The Best Western Movies of All Time [a Selection]

Brutal to the hilt, and yet with Gene Hackman, Candice Bergen and Oliver Reed in the Hollywood mainstream flowed: „The Hunting Party“ is certainly not the Western that you expect from the dream factory. This movie combines the uncompromising brutality of a Sam Peckinpah and the dirty morals of the Italo Western.

If „The Hunting Party“ is still too lax in terms of Western brutality, Robert Aldrich’s „Ulzana’s Raid“ will overwhelm you. In his carefree maverick attitude, Aldrich lets nothing and no one get away. The U.S. Cavalry gets completely robbed of its Western myth—which not only amounts to a genre dismantling, but could also be understood as an allusion to the Vietnam War at the time.

Burt Lancaster plays the scout filled with bitter wisdom who is supposed to lead the cavalrymen to the Indians—a figure in which Lancaster thought he recognized himself. Quite untypically, the Indians are not staged as shooting gallery figures, but as precisely operating guerrilla fighters.

In the finest New Hollywood manner, Robert Altman takes apart the Western genre. The harmony of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond’s images and Leonard Cohen’s score is ingenious; and rarely has the scenery of a Western been so inhospitable due to the coldness (of both climate and society) as in „McCabe & Mrs. Miller„.

If „McCabe & Mrs. Miller“ hasn’t sufficiently disillusioned you with Western topography, „Jeremiah Johnson“ certainly will, at the latest, with its cold woods, wild wolves and grizzlies.

The title character is a frontier greenhorn who turns away from a self-destructive civilization at the price of an unrelenting struggle for survival. While asserting themselves under extreme conditions, not only is the frontier pioneers’ prowess as daring loners revealed, but also the murderous selfishness of the settlement movement. The multiple times proven Pollack/Redford combination portrays the path to a new life as an endless odyssey full of death and hardship.

In their cry for help, the major studios at that time gave young filmmakers like Peter Fonda money and final cut privileges, so that they could once again bring about a box office miracle à la „Easy Rider“ (1969). Of course, „The Hired Hand“ was far from achieving the desired victory at the cinemas—but still for Western lovers the film is a little treasure.

In Fonda’s westerns, there is hardly any talking, occasional shooting, a lot of riding and silence. The film shows the completely unromantic reality of homesteaders, the taciturn camaraderie of vagabond cowboys and the tribulations of heroism. Experimental editing, Vilmos Zsigmond’s camera and an unconventional showdown make „The Hired Hand“ a somewhat different Western.

Of all things, Hollywood of the male-dominated studio era produced one of the most feminist films ever: In „Johnny Guitar,“ women hold the revolver. Joan Crawford’s frontier businesswoman Vienna prefers to listen to the wheel of her roulette table; but when her vengeful antagonist, embodied by the later „Exorcist„ demon Mercedes McCambridge, burns down the saloon and wants to string Vienna up, a destructive duel breaks out between the two women that relegates even the toughest gunslingers to supporting characters.

A character who would be a man in any other Western before and long after: Barbara Stanwyck plays a merciless matriarch who has bought sheriff and judge, keeps a killer brigade as her court, and engages in salacious dialogues with ex-gunslinger Bonnell, whose revolver she wants to touch and who—against all customs Hollywood westerns—is the love-interest in the film. The Western with the prairie plutocrat in the wicked Arizona Territory is one of Hollywood’s few feminist blossoms.

The moral gloom of the Wild West with revenge, corruption and the inflationary use of capital punishment is here cloaked in the format of a comedy. Lee Marvin plays a drunken gunslinger whose horse staggers along with him, when Marvin himself was an alcoholic—for this performance he received, rightly, an Oscar.

One of Shirley MacLaine’s best flicks is not alongside Jack Lemmon directed by Billy Wilder, but alongside Clint Eastwood directed by Don Siegel. The film, in its Italo-Western look, appropriately underscored by a Morricone score, shows a woman using her sex appeal to involve an ideologically disillusioned loner in the collective struggle, mercilessly manipulating him despite all his coolness and cultivated egotism.

More frontier flair in a movie is hard to find: Whether Indian attacks, saloon gunfights or coyote howls, The Railroad ode „Union Pacific“ helped formulate all the clichés and motifs that late Westerns and New Hollywood cinema later deconstructed. The film by Hollywood co-founder Cecil B. DeMille is a brilliant screen spectacle of monumental proportions, which is worthwhile above all as a very classic Western.

How the people got to their farms and ranches in the first place is shown in „How the West Was Won.“ Garnished with countless well-known names, the film is an epic tour de force that shows in several episodes—staged by several directors—the adversities of the settlement of the North American expanse by European emigrants.

