The MoFo Top 100 Westerns: Countdown

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Very cool list so far.

I'm surprised at how high Jesse James is, I thought it was forgettable and not that good.

Also, I'm incredibly surprised at the fact that The Hateful Eight is higher then Django Unchained (even though I love both)
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Some of you might want to sit down for a minute because this might shock you, but I watched both of these Quentin Tarantino movies for this countdown. They both could have been great movies if they weren't so bloody, but with QT at the helm, I knew what to expect, so I was prepared for it.

Django Unchained was a good movie, but it had no chance to make my list, even without all the violence and the blood. The movie itself didn't really lack anything. It just isn't really my type of movie, even without all the violence and the blood.

The Hateful Eight on the other hand was a great movie as a "who done it", but the blood overkill ruined any chance it had to make it onto my list. Without all the blood, it could have been high on my list.


Of the movies that "Just Missed", No Name on the Bullet was the only one on my list, and it was very high on my list. It was far and away my favorite Audie Murphy movie, maybe because he wasn't playing the good guy in this movie. It made it all the way up to #3 on my list.


My list so far:
1) Oklahoma! (1955)
3) No Name on the Bullet (1959)
6) Support Your Local Sheriff (1969)
7) The Frisco Kid (1979)
8) The Gunfighter (1950)
9) Maverick (1994)
12) North to Alaska (1960)
13) The Bravados (1958)
16) City Slickers (1991)
17) The Hanging Tree (1959)
19) Winchester '73 (1950)
20) The Quick and The Dead (1995)
22) The Ox-Bow Incident (1942)
23) El Dorado (1967)
25) Incredible Rocky Mountain Race (TV Movie - 1977)
Funny how The Hateful Eight refers to No Name on the Bullet.

I had No Name on the Bullet at #19. I had to be honest with myself when I complied my list. Which I found difficult with Westerns.




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"You want that gun, pick it up. I wish you would."

The Top Ten kicks off with Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo. That gives him three on the list joining Red River (#56) and El Dorado (#47), both of which of course also star John Wayne. The Duke famously wanted to make this as a response to Zinnemann’s High Noon which Wayne thought of as “un-American”. Whatever the impetus for the project the resulting film is a damn fine entertainment where Wayne’s sheriff Chance and a few loyal friends including an alcoholic deputy (Dean Martin), an aged and hobbled deputy (Walter Brennan), and a hotshot kid (Rickey Nelson) stand up against a powerful rancher and his brother. With the musical talent of a famous crooner and a teen idol on hand we get a few songs including “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me”. Ward Bond, Claude Akins, Angie Dickenson, John Russell, and Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez round out the strong cast. Rio Bravo appeared on thirty ballots including two first place votes, a second place, two thirds, a sixth, an eighth, three ninth, and three tenth. It edges out The Hateful Eight by only three little points into the Top Ten.




The Sons of Katie Elder, North to Alaska, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Shootist, Red River, The Cowboys, El Dorado, True Grit, Stagecoach,
Rio Bravo,Two Mules for Sister Sara, Pale Rider, High Plains Drifter, For a Few Dollars More, A Fistful of Dollars
and The Outlaw Josey Wales





Thursday Next and Siddon are the only MoFos in the running for predicting the correct order of the Top Ten. Nobody else thought Rio Bravo was going to pop first.



Rio Bravo is the nearest I've got to a placement on my personal ballot matching the countdown thus far.

Seen: 57/91
My list:  

Faildictions (yee-haw version 1.12):
9. Fury At Furnace Creek



Rio Bravo is my #9, never left my top ten ever since I first saw it as a kid. Love the nostalgia it brings with it, the atmosphere, the technicolor, Angie Dickinson, and the song. Classic western that I wasn’t expecting to show up this early. The song also didn’t do so well for me when I nominated it in one of Chypmunks song tournaments. Possibly the film has lost a bit of popularity over the years.


Recently saw El Dorado (my #30) on bluray, don’t know if they did something to enhance the picture but the colors were really popping off the screen, the film and charlene holt looked absolutely amazing. Definitely worth checking out if you enjoy this era/style of western.

