1FF's 71 favourite westerns.

Stevencc

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I've never really delved into Westerns - will do after reading through this thread, though.
 
Cheese & Biscuits

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I'm not really a western fan but really enjoyed 3:10 to Yuma. That's all I have to add.
 
SALTIRE

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Craig said:
Well done Salty, you've ruined the countdown, I don't know why I bother.
Click to expand...
I did note when I sent in my list that it was the original '57 version, that's all I'm saying. ;)

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Aber gas

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Craig said:
Joint 25th
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064115/



Meek's Cutoff (2010) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1518812/



Joint 24th
Tombstone (1993) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108358/



The Man from Laramie (1955) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048342/
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Tombstone is another of my picks as is meek's cutoff but I'll go into the latter another time. A ridiculously slick film which whilst doesn't have the pathos and depth of some of the great films to come later in this list still has some great performances and entertainment. Russell,Elliott and Kilmer hamming it up in the old west. Popcorn bliss.
 
Craig

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Anything with with Bill Paxton in it gets a thumbs up from me. Another one I remember watching more than once as a kid, always loved Kilmer's Doc Holliday.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was my pick. Lovely observation of obsession using Jesse James and his assassin as an example. Beautifully shot, the train robbery scenes were mesmerising, and wonderfully acted with Casey Affleck stealing every scene he's in, I was actually rooting for Ford, but then maybe that's what we're supposed to do?
 
Craig

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Last lot for tonight.

Joint 20th
The Missing (2003) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338188/



The Naked Spur (1953) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044953/



Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050468/




The Missing is my pick, Cate Blanchett is the single mother living on the New Mexico frontier whose daughter is kidnapped by rogue Apaches intending to sell her into slavery in Mexico. They didn't count on Cate's pops Tommy Lee Jones showing up though after living for years with the Injuns. Together they set off in pursuit.

Also picked Geronimo, my man Wes Studi bossing it as the legendary Apache leader. I'm not entirely certain the man himself would approve of the extended title, but it's Hollywood I suppose.
 
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Aber gas

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None of my top five are out yet, three of my choices are gonna cause mutiny.
 
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Martino Knockavelli

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Craig said:
Joint 26th
The Gunfighter (1950) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042531/
Click to expand...

#17. Composed chamber western. Gregory Peck as an ageing and now nobly reluctant gunfighter who carries his reputation around like an albatross. Set mostly indoors, and on a humble town street, largely eschewing grand vistas and landscape, almost noir inflected. Pauline Kael dismissed it as setting out to disprove a myth that no-one really believed to begin with, which is a fair comment, but I think the picture is aware of that on some level too… the last shot of a hero in silhouette riding off into the sunset admits the tale belongs to legend, to the high mimetic (and is maybe the best use of one of the most iconic shots in the genre). Possessed of a quiet if obvious sort of a poetry, and Peck has a winning dignity about him. An exemplar of a certain type of Western... short, relatively cheap, psychological conflict hewn out of humble means...

Craig said:
Joint 25th
The Man from Laramie (1955) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048342/
Click to expand...

#15. Looks like the Mann vote is gonna end up split, but he made a handful of capital G great westerns. I’ve got 2 on me list but could of plumped for any of them really. Probably the second most significant body of work in the genre after Ford. This is a very good one though… a King Lear style tale of an ageing cattle baron, his good for nothing son and then Jimmy Stewart as the interloper who upsets the apple cart. For Mann the west was an ahistorical arena for personal conflict, w/ men in thrall to their base instincts… pride, lust, avarice, vengeance… Stewart's character here has got a few softer edges than in the other pictures but the basic formula is the same. Mann was the greatest utiliser of landscape in the history of the genre too, his frontier was an elemental place, brutal in texture… barren deserts, rushing cataracts, frozen wastes, an intractable wilderness that maps the protagonists' souls.


Craig said:
Joint 21st

Rio Bravo (1959) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053221/
Click to expand...

