Best Western Films

After re-watching Django Unchained, I have found myself really interested in watching Western movies. Which ones do you consider the best?

edited 8th Sep '13 12:55:53 AM by LDragon2

High Noon, The Searchers, Django, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Wild Bunch, Unforgiven, 3:10 To Yuma, A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon A Time In The West, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Magnificent Seven, True Grit, Shane and Stagecoach are all good places to start.

1903's The Great Train Robbery is also a great bit of film history.

edited 8th Sep '13 2:18:55 AM by TheBatPencil

Yep, that's a fair selection right enough, Batty old bean. They Died With Their Boots On is also good. It's basically what Hollywood wanted the Massacre at the Little Big Horn to have worked out like, but it's entertaining nonetheless, which is what one expects from an Errol Flynn movie.

Nice...

I'd add Pale Rider and Open Range, the latter for its sublime gunfight.

EDIT: And Tombstone and Gunfight At The OK Corral.

edited 8th Sep '13 3:58:18 AM by Achaemenid

My favourite Western is "The Comancheros"...certainly not one of the "big ones" but I enjoy every second of it.

And for a really funny parody on the genre, I recommend "Man of the East".

(Yeah, I'm mostly for the more light-hearted approach on the genre, instead of the more gritty movies).

Blazing Saddles, Maverick, The Wild Wild West if you're feeling adventurous.

I recommend How the West Was Won; it's basically a broad sampling of almost everything associated with the Old West.

The only western I watched are Blazing Saddles and Unforgiven, and I greatly enjoyed both of them.

Well, in Colorado they have a great rentable drive-in theater. Of course, what the best movie of theirs is depends on what they play or what DVDs you bring.

...you ''were'' talking about the hotel, right?

edited 8th Sep '13 8:09:49 PM by Tuckerscreator

I remember Silverado being pretty good.

Does American Outlaws count?

Sabata is a neat film starring Lee Van Cleef. Nothing special, but it's fun. The Great Silence is one of the main contenders to "best Spaghetti western" according to some critics.

Personally I skip nearly all pre-A Fistful Of Dollars westerns. I like my westerns to be a little grittier and the earlier ones are a little too neat for my taste.

A recent good western is the Coen Brothers remake of True Grit (Thanks).

If you want some Asian cinema there's The Good The Bad The Weird, a Korean western in the tradition of The Good The Bad And The Ugly. There's also Sukiyaki Western Django, which is a retelling of A Fistful Of Dollars set in Japan (which was itself a retelling of Yojimbo).

edited 8th Sep '13 9:56:03 PM by Gvzbgul

"Coen", not "Cohen". That's the same mistake Bill Murray made.

edited 8th Sep '13 9:42:05 PM by Tuckerscreator

I watched the True Grit remake at the cinema. I liked it, but I didn't love it as much as the original John Wayne piccy. If I had a TARDIS, though, I would have casted the girl from the Coen Brothers picture alongside Wayne as that would have been cool to watch.

Much of what he did was covered above, but really you can't go wrong with Clint Eastwood westerns.

(Or hell, pretty much anything he did in any genre. Yeah, even Every Which Way but Loose. )

[edit] Also, I saw both versions of True Grit (the newer one first), and I actually prefer the original, though I agree with Tam's assessment on the girl.

edited 8th Sep '13 11:55:17 PM by Nohbody

Agree with most of the ones above. From the John Wayne filmography, I also like the Fair for Its Day Fort Apache, and the later, more escapist War Wagon and Big Jake. I watched some of the Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott westerns and didn't particularly care for them, except for Seven Men From Now, which is a pretty good suspense/vigilante story, with a great villain/anti-villain role for Lee Marvin. High Noon is overrated IMO but well-made and important enough to check out for the historical value.

For Audie Murphy, the most critically acclaimed is No Name on the Bullet, which is a fairly dark, suspenseful premise with a glossy 50s Hollywood treatment. I also like Tumbleweed, Ride Clear of Diablo, and Drums Across The River, which are all action-packed but idealistic early 1950s b-westerns. From his 1960s work, Posse From Hell, Seven Ways from Sundown and Six Black Horses are interesting but difficult to find in the US, and Arizona Raiders is pretty decent if you're willing to put up with low production values and fastforward the longgggg, boooooring opening segment with a very drunk character actor lecturing the camera about Quantrell's raiders.

