~ The 30 Greatest Westerns In Cinema History ~

[MysteRy]

16. The Wild Bunch (1969)



Along with Bonnie and Clyde this film changed the way screen violence was portrayed forever. Sam Peckinpah used slow motion and numerous squibs to emphasise the bloody and often beautiful nature of a cinematic gunfight. The story centres on the fading embers of the Old West, with four ancient bank robbers out of time and out of place with the changing modern world (it is set in 1913 and contains, among other things, a motor car and semi-automatic weapons). The final shootout, when they take on a cohort of the Mexican army and intentionally go down in a blaze of glory, is one of the most sustained and bloody shootouts in screen history.

[MysteRy]

15. The Naked Spur (1953)



One of five Westerns James Stewart made with director Anthony Mann, including Winchester ’73 and The Far Country. Stewart plays a bounty hunter out to track down Robert Ryan, and is a tormented, psychologically damaged hero. Mann’s film is about the moral complexities of the West, with no character a straightforward hero or villain.

[MysteRy]

14. The Beguiled (1971)



This extraordinary film teams Clint Eastwood with his Coogan’s Bluff director Don Siegel. He plays a Yankee soldier lost and injured behind enemy lines during the American Civil War, who gets taken in and cared for by an isolated school for girls in the Deep South. During his slow recovery he sleeps with several of the teachers and pupils, and causes a jealous firestorm to develop amongst them. This gothic melodrama concludes with a terrible fate for Eastwood’s character, who is closer to a cowardly scumbag than the taciturn killers he typically played in Westerns.

[MysteRy]

13. Red River (1948)



Based on the tale of the Mutiny on the Bounty, Red River is a classic Howard Hawks film about drama and rebellion between John Wayne and Montgomery Clift on a cattle drive from Texas to Kansas. The stampede scenes, among others, are referenced and parodied in many later films, including the 90s comedy City Slickers.

[MysteRy]

12. A Bullet for the General (1966)



Damiano Damiani’s Spaghetti Western is a film focusing on the politics of the Mexican revolution, and works as an allegory for contemporary imperialist wars of the time it was made. Gian Mario Volante plays a bandit who originally holds up trains motivated solely by the money, but comes to learn that the revolution is a cause worth fighting for. The film also stars Klaus Kinski and Bond girl Martine Bestwick.

[MysteRy]

11. The Searchers (1956)



Some would place this film at the top of the list. John Ford’s epic features an uncompromising performance by John Wayne as Ethan Edwards – searching for his niece who has been kidnapped by Commanches. Driven by hatred of the Native American, Edwards is even ready to kill the girl when he finds her at the end and discovers that, after five years of living with the tribe, she has fully assimilated into the lives of the Commanche who took her. The character of Edwards was even one of the inspirations for Travis Bickle, the near psychotic character in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

[MysteRy]

10. El Dorado (1966)



El Dorado is one of three Howard Hawks westerns based around the similar scenario of an unlikely band consisting of veteran John Wayne, an inexperienced young gunfighter, and an alcoholic former lawman. The first was Rio Bravo in 1959, the last was Rio Lobo in 1970. Sandwiched in between is this, the best and most consistently entertaining of the three. James Caan and Robert Mitchum complete the cast. The film has a comic tone, but that only masks an emotional core. And the film is a perfect example of Hawks’ themes of solidarity in the face of unfavourable odds, and the importance and honour of professionalism.

[MysteRy]

9. My Darling Clementine (1946)



This is the definitive screen version of real life legends Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the events culminating in the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Unlike other versions of the tale, this is a low key, subtle, and quite gentle take of how real life Earp became lawman of the town of Tombstone. Earp actually told his tale to director John Ford himself, with inevitable slant in his favour no doubt, and is played by Henry Fonda. Other versions of these events include the 90s movies Tombstone, with Kurt Russell, and Wyatt Earp, with Kevin Costner.

[MysteRy]

8. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)



Yet another elegiac film lamenting the end of the old West, this time told through the story of the former friends turned adversaries of the title. Bob Dylan provides the score, and has a supporting role, and the soundtrack includes Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door. Sam Peckinpah’s film is brutal and beautiful, and contains quite savage imagery, in particular during the opening scenes where live chickens are buried up to their necks to be used as target practice. Kris Kristofferson plays Billy, and James Coburn plays Garrett, and the film is a slow meditation, rather than a fast paced action film.

[MysteRy]

7. For a Few Dollars More (1965)



Sergio Leone’s sequel to his ground-breaking A Fistful of Dollars is longer, more accomplished, and provides the first example of a complex three way dynamic between heroes and villain which the director further explored in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West. Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name teams up with Lee Van Cleef’s bounty hunter to foil a gang of bank robbers led by the brilliant Italian actor Gian Mario Volante. Ennio Morricone’s iconographic theme has been reborn in dance remixes, and the film is filled with gallows humour and moments of pathos; especially the extraordinary moment where Volante plays with a dying beetle while he listens to the sound of his men dying in a gunfight outside.

[MysteRy]

6. The Great Silence (1968)



This subversive Spaghetti western is one of the bleakest films ever made. Its hero is the brooding, silent type – literally. Having been made mute by a horrific attack on him as a child, he is now working as a bounty hunter, and is hired to protect a town beleaguered by the policies of the local banker and property owner. The finale is a downbeat, brutal conclusion to the film, and was said by the director Corbucci to be an allegory for the contemporary assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Che Guevara. Ennio Morricone provides one of his best soundtracks.

[MysteRy]

5. El Topo (1970)



One of the original midnight cult movies, endorsed by John Lennon among others, Jodorowsky’s incredible film is packed full of extraordinary and surreal images. It begins as an (almost) straightforward western, with a black clad gunslinger saving some people from a vicious and perverse gang, but then morphs into an examination of the meaning of life, religion, and seemingly a million other things. No amount of words can adequately describe El Topo because the experience of it is not in words, but in its imagery.

[MysteRy]

4. High Plains Drifter (1973)



Clint Eastwood rides into town and may, or may not be, the ghost of the Sherriff murdered when the cowardly townsfolk stood by and watched him whipped to death by three gunslingers, who incidentally are out of jail and coming back to take their revenge. He is hired to protect the town, but not before he gets revenge of his own on those he feels are responsible for his own past trauma. This was the first Western Eastwood directed, and is a stylistic homage to Sergio Leone. It is also indebted to Don Siegel, who directed him in The Beguiled, Coogan’s Bluff, and Dirty Harry.

[MysteRy]

3. Unforgiven (1992)



Eastwood reportedly held onto the script by David Peoples for ten years until he felt old enough to portray the retired gunfighter William Munny. Now working as a barely successful farmer, Munny is forced to take on the hunt for two cowboys accused of maiming and disfiguring a prostitute. The film, like so many on the list, has a revisionist stance, and examines the mythology of the Old West and the macho characters who epitomise it. It is Eastwood’s last western (to date).

[MysteRy]

2. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)



Ennio Morricone’s iconic score, which everyone can sing whether they have seen the film or not, puts The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly near the top of any list of great Westerns. In fact, such is the mastery of the cinematic technique displayed by director Sergio Leone, that the film frequently comes near the top of any great film list, Western or not. Eastwood and Van Cleef return in this third of the Man with No Name/Dollars trilogy, and are joined by Eli Wallach to complete the trio of the title. Their double crossing search for buried gold during the Civil War culminates in the ultimate quick draw gunfight in the middle of a huge cemetery. The battle scenes and those set in the prisoner of war camp provide some moments of pathos amidst the nihilistic violence.