#12. Hawksian masterclass, conceived as a rebuttal to High Noon but it's not overbearing in that respect. A portrait of masculine mate-ship, the bond between professionals, w/ an oddball group of goodies holed up at one end of the street, a bunch of generally faceless baddies at the other, a romantic subplot, an inevitable climactic shoot out. It's simple, almost by the numbers even, but deceptively so, concealing the skill of its construction… charming, warm, leisurely almost, a faultless movie and the pinnacle of another, romantic sort of a western.
 
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Martino Knockavelli

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Craig said:
Ride the High Country (1962) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056412/
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#10. Lazy, bien pensant conceptions of the western would have you believe that it's a genre concerned with triumphalism, with the celebration of striving masculinity, self-sufficiency and capability. But there are surely more westerns (or more good westerns, anyway) that are melancholic, elegiac, concerned with the extinguishing and impossibility of those characteristics. It's the same thing approached from the opposite direction maybe, but the distinction isn't meaningless, and this is one best of the latter variety.

A handsome eulogy for the west and the genre both, but not without revisionism, as greybeard pals Randolph Scott (his last role) and Joel McCrea go on one last job. The germs of Peckinpah's favourite themes are present: compromised morality, duty, loyalty, the end of a way of life (the film opens with McCrea nearly getting knocked down by an early automobile - one of the best examples of a genre that functions as America's foundation myth exhibiting a deep antipathy to a contraption that is celebrated as a manifestation and vector of peculiarly American values in most other contexts.......), but the tone here is more lowkey than the carnage of Wild Bunch or the burlesque of Cable Hogue, and the film more affecting for it. UK title was Guns in the Afternoon, which is much more fitting.
 
Craig

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Working late and the list is on my laptop at home, will resume around 1am.

Some very interesting selections out so far, got plenty of material to sift through once this is done.

Few more of mine out last night.

Open Range - I love it, again a bit of a slow burner, but a very interesting film dealing with the issue of land ownership on the western frontier. Costner and Duvall's traditional cowboys coming up against Michael Gambon's comic book cattle baron and his henchmen.

A Man Called Horse - Richard Harris' English aristocrat is taken prisoner by natives and brutalised but eventually accepted into their culture and becomes their leader. I've not seen it for years, so if I'd recently watched it I'm not sure it would have made my list, but I remember watching it as a kid and it left an impression on me so I included it.

Seraphim Falls - Wonderful and weird revenge film with Neeson and Brosnan encompassing themes from the civil war, which y'all know I love. I really enjoy how it unravels over the course of the film and by the end you're not sure who you're really rooting for.
 
Craig

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My picks.

Dances with Wolves - 'You went and turned Injun didn't ya?'. Costner's masterpiece I reckon, loves his westerns doesn't he? this and the aforementioned Open Range are gloriously rewatchable films. Even his films not directly set in the wild west are pretty much westerns aren't they? be it futuristic western in The Postman or western on water in Waterworld, I rue the day Hollywood studios stopped giving him stupid amounts of money to make his films. This is one of my favourites, disenchanted civil war veteran seeks a post in the middle of nowhere on the western frontier and becomes involved with the local Lakota tribe. Over sentimental with regards to the plains tribes? possibly, but in a genre where the vast majority of films come from the white point of view it's forgiveable. On top of all this we have a cameo from Wes Studi too as Pawnee #1. Brilliant.

Northwest Passage - This was one of my grandfather's favourites. If you can get past the racist undertones it's a damn good adventure film. One of a few films on my list set in the north eastern frontier of the 17th and 18th century which fascinates me almost as much as the civil war and antebellum south.

Ride with the Devil - One of my all time favourite films. Set in Missouri/Kansas during the civil war it follows a group of Bushwackers (militia loyal to the south) and their trials and tribulations during and immediately after the war. They're not particularly fanatic about the southern cause, their's is more a fight for themselves and their friends and neighbours, each slowly coming to the realisation that the cause they fight for is not only a lost one, but a cause that they really ought not to be fighting for. The title refers to the raid on Lawrence, Kansas by Quantrill's raiders which is one of the most infamous massacres in American history, and heavily featured in the film. Highly recommended if you haven't seen it.
 
