[quote=teamwork;425287]There are some real good westerns out there, both from the past and the present. . . . My favourite westerns are as follows, but to be honest i do believe this could be the list for the best westerns of all time anyway.
Well, I've never heard of
American Outlaws and haven't yet seen the
Assassination of Jesse James . . . and barely remember the basics of
Purgatory, so I can't really comment on those. I thought parts of
Tombstone were good--some of the elements were historically accurate and some were not. For instance, the cowboy-outlaw band that wore red sashes were a bunch up north, Wyoming I believe, and not in Arizona. I liked the original
3:10 to Yuma but thought the remake was hokey. Doesn't mean I'm right or you're wrong, just we see and judge things differently.
High Noon was a good choice, although you could set that story in any time frame and any country and it would still work. Doesn't have to be town marshal vs. outlaw. Sean Connery did something of the same thing in a sci-fi film that I think was called
Outland.
Shane is my second favorite western, close behind
The Searchers. It has more of the realistic elements that I like--fistfights that look tiring and bloody and painful, Jack Palance as the most cold-blooded gunman ever, and a fight between squatters and the big cattle baron.
Open range has some of those qualities, too.
I've got a list of good Westerns in no certain order that to me seem to capture at least something of the true west:
The Big Country (1958). Pictures the plains as a place so big that one can easliy get lost, yet too small for cattlemen competing for the limited water sources. It also features a truism of the Real West--the feud between families that often accounted for much of the violence and murders. Also, the fight scene between Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston is probably the best ever filmed. Both of those boys looked like they were stiff, sore, tired and hurting by the time they finished.
Duel in the Sun (1946) This time the feud is between two brothers, lawyer Joseph Cotton who sides with the railroad and progress and cowboy outlaw Gregory Peck, a spoiled kid who's rotten at the core. Again the setting is big and epic.
That same year, Peck made another good Western,
The Bravados (1958) in which he hunts down and kills 4 men who he was told raped and murdered his wife, only to learn finally that he was after the wrong suspects.
The very best vigilante film ever made, however, is
The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) in which drifters Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan become members of a posse who track down and lynch three supposed cattle rustlers, despite the men's protests of innocence. It is a powerful, powerful film that is hard to watch in places.
In my opinion, the best film about a Wild West gunman is
The Gunfighter in which Peck plays an aging gunfighter tired of his reputation and way of life and who wants to make one last attempt to reunite with his wife and the young son who doesn't know him. Ther are only two shootings in the whole movie but the story and drama are unsurpassed.
Another variation on the gunfighter who wants to settle down is
The Lonely Man (1957) in which gunman Jack Palance learns his wife has killed herself leaving a grown son, Anthony Perkins, who knows his dad and hates him. As if that's not trouble enough, Palance is hunted by a gang headed by a man who he once shot (Neville Brand). And he's going blind.
One of the best outlaws on the run film is
Yellow Sky (1949), which is really a Western adaptation of Shakespeare's
The Tempest, so you can't beat the story for drama. An outlaw band led by Peck and including Richard Widmark and Harry Morgan stumble upon a a dessert ghost town in which an older miner and his granddaughter are mining for gold. The granddaughter turns out to be as tough as any of the outlaws.
Everybody likes
Red River for the realism of its cattle drive, but a movie that shows the rougher side of cowpunchers on a drive is
Cowboy (1958) with Jack Lemmon as the tinhorn accompanying Glenn Ford's cattle drive. Based on a book by Frank Harris (who Lemmon plays) called
My Reminiscences as a Cowboy.
One film that I always felt caught the feel of the real West is
Along Came Jones, in which Gary Cooper plays a wandering bronc buster who can't shoot, yet longs to become "somebody." He gets his wish when people start mistaking him for the tall and lanky gunman Monty Jarret (Dan Duryea) and becomes his rival for the winsome Lorretta Young. William Demarest plays his long suffering sidekick. It's a funny spoof of Cooper's usual Western roles, yet somehow all the more realistic for that.
