5. “Stagecoach” (1939)
As anyone who’s ever shared a sleeper cabin on a train can attest, travel makes strange companions, and with the history of the Old West essentially a history of westward migration, the idea of a motley crew of strangers thrown together for a perilous trip is an integral part of Western mythos. And it gets its most sprightly, energetic and memorable workout in John Ford’s wildly entertaining “Stagecoach.” Famous for making a star of John Wayne, it’s actually a terrific ensemble piece as a Marshall (George Bancroft), a driver (Andy Devine), a wimpy whiskey salesman (Donald Meek), an asshole banker (Berton Churchill), a drunkard doctor (the ever-wonderful Thomas Mitchell), a prissy gentlewoman (Louise Platt), an unctuous Southern gambler (John Carradine) and a hooker with a heart (Claire Trevor) join Wayne’s good-guy fugitive on a perilous journey through Apache country. It’s unreconstructed, to be sure (dang those bloodthirsty Injuns!) but its jaunty portrayal of these disparate types revealing their true colors while fending off repeated (and immensely exciting) attacks, is legendary for a reason. And the romance between Wayne’s Ringo Kid and Trevor’s hard-headed, soft-centered prostitute is maybe the most touching in Ford’s whole repertoire.
4. “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (2007)
There’s a collective intake of breath, and a lot of soul-searching whenever we suggest putting a film from the last decade or so onto one of these all-time lists, let alone in a top 5 position, so it’s not lightly that we state for the record that Andrew Dominik‘s achingly beautiful slow-burn masterpiece deserves its slot amongst its older brethren. Hushed and immense and deeply sorrowful, and one of the very finest hours by master cinematographer Roger Deakins, it represents a career high for everyone involved. Brad Pitt is wonderful as Jesse James, a role that Dominik’s sensitive adaptation of Ron Hansen‘s novel imbues with all sorts of parallels to the modern-day price of fame, but it’s Casey Affleck who, for at least one Playlister, gives very possibly the single finest performance of the century so far as Robert Ford. Amid so much exceptional craft, from the images to the Nick Cave/Warren Ellis soundtrack, to the eclectic but perfectly cast supporting ensemble (including Mary-Louise Parker, Paul Schneider, Jeremy Renner, Zooey Deschanel, Sam Rockwell and Sam Shepard, RIP), Affleck is simply riveting, with his naked expression of jealous hero worship brilliantly evoking one of the least explicable traits within the darker reaches of the human psyche: the compulsion to murder the things we love.
3. “The Searchers” (1956)
It’s not quite that John Ford created the Western, but he certainly was the first one to master it. And one of his very finest hours (and unequivocally that of his regular star John Wayne, still the greatest icon the genre ever produced) came with “The Searchers,” which paradoxically is where he started to unpick the fabric of the genre he’d helped to build. It stars Wayne as Ethan Edwards, a Civil War veteran who returns home to Texas, only for his brother to be killed by Comanche, and his niece (Natalie Wood) kidnapped. With the girls’ adopted, part-Cherokee brother (Jeffrey Hunter), he sets out on a years-long quest to find her, and quite possibly, given Ethan’s hatred of and bigotry towards Native Americans, kill her. Too few of the films on this list really grapple with race and the treatment of indigenious Americans, and while there’s a blunt crudeness in the way that Ford does it here, it’s ultimately enormously effective when it comes to the film’s indelible conclusion, thanks largely to Wayne’s greatest, most fully-realized performance. But it’s also, beyond that, simply a great film, with Ford at the peak of his compositional powers, delivering a textured and novelistic screenplay, enlivened by action that thrills as much as it discomforts.
2. “McCabe And Mrs. Miller” (1971)
One would hardly expect Robert Altman to turn in a conventional Western, and indeed he did not. Described by the maverick filmmaker himself as an “anti-Western,” “McCabe And Mrs. Miller”defies genre tropes in a way that’s both subversive and, as its placing here might suggest, exemplary — helping to make it a towering work of American film. Adapted from Edmund Naughton’s novel, it sees gambler John McCabe (Warren Beatty) arrive in snowbound Washington State, set up a brothel, and begin an affair, with British opium-addict Constance Miller (Julie Christie), making the pair a target of a local mining company. Hauntingly scored to Leonard Cohen songs, and with dialogue semi-deliberately muffled, overlapping and difficult to hear, it’s a prime example of what Altman did so well, marrying sharp political jabs with a genuinely compassionate humanism, and finding a spare gorgeous-to-look-at authenticity that’s rare for the Western, aided by truly multi-faceted turns by his leads. It might be lacking in fireworks, but such displays would only take you out of the full immersion Atman achieves here, making “McCabe and Mrs Miller” the kind of absorbingly sensory evocation of mood embodied by very few other films, let alone Westerns.