SALTIRE

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Forgot about Ride With The Devil, a pretty good film iirc. Was half thinking about putting in Dances With Wolves but decided against it at the last minute.
 
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Martino Knockavelli

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Craig said:
Joint 18th
Stagecoach (1939) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031971/
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#9. The film that kickstarted the western as prestige, A-picture worthy material, and the source of a million tropes that define the genre to this day - the good guy outlaw, the whore w/ heart of gold, a motley crew of sorts as a microcosm of American society, John Wayne, Monument Valley..... Familiarity with the formula has not dulled its edge though. A masterpiece of economic characterisation, and a brilliant example of Ford's ability to balance drama/romance/action/comedy. A perfect picture, and the most important/influential western ever made (unless one wants to make a smart arse argument for The Great Train Robbery).
 
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Martino Knockavelli

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Craig said:
Joint 17th
Man of the West (1958) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051899/
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#8. Mann has got really bollixed by splitting the vote. His penultimate western and probably his masterpiece. Gary Cooper in for James Stewart, but most of what I said about Laramie applies here too. Shakespearean in sweep and tone, playing up to the level of archetype and myth suggested by its title. Cruel, brutal and desolate, incredible use of landscape again. Overlooked in the US on its release but rightly feted by the Cahiers lot.
 
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Martino Knockavelli

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Craig said:
Joint 16th
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067411/
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#7. The western was getting into revisionism 2.0 by the 70s, all Vietnam and counter culture on the prairie. There's a bunch of good films from this era but they tend to be marked by an irony and archness (Missouri Breaks, Great Northfield Minnesota Raid etc), which is not my fave. McCabe is an exception. It is an "anti-western", a rebuttal and refutation of the genre's ideology and history. It's shitty, stinky, and full of mud and VD and pointless deaths, w/ heroic pioneers recast idiots, charlatans, chancers and crooks*. But it's affecting too. Evocative, atmospheric, with a tragic sort of a love story at its heart. It was possible to synthesise both of those impulses. Probably year zero of the tone and aesthetic of the western that dominates now also. Hard to imagine that Deadwood or the Coen bros True Grit etc would exist without this.

*and snowbound!
 
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Martino Knockavelli

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Craig said:
Joint 15th
The Tall T (1957) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051047/
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#6. This is really a nomination for 4 of the Boetticher/Ranown films, because they are more or less impossible to separate (The Tall T, Seven Men From Now, Ride Lonesome, Commanche Station). Lean and modest 80-90 minute b-westerns, recycling plots and actors and even a notable prop or two. Controlled and poised, delicate and robust, skilful unpickings of the mores and codes of the genre. Between the pics there's repetition, but subtle differences too, it's like an exquisite object held up to the light and examined from different perspectives. More or less unnoticed in the US when released, but championed by the French again and now rightly feted by everyone wot knows. Boetticher (who was a very interesting fella, entirely unsuited to the studio system of the time) authored the 3rd or 4th most important body of work in the genre, tho one can make a good argument that Randolph Scott and Burt Kennedy warrant co-auteur status.
 
Craig

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Joint 12th
Fort Apache (1948) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040369/



Ravenous (1999) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129332/



Joint 11th
No Country For Old Men (2007) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477348/



Wagon Master (1950) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043117/


Ravenous was my pick. First of all let me say how awful that trailer is, does not capture the essence of the film in any way. It's basically a twisted journey into madness in the Sierra Nevada mountains incorporating elements of the Donner party, native American mythology and extreme isolation. It does play it for laughs at times, but it isn't the self deprecating mess that the trailer suggests. It's pretty creepy and you end up caring for all the characters in the film. Also, the soundtrack is one of my favourites ever. I only have one western horror I like more, and that's yet to come.

We will commence with 1FF's top 10 (14 with joint positions) favourite westerns tomorrow and Sunday.
 
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