20. “Rio Bravo” (1959)
A movie so good that its director, Howard Hawks, essentially went on to remake it twice more (with 1966’s “El Dorado” and 1970’s “Rio Lobo”), not to mention it inspiring “Assault On Precinct 13,” “Rio Bravo” is as perfectly constructed piece of mainstream entertainment as you could ever really wish for. Made as something of a knee-jerk reaction to the semi-pacifism and political undertones of “High Noon” (“I didn’t think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking for help, and finally his Quaker wife had to save him,” Hawks said), it sees John Wayne as the sheriff, who with drunken deputy Dean Martin (his best movie performance), kid Ricky Nelson and a smattering of other misfits, has to fend off a group of bad guys attempting to free a murderer from his jail cell. Far from stripped down, it feels, like many Hawks movies, closer to Eugene O’Neill than to John Ford in places, talky and tangential (both Martin and Nelson get to sing, for instance), but it also grips, thrills and even moves. Hawks might have been wrong about “High Noon,” but the work he created in response was a great one.
19. “El Topo” (1970)
If you’ve dismissed the Western as your grandad’s genre, safe and formulaic, then 1) you’re wrong in general, and 2) you haven’t seen a film like “El Topo.” The true definition of a cult film (gaining an audience thanks to the support of John Lennon, and then it was basically unavailable for decades, only reemerging in the last decade), the film stars Alejandro Jodorowsky himself as the titular man in black heading out to become the greatest gunslinger in the West by defeating four champions, only to be taken in by a tribe of outcasts, leading him to later confront his long-abandoned son. It’s near indescribable without seeing it: packed with symbols, hidden meanings and references, scuzzily provocative, defiant of your explanations, and driven by existential psychedelia. The director’s later “The Holy Mountain” and “Santa Sangre” might be superior, but “El Topo” is a Western like no other and, frankly, a film like no other too.
18. “A Fistful Of Dollars” (1964)
Plagiarism gets a bad rep. Well, that’s not entirely true — plagiarism mostly gets an entirely fair rep. But firmly on the ‘merits’ side of copyright violation is Sergio Leone’s breakthrough “A Fistful Of Dollars,” a movie that both invented a sub-genre in the spaghetti Western (shot in Italian and then dubbed in a different language — 600 were made over the 1960s and 1970s), and created the last great Western movie star in the shape of Clint Eastwood. And all that by ripping off the plot of Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo,” something that resulted in a successful lawsuit by backers Toho (ironically enough, Kurosawa half-inched Dashiell Hammett’s work for his own movie, without legal consequence). Eastwood’s first appearance as the Man With No Name sees him arrive in a Mexican town that’s caught in a battle between a powerful family and the town sheriff, and then proceed to exacerbate that conflict by playing them off against each other. From its iconic “get three coffins ready” opening to Ennio Morricone’s genre-changing score to the bold, operatic direction, this was the film that the Western needed to reinvent itself.
17. “My Darling Clementine” (1946)
The Gunfight at the OK Corral, the famous battle between lawmen Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp, and Doc Holliday on one side, and the so-called Cowboys on the other, became maybe the single most famous event of the Old West, and has been told on screen any number of times. But much of that fame is down to John Ford’s “My Darling Clementine,” which remains probably the definitive take on the story (if not, it should be said, the most historically accurate). Following the Earp Brothers (here cattle drivers, led by Henry Fonda as Wyatt) who look to avenge the murder of their brother James at the hands of the Clanton gang with the help of surgeon (in real life, a dentist) Doc Holliday (Victor Mature), it’s in no particular hurry to get where it’s going, languid in its pacing and more interested in the landscape (never more mythically captured by Ford, the best capturer of mythic American landscape in film history) than in bullets flying. That said, being made so soon after Ford returned from military service during the Second World War, it’s also haunted by the scars of violence in a way that feels thoroughly modern when the bullets do fly.
16. “Dead Man” (1995)
C’mere, little Jimmy, let Grandma tell you about a time when Johnny Depp was one of the finest actors of his generation, by showing you Jim Jarmusch‘s “Dead Man.” Many Jarmusch movies have Western influences, but “Dead Man” is his straightest run at the genre, and one of his very best films — elegiac, offbeat and as mournful for the passing of life as it is for the passing of the Old West ways of life. Post-modern and old-fashioned all at once, set to a stunning, spare Neil Young electric guitar score and couched in Robby Muller‘s rich, declarative black and white cinematography, it’s the story of a mild-mannered accountant named William Blake (Depp) who is forced out of town by his businessman boss (Robert Mitchum, in his final role) and escorted across the country by a Native American known as Nobody (a marvellous Gary Farmer). Shot through with existential philosophy and literary allusions, it’s kept on this side of pretension by a beautifully sad, mischievous and laconic sense of humor that brings that very Jarmuschian self-aware absurdity to the rescue, and paradoxically delivers one of his most heartfelt and moving films.