confirms that there’s really nowhere near as much room for debating his moral alignment as there was even in the later work of John Ford. Leone’s uniquely impassioned and architectural Italian sensibilities turned the American Southwest—or, rather, whatever portion of Spain his producers decided would suffice—into a dreamlike terrain of bombed-out ghost towns that still invariably host cathartic shoot-outs, amphitheater-shaped graveyards that seem nearly a mile in diameter, and wide vistas that alternate with extreme close-ups without nary a medium-shot buffer in sight. Eric Henderson


The Wild Bunch

7. The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is a quintessential depiction of characters who are out of step with their times. Early 20th-century technological advances suggest that the world is outpacing these ageing gunfighters, just as the Mexican Revolution forces them to confront new injustices much graver than their own lawless plundering. After their one last score goes awry, the gang struggles to cling to the code of honor that had previously kept them immune from their regrets, leading to a climactic attempt at redemption that could be borne of a guilt-wracked death wish as much as noble self-sacrifice. A touching paean to friendship, the film also boasts an unprecedented level of violence, intended by Peckinpah to be an allegory for the ongoing American involvement in Vietnam. From its iconic freeze-frame opening to the kinetic editing of its cathartic shoot-out finale, The Wild Bunch critiques the old-fashioned machismo and glorified slaughter that are mainstays of the western genre while simultaneously gleefully indulging in these tropes, updating them in ways that were incredibly influential. Robb


My Darling Clementine

6. My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)

“What kind of a town is this?” shouts Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) shortly after entering Tombstone, the rough-and-tumble Arizona municipality at the heart of My Darling Clementine. Earp’s incredulousness is certainly warranted, as his shave at the local “tonsorial parlor” has just been interrupted by stray bullets coming in from the adjoining saloon, but it’s a question that hangs over the entirety of John Ford’s masterpiece. How, in the Wild West of 1882, is a community to operate? What values, institutions, and individuals come out on top, and which are left to rot in the dustbin of history? These concerns can be felt throughout Ford’s filmography, which returns again and again to the potentials and pitfalls of group formation at a moment in American history—and within a genre of American cinema—defined by the collisions between people of varying classes, ethnicities, and visions of the nation’s future. Rarely have these weighty queries been explored with such elegance, poignancy, and dexterous economy as in My Darling Clementine. Matthew Connolly


Once Upon a Time in the West

5. Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)

As expansive and iconic as its title suggests, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West certainly seemed to be written in John Ford’s blood, from the vast wide-angle visions of Monument Valley that Leone and DP Tonino Delli Colli luxuriated in to the railroad-based, future-of-America economic landscape that serves as a backdrop to a number of bandit-versus-bandit power plays. It’s to Leone’s credit that the huge, carefully plotted story isn’t what’s remembered about the film, which is nothing if not the ultimate culmination of the auteur’s genre work. What’s remembered is the blue, uncaring sky cast above a dry, ruthless wasteland of a desert with winds kicking up miniscule storms of red dirt, dust, and debris; the way Charles Bronson’s elusive, solemn gunslinger moves that harmonica across his parched lips; and Jill’s (Claudia Cardinale) near-ritualistic humiliation at the hands of the cackling, diabolical Frank (Henry Fonda). The western suddenly became something beyond its incalculable mythology here and mutated into a rapidly evolving and fluctuating state of grim existence, where Ennio Morricone’s score holds even sonic weight with the swirling hum of gusting winds in an otherwise silent, barren landscape. Cabin

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Johnny Guitar

4. Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)

Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar upends nearly every convention of the traditional western. Its eponymous hero (Sterling Hayden) is a sensitive soul who wields only six strings, not a six-shooter, and contrary to the panoramas for which the genre is known, the vast majority of the film occurs indoors, using the restricted settings to concentrate focus on the characters’ psychological states. But the biggest aberration of the film is that its conflict, propelled by belligerent men seeking to prevent the railroad from coming to town, actually revolves around the psychosexual war between two women: Vienna (Joan Crawford), owner of a saloon she intends to convert into a tourist attraction by erecting an adjoining train depot, and Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge), a sexually repressed firebrand who resents Vienna, in part, for the woman’s relationship with an outlaw (Scott Brady) whom Emma secretly loves. More than 60 years after its release, Johnny Guitar still feels radical. Its subverted norms of genre and gender are rendered in vivid images that sear themselves into the brain: Johnny and Vienna standing against a painted sky; Vienna meeting a posse primed to kill her while dressed in virginal white, a statement of silent protest; and Emma riding away from Vienna’s burning saloon and turning to the camera with one of the most savage, wild-eyed grins in cinematic history. Cole


