The thread on Tombstone vs. Wyatt Earp got me wondering if maybe one of those (your pref) was the last great western to be made. Then I thought of Unforgiven.
What was the most recently filmed/released Western (not counting those “modern Westerns” like Red Rock West and others from that genre)?
Let’s say (for kicks) that the time period of the film is before 1930.
While we’re at it, maybe list your Top 5 Westerns of all time.
From the hip, my Top 5:
Shane
Pale Rider (almost a ripoff of Shane)
Silverado
Unforgiven
The Big Country
(I’ll regret this off-the-cuff selection as soon as one of you mentions one I should have thought more carefully about, but that’s the breaks in starting something like this.)
Some people would probably claim that Dances with wolves is the most recent great Western, but not me. For a start, the depiction of the Lakota as a tribe of peace-loving new-age dudes was silly. Secondly, it had Kevin Costner in it, and he will accursed for making a generation of kids believe that Robin Hood was a crusader from Yorkshire, that Sherwood Forest has no trees in it and is in Scotland, that Prince John was a Satanist, and this last point is of paramount importance, that Robin Hood looked like Kevin Costner whereas he was in fact the spitting image of Errol Flynn.
I’d go with Unforgiven. But as for the best westerns, my choice would be:
High Noon
For a few dollars more
Lonely are the brave
How the West was won
Shane.
Don’t you worry, there will be more great Westerns. People are forever claiming that the genre is dead and it keeps on reviving itself. Like tha not-quite-dead yet bad guy who squeezes off a last shot at John Wayne at the end of the film.
Unforgiven might be the last great Western but The Quick and the Dead is good in its own right and three years more recent. My guess as to the most recent Western is Texas Rangers. How about a TV movie? Peacemakers is due to premiere at the end of this month. We may need to wait until the holiday season to see a Western in a theater.
I would nominate Ulzana’s Raid (1972), Robert Aldrich’s tough-as-hell tale of savage cavalrymen hunting savage Native Americans. Personally I think Unforgiven is somewhat overrated (sure, it’s well-acted and depressing but its characters are one-dimensional, the ending’s stupid, and it doesn’t really say anything other than “the west was crappy”). Although The Wild Bunch and Once Upon A Time In The West (both 1969) are both clearly better than Ulzana’s Raid. The Shootist (1976) is later, but it’s hardly a Western.
I’ll gladly face down anyone in a high-noon shoot-out if they dare to claim that there has ever been a better Western than ‘The Searchers’.
This classic John Ford film is the full deal. Rootin-tootin gunslinging, horse-opera comedy, man vs. the west confrontations and strong women in gingham dresses. All at once it shows the real fear that some settlers had of the ‘redman’ and humanizes the Native American people in a very subtle way, decades before such portrayals became common in Hollywood film making.
And say what you will about John Wayne as an actor, he’s got a scene in this film that’ll rip your heart out.
Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven’ is the closest that films have come in the last 20 years to matching this kind of compelling story-telling in the western genre.
Other great oaters include many of the Leone films (‘The Good The Bad and The Ugly’, ‘Once Upon A Time In The West’), ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance’, and ‘The Magnificent Seven.’