Seen list 60/91 + ranking on my personal list:
90. Duck, You Sucker! (#53)
85. The Big Gundown (#52)
82. ¡Three Amigos! (#50)
80. The Mercenary (#21)
79. My Name is Nobody (#13)
76. The Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean (#27)
75. Pale Rider (#60)
74. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (#58)
72. Maverick (#95)
69. Westworld (#65)
68. Bad Day at Black Rock (#62)
67. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (#18)
66. The Grey Fox (#85)
64. Django (#36)
63. Ride the High Country (#92)
62. City Slickers (#82)
61. Young Guns (#11)
58. Meek's Cutoff (#67)
57. The Shootist (#40)
56. Red River (#78)
55. Back to the Future Part III (#49)
54. Bone Tomahawk (#55)
53. Winchester '73 (#32)
52. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (#54)
51. Giant (#53)
48. 3:10 to Yuma (#35)
47. El Dorado (#30)
46. The Proposition (#68)
45. The Professionals (#71)
44. My Darling Clementine (#78)
43. Shane (#90)
42. The Quick and the Dead (#88)
40. The Gunfighter (#8)
39. Little Big Man (#33)
37. Jeremiah Johnson (#4)
36. Open Range (#47)
35. Hell or High Water (#17)
34. The Great Silence (#22)
32. One-Eyed Jacks (#7)
31. High Plains Drifter (#48)
30. Johnny Guitar (#93)
29. 3:10 to Yuma (#57)
28. Tombstone (#12)
27. The Big Country (#15)
26. Dead Man (#24)
25. The Revenant (#26)
24. The Magnificent Seven (#77)
23. Stagecoach (#37)
22. True Grit (#60)
20. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (#28)
19. The Ox-Bow Incident (#16)
18. For A Few Dollars More (#29)
17. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (#20)
16. A Fistful of Dollars (#31)
15. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
14. There Will Be Blood
13. The Outlaw Josey Wales (#10)
12. Django Unchained 2012 (#74)
11. The Hateful Eight 2015 (#19)
10. Rio Bravo 1959 (#9)

My Ballot 17/25:
  1. - Top 2
  2. - Top 5
  3. - 100%
  4. Jeremiah Johnson 1972
  5. - Top 3
  6. - 100%
  7. One-Eyed Jacks 1961
  8. The Gunfighter 1950
  9. Rio Bravo 1959
  10. The Outlaw Josey Wales 1976
  11. Young Guns 1988
  12. Tombstone 1993
  13. My Name Is Nobody 1973
  14. - 100%
  15. The Big Country 1958
  16. The Ox-Bow Incident 1943
  17. Hell or High Water 2016
  18. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid 1973
  19. The Hateful Eight 2015
  20. McCabe & Mrs. Miller 1971
  21. The Mercenary 1968
  22. The Great Silence 1968
  23. - 100%
  24. Dead Man 1995
  25. - 0%



GREAT movie, got my vote!

Seen: 33/91
- Slow West (#95)
- The Big Gundown (#85)
- The Furies (#84)
- The Gold Rush (#78)
- The Shooting (#71)
- The Grey Fox (#66)
- The Great Train Robbery (#60)
- Meek’s Cutoff (#58)
- Red River (#56)
- Bone Tomahawk (#54)
- The Cowboys (#50)
- Rango (#41)
- The Gunfighter (#40)
- Open Range (#36)
- Hell or High Water (#35)
- The Great Silence (#34)
- The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (#33)
- Johnny Guitar (#30)
- Tombstone (#28)
- The Revenant (#25)
- Stagecoach (#23)
- True Grit (#22)
- Blazing Saddles (#21)
- The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (#20)
- The Ox-Bow Incident (#19)
- For a Few Dollars More (#18)
- McCabe and Mrs. Miller (#17)
- A Fistful of Dollars (#16)
- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (#15)
- There Will be Blood (#14)
- Django Unchained (#12)
- The Hateful Eight (#11)
- Rio Bravo (#10)

My list:
1. There Will be Blood
5. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
6. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
7. McCabe and Mrs. Miller
8. Blazing Saddles
10. Rio Bravo
11. For a Few Dollars More
12. Johnny Guitar
14. Hell or High Water
16. The Revenant
17. The Lone Ranger
18. A Fistful of Dollars
19. Red River
20. The Gunfighter
21. Bone Tomahawk
22. The Hateful Eight
23. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
24. Stagecoach
25. Django Unchained
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Well, what a pleasure this has been following Holden's presentations. Here we are starting the Top 10 already! I have been slowly working my way through some of the titles I have seen on the countdown, most recently Pursued and The Coen's True Grit, which I somehow managed to miss when it first hit the streets. I liked both a whole lot.