Sabata and Return of Sabata with Lee Van Cleef, Adios Sabata with Yul Brynner...most anything with "Sartana" in the title and starring a man named Gianni Garko/John Garko...these are fun, kind of cheesy "gadget westerns" in the vein of the Wild Wild West tv series. Italian, so the dubbing into English can be kind of distracting. Other good Italian westerns with Lee Van Cleef include Da Uomo a Uomo (Death Rides a Horse) and Giorni dell'ira (Day of Anger).

Further afield, the Indian film industries do a lot of "modern westerns"-parched villages in rocky countrysides and curly eared horses and Enfield rifles coexisting with cars, phones, and modern cities. They can be tough sledding if you can't handle Mood Whiplash and song and dance numbers in EVERYTHING. Sholay is considered the best of them, though it suffers from weak action scenes and some long strange comic relief interludes. Not quite a "curry western" but a movie with a lot of the western tropes (particularly in its second half) is the recent Rowdy Rathore: you have a petty criminal who reforms and fights evil rich people; rocky, mountainous scenery; and a lawman taking a stand in a podunk town. Violence is more hand-to-hand wirefu than gunplay though. The Telugu film Takkari Donga is a So Bad, It's Good Anachronism Stew.

For comedy westerns, I like Support Your Local Sheriff, Support Your Local Gunfighter, Hot Lead and Cold Feet, The Apple Dumpling Gang, and My Name is Nobody. The Sabatas might qualify as these also, the Mel Gibson/Jody Foster Maverick certainly does. The Wild and the Innocent, featuring Sandra Dee, Audie Murphy, and Jim Backus, is also cute but difficult to get hold of; give it a try if it turns up on tv but it's not necessarily worth jumping through hoops to find it.

Be wary of critically acclaimed 1950s westerns that are not by John Ford, or the guy who did the original 3:10 to Yuma. Alot of them are just stodgy 1950s-style character dramas in western dress, with some violence in the third act.

edited 9th Sep '13 1:21:30 PM by odadune

Check out Anthony Mann's five collaborations with Jimmy Stewart. Great movies.

And I'm surprised that I haven't seen Shane mentioned in this thread yet. It's probably my favorite 'classic' Western. A mythic tale of Good vs. Evil seen through the eyes of a child (wish they could've gotten a slightly better child actor, though). Jack Palance plays one of the greatest villains of all time, in his short amount of screentime he just oozes malevolence.

Further afield, the Indian film industries do a lot of "modern westerns"-parched villages in rocky countrysides and curly eared horses and Enfield rifles coexisting with cars, phones, and modern cities.

As an aside, given that just across the borders in Pakistan and Afghanistan the local gunsmiths are still making Enfields (and a bunch of other firearms), in general them existing alongside modern stuff isn't really that anachronistic.

Are there any Somalian Westerns? The whole arid/lawless environment seems like a natural fit.

There needs to be a better name for Western-genre, all I get in my searches is people talking about Western-politics stuff.

Anyway, I think that is a neat idea. I love Westerns in other time periods. The Good The Bad The Weird is set in Japanese held Manchuria during WWII, but it still plays as a western.

I think a big obstacle is that nowadays we have automatic guns, and semi-auto pistols, which are a bit different to the guns used in a typical western film. Modern guns tend to push a film into more of a action film than a western. But, it can still be done, I think The Good The Bad The Weird succeeds, because the main characters mostly stick to the older weapons, except the bad guy of course. There are other films that are set in the modern day that are western-esque, but they're really more action films with a little bit of western flavour.

edited 14th Oct '13 11:21:27 PM by Gvzbgul

What about a Space Western? The characters in Firefly match up to archetypes from the old west.

Yes Firefly and Serenity should also count on some technicality as they partially fit into western

Dammit, I'm already too late to make a joke about the hotel chain.

Appaloosa for something with a little bit of realism and The Quick and the Dead for something more escapist.

My Darling Clementine is one of the greatest films ever made, in my opinion. Even if it is horribly inaccurate to the story of Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight At The O.K Corral it stands on it's own as a great film.

Wonder cinematography from John Ford, the master of the American Western.