Rio Bravo

3. Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)

Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo isn’t among the greatest American westerns because its standoffs and gunfights are masterfully constructed (though they are) or because the film features “Stumpy,” the most colorfully crotchety old hoot Walter Brennan ever played (though it does). Rio Bravo’s longevity as a cinematic landmark stems from its subtle, character-driven rebuttal to the presumed individualist ethos of its genre. Intended as the anti-High Noon, the film tells the story of a sheriff (John Wayne) who, without the support of the people around him, wouldn’t stand a chance against the criminal gang due to arrive in his town. Featuring a surprisingly vulnerable performance from Dean Martin as “Dude,” the sheriff’s deputy with a drinking problem—as well as an iconic turn from Angie Dickinson as the irresistibly charming “Feathers”—Rio Bravo suggests that tackling social problems requires forgiveness, mutual support, and an openness to personal transformation. Under what seems like the typical postures of dad-movie masculinity, Hawks smuggles a sensitive film about deeply flawed people whose sum is greater than their parts. Brown


McCabe & Mrs. Miller

2. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)

There isn’t a conventional sound or image to be found in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, whose scenes are charged with a jazz-like pulse of controlled spontaneity that would become a Robert Altman trademark. Compared to the obliging alternation of wide shots, medium shots, and close-ups that comprise most films, McCabe & Mrs. Miller’s compositions seem to be too close in on the characters, reveling in the nits and grits of their hair and beat-up clothes, which often obscure the particulars of their identities. The film’s power springs from its destabilizing mix of precise portraiture and epic scale, ugliness and beauty, cynicism and wide-eyed optimism. Moments of transcendence arise with disconcerting casualness, as the narrative is a vase that holds multitudes of smaller stories of nearly equal stature. Yet it’s evasive to discuss the film merely as a series of haunting flourishes. The brilliance of his filmography resides in its mysterious majesty—in how his inspired individual decisions, intuitive yet relatively straightforward in isolation, cumulatively yield something beyond the sum of their considerable parts. Altman called himself a painter, and the word applies not only to the craftsmanship of his images, but to their bottomless figurative nuance. Bowen


The Searchers

1. The Searchers (John Ford, 1965)

Reflecting on the vast wilderness of the Old West in Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy describes it as the final place left on Earth where it was possible to determine “whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will, or if his own heart is not another kind of clay.” The dramatization of the struggle to tame or be tamed by an entirely new land is what gives the western such enduring appeal. And John Ford’s The Searchers has come to define the genre partly because of its unflinching look at how the American psyche was transformed by the process of building a home, in a place that was both indifferent and actively hostile towards its presence. The plot of the film sees a former Confederate soldier, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), embarking on an odyssey to return his kidnapped niece to her family. Uniquely capable of tracking her down due to his fierce determination, motivated by a primal hatred of the girl’s Comanche captors, he embodies the abyss of American colonial expansion gazing back at the country that it founded. As the years go by, it becomes unclear whether memories of bloody territorial violence have left enough of his humanity intact for him to achieve what he set out to do. In its celebrated closing shot, the film shuts the door on the western’s most iconic figure, who shoulders the collective shame and pride of a nation as he walks off into a breathtaking but empty vista, framed by darkness. Robb

3 Comments

  1. “It’s one of the most satisfyingly homoerotic anti-climaxes to a dick-measuring contest in the entire western genre.”

    You can’t be fucking serious.

  2. Gore Verbinski’s “The Lone Ranger” not only makes the list, but makes the list above the original “True Grit”, “Destry Rides Again”, and “Tombstone”???

    “The Magnificent Seven”, “Open Range”, “Appaloosa”, “Cat Ballou”, “How the West Was Won”, “Hang ’em High”, “Jeremiah Johnson”, and “Dances with Wolves” did not make the list. ….but I cannot emphasize this enough….THE LONE RANGER MADE THE FUCKING LIST!!!!!

  3. The Searchers came out in 1956 not 1965. Obviously, it’s a typo, but definitively worth the top spot. Dodge City – 1939 was missing. Two Rode Together- 1961 Little Big Man – 1970 The Comancheros – 1961 Cheyenne Autumn – 1964 The Last Wagon – 1956 and Young Guns – 1988

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