Glad to see The Outlaw Josey Wales and Treasure of the Sierre Madre place near the top 10, although I thought Treasure was a shoe-in for Top 10. Both were on my list, with Wales at #3, and Treasure was my #1! I never tire of watching either film. I am banking on my # 2 placing in Top 5. We shall see!
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Watched since the list began:
Slow West
The Dark Valley
Bone Tomahawk
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Django Unchained
The Hateful Eight


Haven't seen and going to watch:
Geronimo: An American Legend
Oklahoma!
The Big Gundown
The Mercenary


Haven't seen and not going to watch:
Maverick
Back to the Future Part III
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Rio Bravo is a film which elicits great love from its fans. I think more of it now than I once did - I'll even watch it every time it's on if there isn't something else I haven't seen. But I still don't see why so many people find it so cool or something to "hang out" with (other than my having it on in the background ), and I grew up with it. I guess I don't belong to the cult of Hawks, even if I think he's a very good director and the auteur theory makes watching his films more interesting and significant.

It's amazing how basically nothing happens in Rio Bravo, but it's still watchable. On the other hand, I'll admit that there's nothing really wrong with what happens in Rio Bravo which wouldn't make a decent little 90-minute action western, but the problem is that Hawks made the film 141 minutes. What's even more telling about Hawks at this latter end of his career is that he basically retooled this movie three times later: El Dorado and Rio Lobo as actual westerns and Hatari! with Wayne making a modern western set in Africa and running 157 minutes! All four movies have basically the same sets of characters going through similar situations to try to survive and make things right.

It didn't make my list, bur one that did (at #9) is Barbarosa.

Barbarosa (Fred Schepisi, 1982)
-

I've always loved this quirky western ever since I first watched it in the theatre. It's gorgeously photographed and Willie Nelson and Gary Busey make such a great team that it's a shame that they didn't make more films together. What sets this western apart from most is that it evolves from a revenge flick into a sly fairy tale about families and the lengths a man will go to try to protect his and perhaps reinvent himself to find true happiness. Willie Nelson is great as Barbarosa, a bandit who married into a Mexican family but was immediately cast out and has been hunted by that family for about 20 years. Gary Busey is a "farm boy" who accidentally killed an in-law and is on the run from the dead man's father and brothers. Busey comes across Barbarosa, becomes his partner and learns the ropes from the wise veteran, but even more important, he learns about family life and the unfortunate truth it can sometimes present as well as the beautiful rewards it can lead to depending on one's outlook on life. Just in case it sounds like I'm painting this film as too dark, I have to mention that the quirkiness extends to its sense of humor which is also quite generous and gives Willie Nelson an all-time great line when he first meets up with "Angel Morales". Gilbert Roland also delivers a strong performance as the stern patrician of the Mexican family who is actually Barbarosa's father-in-law. The film's climax is also just about perfect.

My List

1. Little Big Man
3. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
4. The Outlaw Josey Wales
7. One-Eyed Jacks
8. The Professionals
9. Barbarosa
10. Red River
11. Oklahoma!
12. Hud
13. The Big Country
14. Giant
17. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
19. The Ox-Bow Incident
20. The Ballad of Cable Hogue
22. Support Your Local Sheriff!
23. The Revenant
24. There Will Be Blood
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Yahoo! finally another from my list! I had Rio Bravo as my #8 I love this movie!

Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)

What a great movie! And what an influential movie Rio Bravo was. It's so good that it was remade twice more and by the same director too, Howard Hawks. But it's Rio Bravo that's the 1st and best of the three....and it inspired the next wave of spaghetti westerns as well.

