15. “Winchester ‘73” (1950)
Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott; John Ford and John Wayne; Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood. There’s something about the Western genre that has inspired some of the great director/star partnerships. Perhaps because both men had such diverse careers outside the genre, the pairing of director Anthony Mann and star James Stewart tends not to be mentioned in the same breath, but it should be: Teaming here for the first time, you can see why they would go on to work together seven more times, four of them Westerns. Stewart’s performance is a revelation — keen-edged, desperate, almost deranged at times, and it’s wonderful to see him explode out of the laconic everyman role he often played elsewhere. And the plot is unusual too, a revenge story built around the eponymous rifle that digresses to follow the rifle’s story, rather than the human protagonists’. That can be a shaggy structure around which to build a film, but “Winchester ’73” remains a blistering, satisfyingly cyclical human drama in which the coveted “perfect rifle” becomes emblematic of both the violence and the promise of better that characterizes the cinematic West.
14. “Shane” (1953)
George Stevens‘ classic, which is also Alan Ladd’s finest non-noir hour, was heavily leant on in James Mangold’s “Logan” which should bring the film a new generation of admirers. But the reference is also gratifying because it acknowledges just what a debt modern mainstream filmmaking, especially that of the superhero genre, owes to the architecture of the classic Western. After all, the story of “Shane,” in which ex-gunfighter Ladd happens into a job on a farmstead where his respect and love for the family he joins, including Jean Arthur, Van Heflin and little Brandon deWilde, ends up driving him back to the life he was trying to escape, is all about the power/responsibility duality and the nobility of self-sacrifice. And in Stevens’ atypically sensitive take on this most red-bloodedly masculine and taciturn of genres, it’s made all the more keen-edged by being told through the eyes of a child. The little boy’s unsullied morality and simple ideas of good defeating evil (here personified brilliantly by a granite-faced Jack Palance) are irresistibly motivating to Shane, who is himself the foremost example of that subtler Western archteype: the man who has a talent for violence without having a taste for it.
13. “Johnny Guitar” (1954)
Much derided on its release, and as well known for the feuding between stars Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge as for anything else, Nicholas Ray’s “Johnny Guitar” has long since had a full critical resurgence, thanks in part to praise from Francois Truffaut, who called it “a Western dream.” Even now, it feels unusual — a Western with two women at its centre, a lush, bright psychological melodrama unlike almost anything else in the genre. Crawford, in one of her greatest and most definingly steely roles, plays saloon owner Vienna, an outcast in her Arizona town, whose enmity with her neighbors (in particular McCambridge’s equally willful Emma) reaches a peak when her ex Johnny (Sterling Hayden) rides back into town. Often jarring, almost to the point of artificiality (it’s been a key influence on Pedro Almodovar, but it feels like it could well have made an impression on David Lynch too), it’s the Western as psychodrama, as fever-nightmare, and as feminist tract. It’s a movie that feels decades ahead of its time, and thankfully, here we are, decades later, when it’s finally found the audience it always deserved.
12. “Unforgiven” (1992)
The reason that we’re gathered here is for the 25th anniversary of Clint Eastwood’s farewell to the genre that he was most famously associated with (almost a missed opportunity, it now feels like, given that he’s still going strong at 87 and has made a further twenty movies since), and while the film didn’t prove to be the last great Western, it certainly feels like the true end of an era, the drawing of a line that’s never since quite been crossed in the same way. Eastwood, deliberately evoking his persona from a number of other movies on this list, plays William Munny, a retired bandit turned pig farmer persuaded back on the saddle by The Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) to seek vengeance after the disfiguring of a prostitute, and bringing him into conflict with big-man-in-town Little Bill (Gene Hackman). There’s a certain amount of myth-pricking to Eastwood’s film (a screenplay by David Webb Peoples that the star had sat on until he was old enough to play it), but more than anything, and more than almost any Western, it’s a movie about violence, about the cost of it on the soul, and the occasional necessity of it despite that. It’s a film of novelistic depth and richness, and probably still the best thing that Eastwood ever made.
11. “The Good, the Bad & the Ugly” (1966)
Generally speaking, interrogating form and commenting on genre and other such lofty, film-student-friendly behaviors is a job reserved for the arthouse. But Sergio Leone‘s ne plus ultra Spaghetti Western, the culmination of his ‘Dollars‘ trilogy, does all of that as a kind of insolent side-order to its main menu of lean, baked-leather, wildly popular entertainment. With irony even embedded in the title (Lee Van Cleef is not really any more ‘bad’ than Clint Eastwood, and Eli Wallach isn’t so very much uglier than either), with its glorious wides and crinkled close-ups of gimlet eyes — often radical alternations of scale that happen within the same shot — it’s simply stunning. It’s hard to remember that Spaghetti Westerns were made on the cheap and on the sly, using mostly unknown actors (even the American trio had yet to become real stars), when you watch Tonino Delli Colli‘s muscular, vivid Technicolor compositions. Sure, it’s style over substance insofar as plot is concerned (three desperadoes go looking for a cache of stolen gold and eventually, um, find it), but never has the style-is-substance argument been better made, especially when accompanied by Ennio Morricone‘s quintessential call-and-response theme tune.