The MoFo Westerns List

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The Mandalorian counts, right?
Still no, but this is fun...
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Have a great weekend. Watch some Westerns. 🤠

Watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid tonight!



Watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid tonight!
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid remains one of my all-time favorites and THE very first Western I ever fell in love with as a kid, probably when I was eight or nine (which was a long damn time ago) after I watched it on TV with my Dad. Back in the days before cable TV and VCRs (see, like I said a long damn time ago). I have seen it on the big screen several times over the decades, rarely pass up a chance to watch it. For a movie that just turned fifty I suspect you'll find it modern and still a heck of a lot of fun.

Enjoy!




You can't make a rainbow without a little rain.
Came across The Sons of Katie Elder. Anyone recommend that?

I haven't seen The Sons of Katie Elder yet, but it has a great cast, and the plot sounds interesting. I DVRed it recently, so hopefully I'll have time to watch it within the next few days.
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Can someone explain why The Great Race (1965) is listed as a Western? (I haven't seen it in years, but I only remember one short scene in a saloon.)
It's not a western. But what IMDB did on it's movie page is interesting:

Genres:

Action | Adventure | Comedy | Family | Romance | Sport | Western

That's seven genre tags they used. I've not seen that before on a movie. It makes it hard on us when IMDB seems fit to call a movie genre anything they can think of.



The Great Race isn't a Western. I saw it listed on the IMDb before we started and figured nobody would be using it anyway. The barroom brawl scene is parodying the Western, but that is only one scene in this broad farce. This is exactly the reason I didn't want the IMDb to be the final word of eligibility.

For the record Blake Edwards' The Great Race is not eligible.



Longtime character actor René Auberjonois died over the weekend. While best known for his television stints on "Benson", "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine", and "Boston Legal" he was in three films that are eligible for our MoFo Westerns list.



The first is well known, one of the jewels of the Revisionist canon, and sure to make many ballots. In Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) Auberjonois plays Sheehan, the saloon owner in the snowy town of Presbyterian Church. While the interlopers of the two title characters in Warren Beatty's gambler John McCabe and Jule Christie's madam Constance Miller are the focus of the narrative and the hired killers led by Hugh Millais' Butler are crucial to the plot, René Auberjonois is often the most highlighted of the town's denizens, and it is through his confusion, suspicion, congeniality, and horror where the audience can feel the fragility of survival on the frontier.




Alex Cox's Walker (1987) is...something. Cox is an interesting character himself. His first two films Repo Man (1984) and Sid & Nancy (1986) were cult hits. His third film was Walker and pretty much ended his getting anywhere near mainstream money and distribution for his movies. It purports to be the true story of real-life figure William Walker who in the mid-nineteenth century led a small band of heavily armed men into Nicaragua where he took over the country for two years before being executed. Cox's film is a stylized, satirical polemic, filmed at the time of the Iran-Contra scandal. Cox infuses intentionally anachronistic elements into his film to underline the connections between the 19th and 20th century actions in Nicaragua. Even apart from those touches, historical accuracy is jettisoned by and large. Whether or not this approach works for you it certainly did not work for most critics nor audiences in 1987.

But it is something to behold, even if you wind up hating it.

René Auberjonois plays Major Siegfried Hennington, one of Walker's (Ed Harris) loyal soldiers.




The third is little-seen but a movie I like a lot. Maggie Greenwald's The Ballad of Little Jo (1993) got little distribution or attention, but it's a darn good film following the journey of Josephine Monaghan (Suzy Amis) who winds up disguising herself and living as a man in order to survive the horrors of westward expansion. Auberjonois is in the very first section of the film playing Streight Hollander, a traveling salesman who takes Josephine under his wing for a while. But he isn't as benevolent as he first seems and this is where things go horribly wrong, driving the transformation into the quiet Jo.

This one is definitely worth tracking down.




Love the passion you’re bringing to this list Holden, I really don’t watch many films lately but I’ll try to get in a dozen or so westerns by May. Yes-Haw
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Women will be your undoing, Pépé
Came across The Sons of Katie Elder. Anyone recommend that?
Haven't seen it but it's on my watchlist and has been for a very long time.
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You can't make a rainbow without a little rain.
It's not a western. But what IMDB did on it's movie page is interesting:

Genres:

Action | Adventure | Comedy | Family | Romance | Sport | Western

That's seven genre tags they used. I've not seen that before on a movie. It makes it hard on us when IMDB seems fit to call a movie genre anything they can think of.
The Great Race isn't a Western. I saw it listed on the IMDb before we started and figured nobody would be using it anyway. The barroom brawl scene is parodying the Western, but that is only one scene in this broad farce. This is exactly the reason I didn't want the IMDb to be the final word of eligibility.

For the record Blake Edwards' The Great Race is not eligible.

Thank you. I remembered it being a very funny movie, but I didn't think it was a western. I have a long watchlist for this list already, and I didn't want to waste time watching it for this list if it wasn't eligible.



You can't make a rainbow without a little rain.
Came across The Sons of Katie Elder. Anyone recommend that?

@cricket,
I watched The Sons of Katie Elder today. (Keep in mind that I'm not a western fan, but you asked, so I'm giving my opinion of the movie.) It's a pretty good movie, but it has some flaws.

The most glaring problem is that John Wayne was too old for his role, even though he played the oldest brother. It might have worked if it was just him and Dean Martin, but he was old enough to be the father of the two younger brothers.

At times, it felt like there were scenes that should have been in the movie that weren't there. For example, the brothers come to town for their mother's funeral, and they talk about doing certain things for her. And the townspeople talk about how their mother was a wonderful person, but we never even see her in the movie. It's hard to care about her death when we've never been given the chance to get to know her at all. In fact, we barely get to meet several of the people who get hurt or killed in the movie, so there's little emotion for them.

For a movie that supposed to be a tense drama, there's a scene in the middle with the four brothers fighting that almost has a "Three Stooges" feel to it. It felt completely out of place in the movie.

But if you can get past the flaws, it's an interesting movie.



Has anyone else seen The Great Silence?
Of course! The Great Silence is generally considered the top Spaghetti Western not directed by somebody named Sergio Leone, Corbucci's masterpiece, and surely one of the bleakest and most memorable of Revisionist Westerns.




Women will be your undoing, Pépé
Has anyone else seen The Great Silence?




But I think my favorite Western is Meek's Cutoff.

Haven't seen Meek's Cutoff, looks very worthwhile.

Of course! The Great Silence is generally considered the top Spaghetti Western not directed by somebody named Sergio Leone, Corbucci's masterpiece, and surely one of the bleakest and most memorable of Revisionist Westerns.

Klaus Kinski played such a sly and vicious villain.
The Great Silence is an excellent film and Holden expresses why, perfectly.
Saw it a few years back and it still stays with me.



There was a phase where I was digging around for more obscure and interesting Westerns, and The Great Silence was the best one I stumbled across. I had no idea what Revisionist Westerns were or who Corbucci was. I didn't even know who Klaus Kinski was at the time.



You can't make a rainbow without a little rain.
I found a YouTube page that has a bunch on western movies to watch for free. I haven't watched anything from there yet, but I thought it might be helpful for people looking for movies to watch for this countdown.

I haven't heard of a lot of the movies there, but maybe @Holden Pike can take a look at it and see if there are any movies there that you'd recommend.


https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyJ...Po799bA/videos


There's even one movie listed that claims to have a young Sylvester Stallone somewhere in the movie.

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