I noticed the music score which had a trumpet playing a Mexican sounding melancholy melody. I stopped the film and said to my wife, 'the soundtrack sounds alot like the spaghetti westerns'. Then after watching the film I read this at IMDB:

The score includes the hauntingly ominous "El Degüello" theme, which is heard several times. Colorado identifies the tune as "The Cutthroat Song".... Composer Ennio Morricone recalled that Sergio Leone asked him to write "Dimitri Tiomkin music" for A Fistful of Dollars (1964). The trumpet theme is similar to Tiomkin's "Degüello" (the Italian title of Rio Bravo was Un dollaro d'onore, "A Dollar of Honor")...The film was a huge success in Italy, laying the groundwork for the following decade's Spaghetti Western boom.
John Wayne is in top form here, doing the character he does best. It's one of his most well defined character roles.

I'm a big fan of Dean Martin...and his 'drunk trying to go straight' is one of his all time plumb roles. I liked the way they give him a rough and tumbled look with dirty & tattered clothes. He even looks like he smells bad! I like the way we follow Dean Martin's struggle away from the bottle and back to redemption. In that way the character's in Rio Bravo are more important than the plot.

Director Howard Hawks...saw how popular western TV shows had become, and realized that audiences cared more about the characters than the plots... Rather than making a movie that centered around one main plot, he decided he wanted to make a completely character driven western with several story-lines running through it simultaneously...

And that's exactly what the film does, it gives us time with the characters as if we were part of the story. It's the people and their lives that matter much more than the action in Rio Bravo. Such a good movie!




Welcome to the human race...
Rio Bravo was my #12. Obviously, I find the idea of its existence happening due to Wayne taking severe issue with a film that dared to suggest that maybe not every sheriff in a Western movie would've been some swinging-dick Gary Stu like a certain somebody might've played about a hundred times in his acting career patently ridiculous, but the results are good enough to compensate for that. It probably helps that it's not just down to Wayne himself so much as him being backed up by arguably the best ensemble he's ever been a part of as dependable presences like Dean Martin or Walter Brennan might well steal the show from him. It will be funny when High Noon overtakes it, though.

Quentin Tarantino is pretty hit or miss for me, but Django Unchained is one massive hit with its gorgeous visuals, delicious violence, and fantastic performances. Speaking of those performances, I actually don't find Waltz to be the show stealer at all. Sure he gives a fine performance, but my man Leonardo DiCaprio and motherf***ing Samuel L. Jackson are the standouts for me. Hell I found "Big Daddy" Don Johnson more memorable. It's probably my favorite Tarantino film and my 4th favorite Western.
DiCaprio is the weak link for me, he feels more showy than show-stealing in trying to liven up such a (deliberately?) flat character with as much scenery-chewing as he can muster. I'll grant Johnson and Jackson, though - the former's a more naturalistic version of what DiCaprio's trying to do and the latter's actually got a worthwhile character to play.

Haven't seen and not going to watch:
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
The other two I can understand, but why this one?
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Some of you might want to sit down for a minute because this might shock you, but I watched both of these Quentin Tarantino movies for this countdown. They both could have been great movies if they weren't so bloody, but with QT at the helm, I knew what to expect, so I was prepared for it.

Django Unchained was a good movie, but it had no chance to make my list, even without all the violence and the blood. The movie itself didn't really lack anything. It just isn't really my type of movie, even without all the violence and the blood.

The Hateful Eight on the other hand was a great movie as a "who done it", but the blood overkill ruined any chance it had to make it onto my list. Without all the blood, it could have been high on my list.


Of the movies that "Just Missed", No Name on the Bullet was the only one on my list, and it was very high on my list. It was far and away my favorite Audie Murphy movie, maybe because he wasn't playing the good guy in this movie. It made it all the way up to #3 on my list.


My list so far:
1) Oklahoma! (1955)
3) No Name on the Bullet (1959)
6) Support Your Local Sheriff (1969)
7) The Frisco Kid (1979)
8) The Gunfighter (1950)
9) Maverick (1994)
12) North to Alaska (1960)
13) The Bravados (1958)
16) City Slickers (1991)
17) The Hanging Tree (1959)
19) Winchester '73 (1950)
20) The Quick and The Dead (1995)
22) The Ox-Bow Incident (1942)
23) El Dorado (1967)
25) Incredible Rocky Mountain Race (TV Movie - 1977)
I could see you liking Hateful Eight sans the bloodshed.
Still, BRAVO for attempting to watch, not only one but both of them.

And regarding Audie Murphy, I felt the same way about Glenn Ford in the original 3:10 to Yuma.
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