1. “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962)
We’re breaking the listmakers’ code by telling you, but the honest truth is that ranked “best of” lists are a moveable feast. The pleasure in them is in gauging changes over time, and noticing how one canonically great film can come into spectacular focus while another fades, given the contemporary context. And so while our number one is a John Ford film — Ford’s is a legacy that will continue to straddle the Western genre as long as there are screens on which moving pictures tell stories — it’s perhaps not the one we might have picked a few years ago, and perhaps not the one you might expect. Told in flashback, and largely eschewing the grandiose widescreen vistas of other Ford films, it centers on a state senator (Jimmy Stewart) famous for killing a notorious outlaw, being interviewed by a journalist as he attends the funeral of an old friend (John Wayne). More so even than Ford’s more overtly revisionist “The Searchers,” this film is a bitter pill: full of regret at the choices of the past. And despite an apparently unpleasant shoot, Stewart plays brilliantly off Wayne and a hard-as-nails Lee Marvin as Valance. Quite what it is about this film, with its themes of untrustworthy heroism, fake news and legacies founded on lies, that makes it feel so relevant to our times we’ll leave you to discern for yourself. But right now, today, ‘Liberty Valance’ is the western that to us speaks most strongly to the everlasting, infinitely elastic appeal of this deeply American, definingly cinematic genre.
As always, there’s a bunch we could have included with a list longer than 50. Among some of the more notable ones are the middle chapter in the Man With No Name trilogy, “For A Few Dollars More,” Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate,” Mel Brooks’ comedy classic “Blazing Saddles,” the original “3:10 To Yuma” (and to some extent the sequel), Sam Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid,” John Huston’s “The Misfits,” Kevin Costner’s Oscar-winner “Dances With Wolves” and the later, but also strong “Open Range,” cult favorite “Tombstone,” Sam Raimi’s “The Quick & The Dead,” Robert Redford vehicle “Jeremiah Johnson,” and John Wayne’s final turn in “The Shootist.”
There was also Gregory Peck in “The Gunfighter,” William Wellman’s “The Ox-Bow Incident” with Henry Fonda, Marlon Brando’s “One-Eyed Jacks,” Budd Boetticher’s “Decision At Sundown” and “Ride Lonesome,” the epic “How The West Was Won,” spaghetti Westerns “The Great Silence” and “Requiescant,” Clint Eastwood’s “High Plains Drifter,” John Ford’s “7 Women” and “Wagon Master,” Richard Harris as “A Man Called Horse” and Dustin Hoffman as “Little Big Man,” Arthur Penn’s “The Missouri Breaks,” Howard Hawks’ “Red River,” Robert Aldrich’s “Vera Cruz,” Fritz Lang’s “Rancho Notorious,” Samuel Fuller’s “Forty Guns,” Anthony Mann’s “The Man From Laramie,” Monte Hellman’s “The Shooting,” the original “True Grit” and its remake, the original ‘Django,” “The Ballad Of Cable Hogue,” and Suzy Amis in “The Ballad Of Little Jo.”
Plus there’s a few more recent entries that maybe haven’t quite stood the test of time like some of the movies on the main list, but might well as the decades pass, including Michael Winterbottom’s “The Claim,” Brit Marling in “The Keeping Room,” horror-Western “Bone Tomahawk,” Kelly Reichardt’s “Meek’s Cutoff,” Tommy Lee Jones’ underrated “The Homesman,” Korean lunacy “The Good The Bad & The Weird,” and Outback western “The Proposition.” And we deliberately excluded neo-Westerns set later in time, movies like “No Country For Old Men,” “Lone Star,” “The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada,” “Bad Day At Black Rock,” “Hell Or High Water” and “Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia.” Any others you think deserve a mention? Shout them out below, pardner.