The spectacular tracking shots, scenes like paintings, gigantic panoramas and haunting perspectives may not be realistic, but convey a vague sense of all the hardships that preceded what is now the United States—with raft trips through raging rivers and the settler treks to even get to the remote areas that were then opened up with railroads, taken from the Indians and devastated in the Civil War.

„Ride the High Country,“ considered the first true Peckinpah Western, celebrates the melancholy of aged Westerners and their fate-tanned male friendship. Peckinpah, who had spent large parts of his childhood in a similar area, not only garnished his film with autobiographical elements (Joel McCrea’s Steve Judd is modeled on Peckinpah’s father in terms of character), but also enriched it with an incredible wealth of detail that often only becomes apparent on a second or third viewing—in „Ride the High Country“ everything is a bit more mangy, more weathered, even the bullet hole in a window pane seems more brute and realistic than in most other Westerns. And the finale, a foretaste of the elegy of „The Wild Bunch,“ can confidently be described as the poetic quintessence of the Western.

Fred Zinnemann’s „High Noon“ is not only one of the ultimate film classics, but has lost nothing of its freshness, elegance and intensity—there are few films from the fifties that the decades have passed by without leaving such a trace. The spartan musical accompaniment and silent close-ups, blended with the otherwise often anachronistic black-and-white, give „High Noon“ a gripping surreal aura.

Zinnemann and his crew deliver a composition that ticks as precisely as the clock that indicates the approaching showdown. The heart of the film is the selfish ingratitude of the hardworking small-town community whose members abandon the very one to whom they owe everything—U.S. civil society as a cowardly bunch.

Although it by no means stands out from his body of work, „Will Penny“ is the film that best reveals Charlton Heston’s acting greatness. The title character, Will Penny, is a counter-representation of the clichéd Westerner so often portrayed by John Wayne—a washed-up man who learns the value of family cohesion more at the end of his life than at the beginning.

The film begins on the barren prairie and leads to the foot of the Sierra Nevada with its mountain forests, where only the hardy survive—a look at the darker side of individuality, mobility and flexibility, at the end elegiacally sung by Don Cherry.

What a sentimentalist „Bloody“ Sam Peckinpah, who relentlessly confronted his audience with scenes of violence and regularly aroused the ire of moralists, had been in reality is shown by „The Ballad of Cable Hogue„—a sensible love story in the rough scenario of the Wild West.

The West that Peckinpah depicts here is, of course, on the eve of a turning point, its downfall; in one scene, the men, accustomed all their lives to horseback riding, marvel at the arrival of an automobile. The story of Cable Hogue’s desert watering hole is not least a fabulously veiled look at loneliness and deceit as social constants of the Old West.

The fact that the Hollywood Western not only told fairy tales, utopias and fictions, but also drew on real figures and events here and there is shown, for example, by „Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,“ through which a certain young actor named Robert Redford became a star virtually overnight. Redford and his already established screen partner Paul Newman play two of the most charming outlaws in film history, who in a legendary scene at the end rush into the shootout as if there were no tomorrow.

Sheriff Baker crouches on a stone, doomed by a shot in the stomach, in the background floats—at first softly, then louder and louder—the music, which today everyone knows, but at that time was only written for this scene—“Mama, take this badge off o’ me, ’cause I can’t use it anymore. It’s gettin’ dark, too dark to see. I feel like I’m knockin’ on Heaven’s door.“ Bob Dylan, then, in his screen debut, plays a man with no name, simply called „Alias,“ Slim Pickens, who barely ten years earlier rode the atomic bomb like a Texas bull for Stanley Kubrick, the dying sheriff.

In the manhunt between Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, like Cassidy and Sundance historical figures, they are merely supporting characters; James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson play the title roles—and damn well. Sam Peckinpah uses the material to deal with the depravity of the establishment and the senselessness of gun death in a multifaceted Western. And as in „The Wild Bunch„, the director shows the recurring brutalization of society by means of innocent children, who here gleefully swing the gallows rope and are socialized with the violent acts of adults

Another Western myth that Hollywood has managed to exploit commercially is the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881—an example that sometimes it is indeed the victor who writes the story. In this case, it is Wyatt Earp, who, as the survivor of the shootout with the Clanton gang, subsequently styled himself as a law-and-order preserver.