Cooper is also good in the often funny
The Westerner, which won Walter Brennan his third Oscar, and one of the early versions of
The Virginian (1929), as well as the later
The Hanging Tree (1959), in which Cooper plays a well-known gunfighter in a California mining camp full of people from around the world whose only passtime appears to be lynching evil-doers. Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin visited the same sort of city but with music and dance in
Paint Your Wagon.(1969)
A more traditional Western--but only somewhat--is
Vera Cruz (1954) in which Cooper, an ex-Confederate officer ruined by the Civil War, flees to Mexico where he meets outlaw Burt Lancaster who has brought his gang south to hire out as gunmen for Emperor Maximillian--until they find that the French are moving a coach filled with gold that makes a more tempting target.
Lancaster was in some great Westerns, including the very funny
Hallelujah Trail, which includes Cavalry, Indians, feminists advocating temperance, barfly members of the civilian Denver Militia, all descending on a whiskey train that represents the investment of a businessman and "damn good Republican" who is also plagued by a union of Irish teamsters who are threatening to go on strike--an aspect of the Old West that is rarely explored in movies.
Lancaster also played the long-suffering Bob Valdez who teaches a local cattle baron that paybacks are hell in
Valdez is Coming (1971). Lancaster also teamed up with Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, and Woody Strode in the turn of the century Western
The Professonals (1966). That film always struck me as something of a kissing-cousin to
The Wild Bunch (1969).
One of my favorite Westerns and one of the most realistic in my opinon is
Monte Walsh (1970) in which Lee Marvin and Jack Palance play cowboys at the end of the cowboy era when investment companies in England and New York are buying up the range land and penning up the cattle to feed and fatten them on grain instead of letting them run wild on the range.
Another film that gives some insight into the life of a working cowboy is
Will Penny (1968) with Charlton Heston as a cowboy sitting out the winter in a line camp.
One of the best Westerns ever that captures the hatred between cattlemen and Indians on the West Texas frontier is
The Unforgiven (1960) that stars Burt Lancaster, Audrey Hepburn, Audie Murphy, Lililan Gish, and Joseph Wiseman. What other Western can boast such an unusual cast?
Another realistic Western where a gunman only goes up against a sure thing or else ambushes his opponent from a dark alley is
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Lee Marvin dominates John Wayne and James Stewart on the screen in that movie. And again, there's the realism of violence growing out of economic and political divisions between squatters and small businessmen and the cattle barons. You see something of the same thing in the divisions in the very funny
Cat Ballou (1965) where we get to enjoy two versions of Marvin as he portrays two lethal brothers. There's another good example of avoiding going up against a better gunman in the traditional gunfight in the very funny
Waterhole #3, in which Roger Miller advises "Never draw with a stranger / Especially if he's faster than you / . . . You've sung your last ditty / Kissed your last pretty / And played your last card if you do."
Glenn Ford played in a lot of good Westerns, particularly
The Sheepman, which takes a new funny look at the old feud between cattlemen and sheepmen. I also liked Ford in
The Fastest Gun Alive (1956) in which he plays a storekeeper with a secret--he's the son of a fast-gun lawman who taught him everything about gunfighting except the courage to face another gunman. This got his father killed when he ran from a gunfight. But then stories come to town about a new gun who has just killed the former top gun. And Ford can't resist showing the town how fast he is with a gun. But then the new top gun (Broderick Crawford in an unusual but fine role) comes to town and calls Ford out. It almost plays as a twist on
High Noon, where a man has to face down his fears and do what he's gotta do.
A really unusual Western is
Lust for Gold (1949) in which Ford plays Jacob "Dutch" Walz, the man who found the legendary Lost Dutchman's Mine but never revealed its location. The film flashes back and forward between what happens to Walz in the 1800s and the search for the lost mine in modern (well, late 1940s) Arizona where people have been killed while looking for the mine.
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