I’d like to chime in for “Support Your Local Sherriff” a smart and good-natured parody of the Western heroic myth with James Garner as a guy who gets waylaid into helping bring the law to a Western goldrush town, who’s actually “on my way to the REAL West … Australia!” It’s freaking hilarious with a great supporting cast. Harry Morgan of his daughter: “Pooberty hit her hard. Pooberty will do that, y’know!” Also features Walter Brennan, Jack Elam, Bruce Dern and Joan Hackett as she who was hit hard by pooberty.
Shane
Count me in for The Wild Bunch with Once Upon a Time in the West as a close second, followed by The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Unforgiven, and the underappreciated Yellow Sky. Pale Rider also stands up even if some of the acting is pretty shaky at times
I don’t really consider The Outlaw Josey Wales or High Plains Drifter to be Westerns per se (more revenge thrillers, and in the case of the latter, a kind of ghost story) but both are a great use of the “Man With No Name” architype, and I think the Coen’s take on True Grit and The Hateful Eight are great films that are on the edge of being a Western without really carrying the themes that define Western films.
For comedic/absurdist takes on the Western, Blazing Saddles is always a classic, and Paint Your Wagon is bizarrely absurdist, a film no one should try to remake because it probably shouldn’t have been made in the first place. The Ballad of Cable Hogue is almost unheard of but deserves a look even if it was made at a point in Peckinpah’s career where drugs and booze were starting to get the best of him, and Duck, You Sucker rides the line between satire and serious with a phenomenal as always James Colburn in the lead.
Stranger
Another vote for Serenity, which is basically a post-Civil War heroic outlaw story IN SPACE. It is of course the follow-up to Firefly, which was Joss Whedon’s space western TV series.
And just to continue on that theme, my favorite cross-genre Westerns:
El Mariachi, the first part of Robert Rodriguez’s Burrito Western trilogy, takes place in some dusty northern town in Mexico, and involves the dealings of a drug lord, a hitman, a mariachi, a beautiful woman, and a guitar case full of guns. Desperado, starring Antonio Banderas, was its far more well-known sequel.
Kill Bill warrants a mention as well, being a well-blended mix of Western and Ronin films (the two genres have a long-lasting relationship) taking place in the modern era.
I’m also tempted to throw in some anime, like Cowboy Bebop or Trigun, but the former’s theatrical release, Knocking On Heaven’s Door, is rather light on the western stylings as far as I could tell, and *Trigun *never got a movie that I’m aware of (besides, I can’t stand Trigun)
As far as traditional westerns go, my favorites are the aforementioned Dollars Trilogy (Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly), which I feel are best enjoyed all together, El Dorado, with John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and James Caan, and McLintock! with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. I couldn’t tell you why the latter two are important at all, I just have many fond memories watching them on TV with my dad.
EDIT: And yes, Blazing Saddles and Support Your Local Gunfighter/Sheriff are also mandatory viewing once you’ve gotten someone well-versed in the tropes of the genre.
For a Few Edits More: This reminds me, I should really watch all those Red Westerns and Borscht Westerns I bought a few years back. Imagine the Western genre, but made in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
Haven’t even listened to half of it yet,and I just want to say,Thank you for sharing that!
Well, if you’re going to go that route, you could include Outland, which is High Noon IN SPACE.
“What do you mean by that?!”
“Nuthin, Pa, I didn’t mean nuthin.”
“You ain’t got brains enough to mean nuthin!”
That movie is good fun. As cool as Jim Rockford is, even he’s not as cool as Jason McCullough.
“And me? I go on to become one of the most beloved characters in Western folklore.”
Was that with Sean Connery? I was kind of half-remembering it from when I saw it as a kid, but couldn’t remember if it was Western. I think mostly I remember people exploding in airlocks.
That’s not that big a stretch, at all–This could be apocryphal, but supposedly Peter Hyams went into a producer’s office and (this is so 1940’s melodrama) bellowed: Boffo! “High Noon” in Space!! Huge box-office potential!!! (Insert your fave phrase here)!!! And got the backing on just his “name” alone.
Yeah, from 1981 with Connery and Peter Boyle. An underrated film, IMO.
and if you’re a comic book fan and never saw Steranko’s version of the film, check it out: http://bronzeageofblogs.blogspot.com/2015/03/sterankos-outland.html
Wow I think Unforgiven is a fantastic movie. What did you hate about it?
I’m glad I read through this thread before posting, because I have to agree with you about differentiating between ‘best’ and ‘favoite’
I love McLintock! My brother and I will frequently shoot lines back and forth from the movie; but for my tastes, I think the best movie would have to be Unforgiven. What a great character study.
Also on my list of favorites would be:
Pale Rider
Cat Ballou
Tombstone
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Rio Bravo / El Dorado (interchangeable)
Support Your Local Sheriff / Gunfighter.
Cheyenne Social Club
Open Range
True Grit
Honorable mention goes to: Death Rides a Horse with Lee Van Cleef. It was one of the first movies I remember seeing. It had to be second run because I was born in 62 and IMDB says the movie came out in 66. There’s no way I was 4 years old. I had to have been 12 or 13 at the earliest. However I’m probably remembering it through rose colored glasses. Much like when I tried to rewatch the Butch & Sundance movie with Redford & Newman. Ugh. It was so boring to me I couldn’t finish it.
I gotta ask, were Support Your Local Sheriff/Gunfighter made back-to-back in one go? Because they really feel like they just got everything together to shoot both movies at once so they wouldn’t have to pay everyone twice or recast anything.
Nope. They were made 2 years apart with different casts. A lot of the core players carried over though.
My Top 10 (in chronological order; limit one per director)
The Wind
My Darling Clementine
Johnny Guitar
The Man from Laramie
Decision at Sundown
Rio Bravo
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The Wild Bunch
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
Dead Man
Morgan: “You hit him while his back was turned!”
Sheriff: “Just as hard as I could.”
Another one for the Outlaw Josey Wales
My personal favourite is ‘The Magnificent Seven’.
I like the storyline (reminiscent of roleplaying), the testosterone-filled acting, the music and the quest purpose (defending the innocent for no reward.)
Many previous suggestions have been excellent. I remember:
- the music in ‘The Big Country’ and ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’
- the tension building in ‘High Noon’ and ‘Outland’
- the humour of ‘Blazing Saddles’ and (to a lesser extent!) ‘Silverado’
- the well-crafted characters in ‘Firefly’ and ‘Serenity’
- the viciousness of ‘Unforgiven’ and ‘High Plains Drifter’
You guys keep reminding me of movies I loved. Now I want to see Johnny Guitar again, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. I wish I could come to this festival!
The Big Country. That scene where he’s been out for a while, comes back to find people at the ranch freaking out “he will have got lost!” and he points out that he’s used to navigating the sea kills me.
For Dad, Stagecoach. I knew he loved it, but I realized how much the day my then-future-SiL said it was “boring” because “it’s all been done in other movies”. He could point out a ton of little and not so little things which had been copied by other movies.
Part three is Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Definitely not a fairy tale.
No love for Joe Kidd? It wasn’t a great movie by any stretch of imagination, but it did have a heck of a cast and used a much more interesting selection of guns than is typical in the genre.