“Today, my jurisdiction ends here. Pick up my hat.”
This pretty much sums up my list though there are a few I have missed listed in other posts. John Wayne as a flawed character is so much better. Once Upon a Time is the pinnacle of Leone’s work with some top notch talent. One of the few movies I actually own.
Agreed.
My wife mentioned The Shootist. I have to agree: Duke, Bacall, and Opie. “Are the mattresses ‘ticky’?”
The original True Grit.
Honorable mentions: The Cowboys & Dances With Wolves
I’d have to give it up for Unforgiven.
Until that came along, I was fairly indifferent to the entire genre, (oddly, at the time I didn’t consider the Clint Eastwood “Spaghetti Westerns” as westerns; they were…satire? Caricatures?) but started getting more interested in the “gritty” westerns like The Wild Bunch.
Growing up, the “culture” of our household had “singing cowboys,” with even white teeth, sequinned shirts, and horses smarter than your average politician.
Either that, or John Wayne was the standard, and his style rubbed me wrong from get go; it was years later that I came to believe that Robert Mitchum was what John Wayne was trying to be. But in any case, even at my tender young age, some part of me rebelled almost instinctively against this sanitized saccharine, and I turned my back on the genre for years.
Until I was dragged, somewhat reluctantly, to a dollar theater to see Unforgiven.
My eyes were opened, and I began looking around a bit for other movies like it; The aforementioned Wild Bunch, Butch and Sundance, The Outlaw Josey Wales, etc., and a renewed interest in seeing the Spaghetti Westerns with a different eye: they became less caricature to me than “stylized,” and actually sparked a mild interest on my part for foreign films (not that I’m any kind of aficionado on foreign films, but I don’t automatically reject a film just because it’s foreign).
So for me, Unforgiven was an eye-opening benchmark moment, of definition of what a “western” should be to grab my interest. Even Silverado, which was little more than a loving homage that took every “western” trope and banged it together in a pastiche of scenes to make a whole movie, has a place on my movie shelf.
Silverado
For a Few Dollars More
Support Your Local Sheriff
The Magnificent Seven
I don’t know - one of those…
High Noon or The Searchers
I might give an edge to The Searchers for the incredible location shooting. Monument Valley – accept no substitutes.
Magnificent Seven is a close third.
The Unforgiven is also the best. Not tied with the other two but in a class of “western” by itself.
This thread made me realize three of my favorite westerns feature Kevin Costner.
Open Range, Dances With Wolves, and Silverado.
Huh.
I was thinking No Country For Old Men maybe? But that was an independent motel chain.
All those which featured Clint Eastwood alternately chewing a cigar and chewing the scenery.
I love love LOVE Westerns. I’ve started threads about them. I watch Encore Westerns ten times more than primetime network shows.
So it’s hard to say which one’s the best. I really like Once Upon A Time In The West, but I only watch it once every three or four years. Same with most of the Eastwood-Leone films (although I’d rank High Plains Drifter with them). Same with other epics like The Big Country, Silverado, and Red River.
But there’s one movie that I watch several times a year. Not on purpose, but they play it a lot on TV, and once I start watching it, I can’t stop. And nobody’s mentioned it.
It’s The Bravados, with Gregory Peck as a rancher who relentlessly and ruthlessly hunts down the men that he thinks killed his wife.
It’s kind of cheesy, it’s not very well cast (Joan Collins as a lonely spinster and Andrew Duggan as a priest), but it’s great entertainment.
I would be embarrassed to call it the best ever made, but it’s the one I watch most often.
And god help me, Quigley Down Under is in second place.
Another vote for Hombre, the only western I have ever actually owned. One of the great adaptations of Elmore Leonard’s work for the screen. For some reason it doesn’t get the kudos it deserves.
SO close.
Rustler’s Rhapsody.
As I have mentioned before, I was in a few of these oaters and a couple others that no one in their right mind would consider “the BEST”. Still I love the Western. My favorites include, “My Darlin’ Clementine” (everything worked). Who could forget the Marshall and “his Lady” dancing on what would be the church and the Arizona desert in the background or Doc Holiday stepping on the pool table to complete the solique from Hamlet. Or the final gun fight in the dust. The other I would put on the top shelf was “Red River.” It turned the whole whole quest idea on its head. Think about it - a bad quest…so strange. I would also put The Magnificent Seven into the great file. Four heroic good guys die. That just wasn’t done, but it was.
I guess Jeremiah Johnson would fall into the ‘western’ genre. It’s aged pretty well, other than the cheesy singing going on throughout.
I was poking around on YouTube and saw
Top 10 Western Movies Published on Apr 7, 2014 1,480,616 ViewsThe breakdown of its contents goes:
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Mentioned with clips:
Red River (1948)
Hang 'em High
High Noon
True Grit (Ford)
#10 True Grit (Coen) (2010)
#9 The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
#8 High Noon (1952)
#7 The Magnificent Seven (1960)
#6 The Wild Bunch (1969)
#5 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
#4 Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
#3 Unforgiven (1992)
#2 The Searchers (1956)
Honorable Mentions
McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)
Red River (1948)
Shane (1953)
Stagecoach (1939)
3:10 to Yuma (1957)
#1 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
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If you look back to one of my earliest threads you may be able to detect the shifting sands of SDMB’s tastes in Westerns over the years:
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The LAST Great Western?
07-10-2003, 06:50 AM
Zeldar
#17 07-10-2003, 06:01 PM
RikWriter
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Do we need still another poll on this topic? Would somebody else like to manage that if we do?
If not, why not voice your disagreement with anything in that YouTube coverage or with the SDMB judgment(s)?