After earning money from the Earp myth for forty years with several films, Hollywood now again earned money from its deconstruction. In the New Hollywoodesque „Doc,“ the Earp mythology is so thoroughly dismantled that the hitherto morally impeccable Earp faction is not only plunged into twilight, but the confrontation with the Clantons appears as a self-righteous execution

„The Missouri Breaks“ is first of all formidably cast: with Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nicholson (with a beard!), Randy Quaid or even John P. Ryan as professional bandits, Kathleen Lloyd as a farmer’s daughter who takes up with one of them. But the highlight of the film is Marlon Brando as the eccentric sadist Robert E. Lee Clayton, who gleefully rounds up the criminals. Free of pathos and romance, „The Missouri Breaks“ works out the archaic brutality of hard-hearted frontier America.

Like the Vietnam War at the time of filming, the American Civil War once produced efficient killing specialists who then found no use in peacetime. While shooting countless people on his journey through the U.S. Heartland, Clint Eastwood’s revenge rider gathers a whimsical entourage of diverse people around him, dissolving the fractured postwar era into a kind of Western utopia of a multicultural small community.

For some, „Stagecoach“ is the ultimate Western: the strangers to each other—the fugitive gunslinger, the marshal, the coachman, the whore, the pregnant woman, the boozy doctor, the criminal banker, the whiskey salesman and the gambler—who must take their fate into their own hands in the face of murderous Indians. „Stagecoach“ is the film with which John Ford stylized Monument Valley, located on the border between Arizona and Utah, into an archetypal Western panorama—and a largely unknown Western actor named John Wayne began his rise to Western stardom

Another Ford classic is „The Searchers„, at the same time one of John Wayne’s darkest roles. Edwards, a war returnee who shoots wounded men and even corpses, escalates the search for his niece, kidnapped by Indians, to the point of obsession. „The Searchers“ is another frontier fiction in which the ongoing threat to the homesteaders by the displaced Indians serves as the starting point of the story—again with immensely atmospheric shots of Monument Valley, which has long been iconic in the meantime.

A few years before New Hollywood cinema picked up steam, Sam Peckinpah directed superstar Charlton Heston as an ambivalent figure in the mood of New Hollywood—his cavalry officer is an egocentric nonconformist who embarks on a tour de force full of destruction and doom to get his broken career moving forward again. Good and evil cannot be differentiated in this Western.

Henry Hathaway can be seen as something like the topographer of the Western; and in „The Garden of Evil“ he also immerses the scenery in opulent images before which the protagonists pale. Like „The Treasure of the Sierra Madre“ (1948) a few years earlier, the film raises to the fatal gold-digger paranoia and the cynical fate of futile hardships.

When the ex-megastar Burt Lancaster had to realize that he wasn’t bringin in as much money as he used to, he looked for a role for his old age—and found it in experience-saturated Western warhorses who get into sinister constellations. When fellow humanity becomes the discriminated Valdez’s undoing and he nearly croaks in the desert, he becomes a killing machine with the resources of his dark past as an Apache hunter. „Valdez is Coming“ not only takes a pessimistic look at the fragmented society of the Old West, largely indifferent to tyrannical matadors, but is also grippingly staged.

As in „Valdez is Coming,“ a minority member is provoked by the majority society—by people who underestimate his true abilities and resources; and in the Western, such a lapse usually ends fatally. The self-righteous Americans invading foreign territory and murdering civilians, that had to (and probably should) be reminiscent of Vietnam.

Charles Bronson with his stoic face and athletic body is an obvious casting, Jack Palance is the hard-boiled leader of the posse. „Chato’s Land“ is about the chauvinistic vigilante zeal of supposedly respectable citizens—whose exodus under the banner of justice becomes a ride to ruin.

„The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance“ features John Wayne in one of his most interesting roles: From the virile local hero who drills the naïve West Coast lawyer (played by James Stewart) in the unwritten laws of the West, cracking whimsical sayings and commanding the atmosphere of every saloon he enters with aplomb, he degenerates over the course of the film into an embittered wreck, smoky and boozy. Stewart, on the other hand, plays an early anti-hero of the Western—through the fate of his character, one learns about the lack of democracy of ordinary people in U.S. democracy and the power of creating legends.

The arduous march through „400 miles of the meanest country in the West“ is not only an unconventional coming-of-age trip, but also a small homage by John Wayne to himself—a quarter of a century earlier he led a cattle drive through the prairie in „Red River„, whose overwhelming expanse is captured here by Robert Surtees’ camera. Even the two left-liberals Mark Rydell (director) and Bruce Dern (supporting role) succumbed to the charm of the „Duke“, a political right-winger, on the set.

The road trip among westerns: Howard Hawks visualized the endurance strain of a three-month-long cattle drive that finally led over the Chisholm Trail in crazy pictures—a camera spectacle lasting over two hours, the highlight of which is a stampede in which thousands of cattle make their way. In addition to John Wayne, who, contrary to his usual screen image, plays an extremely gloomy figure in parts, the film also features a very young Montgomery Clift, who breathes plenty of life into his fictional character.

Walter Hill’s version of the Jesse James legend belongs to the New Hollywood late harvest and convinces with its realistic scenery and laconic dialogues. As a twist, the film’s cast includes real-life brothers Keach, Quaid, Guest and Carradine.

Hill shows how the faces and bodies of the virile bandits are gruesomely deformed and destroyed as a result of their criminality. Throughout, the final shootout is the anatomy of a brute gunfight and a reinterpretation of 1939’s „Jesse James„ sprinkled with slow-motion sequences in the style of Sam Peckinpah.

As far away as this settler’s nest is from more hostly climes, „Day of the Outlaw“ is far from well-trodden genre paths. The deserters are an unpredictable collection of fortune hunters and psychopaths, their chief an old officer who credits himself with a morality he lost long ago.

André De Toth’s Western runs differently, feels differently and looks differently than most other genre representatives—shot at the end of the fifties, it was ahead of its time.

Clint Eatswood’s nameless avenging angel exposes the hypocrisy of capable small-town citizens who, in their desperation, allow him to degrade them. The pointed violence here functions as a symbol for the harshness with which the USA was built.

Sometimes fictional and real tragedy interweave in Hollywood cinema, as in „The Shootist,“ John Wayne’s last film before his death from cancer in 1979—the departure of a fictional and real Western legend. The reality of Wayne’s fate gives the film its dramaturgical weight.

Certainly not a masterpiece, but not really trash either: „The Revengers“ is a strangely entertaining film, whose charm lies not in its own original achievements, but in a successful arrangement of old familiar things.

It shows how the sheer endless revenge ride morally deforms a once sincere man and at some point degenerates into an aimless end in itself—musically accompanied by Pino Calvi’s concise score, whose electric guitars so nonchalantly break the Western theme.

The thoroughly pessimistic mood makes „Bad Company“ an anti-Western that annihilates any outlaw romanticism and portrays the journey through the heart of the USA not as a youth adventure but as an oppressive struggle for survival in a merciless society.

With subtle nuances of their facial expressions, Lee Marvin and Jack Palance succeed in expressing the attitude towards life of an entire social group: the prairie warriors who have struggled all their lives on the cattle trails, but who now threaten to disappear forever in the face of an automobile and mechanized economy. Almost every scene is charged with the inconceivable sentimentality of lost life chances.

No western, not even „High Noon„, creates such loneliness in a scenario that is actually loud and bustling, as is typical of the genre, as „3:10 to Yuma„. The bustling Western town of the 1880s is swept clean here, the vastness of the prairie seems claustrophobically oppressive, the sparse use of background music creates an ominous, suspenseful silence. And in the middle of it all, in endlessly excellent close-ups, the confrontation between two men takes place: on the one hand, the outlaw, who hits the neuralgic points of his guard with razor-sharp precision, who on the other hand doesn’t want to look like a coward in front of his two boys in the archaic moral structure of the frontier and wants to provide his troubled wife with an honorable relief in her grueling everyday life with the fee.

„3:10 to Yuma“ is multi-layered: it’s about resisting temptation, acting respectably (both on the side of the lawmen and the bandits), holding one’s own in a fragile world; but much more than that, it’s a wholly unconventional film, a precious genre gem and, with its almost expressionistic atmosphere, simply one of the most cinematographically beautiful Westerns of all time.

Sterling Hayden’s Western protagonist, who doesn’t pick up a revolver once in the entire film and harps on the obligatory showdown on the main street of a small town, inevitably gives „Terror in a Texas Town“ a refreshingly surreal feel.

This Western, quite unusual for its time, lies somewhere between the great Hollywood classics „High Noon“ (1952) and „3:10 to Yuma“ (1957). Much of the New Hollywood era is already present in „The Ride Back„: the dirty realism of sweaty bodies and filthy clothes, slightly surreal strains and characters who are unpredictable in their ambivalence.

„The Wild Bunch“ is something like the quintessence of Peckinpah cinema—and of the Hollywood Western. In countless details, Sam Peckinpah shows the brutality inherent in human coexistence. His characters are hopelessly lost, whose world inevitably perishes in the face of motorization and urbanization, but who cannot get away from violence as their purpose in life and find in it a strange in-betweenness—and in one of the most brutal, corpse-packed flicks in cinema history, Peckinpah exposes death in the Western for what it is: senseless, cruel and devoid of heroism in a mad showdown.