Film critic John Ryan Powell examines ten of the most underrated westerns of all time.
There is no genre of film more distinctly American than the western. Although some of the most critically acclaimed films of the genre were produced by the Italians — specifically Sergio Leone — those pictures borrowed in no small measure from the earlier efforts of American masters like John Ford, Nicholas Ray and Howard Hawks. Yet with few exceptions, American critics have seldom seen fit to treat the westerns made by their country’s filmmakers as “serious art.” More frequently it has been foreign critics and filmmakers — specifically the French, Italian and Japanese — who have revered American westerns. This is unfortunate, as I can think of no other genre that has turned out so many classic films as the western.
As a consequence — and because over the years so few films have been deemed fit to be canonized by critics content to espouse the virtues of the same handful of films and filmmakers until they’re blue in the face — many great westerns (saying nothing of the myriad other pictures from every other genre that have fallen by the wayside) have fallen through the cracks over the years and are now undershown, underseen and grossly underrated. This list is an attempt to shed some much needed spotlight on 20 such movies. It is by no means a “Top 20 of All Time,” nor is it meant to be a definitive list of the 20 most ripe for rediscovery; it is merely a starting point.
No other genre has turned out so many classic films as the western.
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As should be obvious from my previous statements, this article takes for granted that the reader is already familiar with works like the Ford/Wayne westerns (particularly the Cavalry Trilogy, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Searchers, Stagecoach), Leone’s spaghetti westerns, The Wild Bunch, Red River, Rio Bravo, Shane and High Noon, plus later cable classics like Unforgiven, The Outlaw Josey Wales, High Plains Drifter and Tombstone. If for some reason you are not, I’d urge you to go and see those movies and then return to this list.
Now, without further ado, here are the first ten films of the list along with a few words about each. They’re listed in no particular order, so this isn’t intended to be a countdown or anything of that nature.
1. The Long Riders (1980, Walter Hill) – Many films have been made about Jesse James, the James-Younger Gang and the shooting of James over the years. Some have been good, some have been bad and some have simply been mediocre. This one, which casts real-life siblings as the James, Younger, Miller and Ford brothers (the Keaches, Carradines, Quaids and Guests, respectively) is likely the best (only 2007’s wonderful The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford matches it, but its aims are so completely different that it’s really useless to compare the two). Episodic in nature and oozing period detail at every turn, The Long Riders covers a lot of ground but never drags due to the steady direction of the great Walter Hill, who leaves just enough ft on the picture to give it some flavor. The influence of the great Sam Peckinpah is apparent during the film’s incredibly tense, exceptionally bloody climactic shootout which, along with a knife fight between David Carradine and James Remar, are the highlights of this great, criminally overlooked film. One of Walter Hill’s best movies, which is saying a great deal.
2. The White Buffalo (1977, J. Lee Thompson) – Thompson and star Charles Bronson, here playing fairly aged Wild Bill Hickok, collaborated on a number of occasions (many of these collaborations being unfortunate Z-grade affairs for Golan-Globus and Cannon Pictures in the eighties) but for my money never topped this fever dream of a western, which is sort of like Jaws or Moby Dick transposed to the frontier, with the titular mammal standing in for the shark/whale. Haunted by nightmares of a murderous white buffalo, Hickok travels to Wyoming to hunt and kill the beast. Lots of symbolism in play and great supporting performances by Will Sampson and Jack Warden.
3. The Naked Spur (1953, Anthony Mann) – Anthony Mann and Jimmy Stewart collaborated on five westerns in the 1950s, with this one coming dead in the middle of that series of efforts. A brisk picture with a small cast that includes Stewart, Robert Ryan, Ralph Meeker and Janet Leigh, The Naked Spur is the story of Stewart — a desperate, broken man — attempting to bring killer Ryan to justice to collect reward money he needs to buy back a farm sold out from under him by a no-good woman he once knew. Along the way Ryan tries to pit Stewart and his uneasy allies against one another.
Those accustomed only to seeing Stewart play a nice guy in movies like It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington will be shocked at his moral ambivalence here and in most of the other westerns he made with Mann, all of which are well worth seeing. Ryan is even better than Stewart, playing a thoroughly amoral outlaw who is at times openly gleeful in his villainy. Throw in some beautiful location photography in glorious Technicolor and you have a tense, exciting western that’s refreshingly free of the sentimentality that occasionally makes films from the fifties products of their time.
4. The Shootist (1976, Don Siegel) – John Wayne’s final film, this is a perfect marriage of real-life circumstance meeting tailor-made material. Wayne, dying of cancer, protrays a legendary gunfighter who is also dying of cancer. He settles down in a small town as a boarder in the home of a widowed Lauren Bacall and her son Ron Howard to spend the last several weeks of his life. Though mostly a quiet slice of life where Wayne reflects on the life he’s lived and imparts some of the lessons he’s learned along the way onto the awestruck young Howard, there is nevertheless a climactic gun battle that’s as well staged as you’d expect from Siegel, who was one of the best directors of action America has ever produced. James Stewart has a nice cameo as a kindly country doctor.
5. Man of the West (1958, Anthony Mann) – Mann’s final western, Man of the West was panned and ignored at the time of its release, but viewed now it looks like one of the best of its genre and a summation of everything Mann knew about making westerns. Gary Cooper stars as Link Jones, a man who has tried long and hard to abandon his former way of life as a thief and killer raised in a gang of outlaws led by his sadistic uncle Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb, convincingly made up to look several years older than 45). Circumstances force Link to rejoin Tobin’s crew, leading to an examination of whether a once-bad man can ever truly change his ways.
Shot on location in the desert in CinemaScope, Man of the West is a hybrid of sorts that combines the creative, effective storytelling of Mann’s earlier westerns with the big budgets and grand scales of later epics like El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire, and it’s thoroughly successful in doing so.
6. 3:10 to Yuma (1957, Delmer Daves) – Overshadowed by a decent if overblown and overlong remake these days, the original remains a tense and timeless masterpiece, with Glenn Ford playing against type as an exceedingly charming outlaw opposite struggling farmer Van Heflin. Heflin agrees to hold Ford at his home and then escort him to the titular train for transport to jail with only a drunk as backup when Ford’s fearsome gang comes calling. Though there is some action, the primary appeal of the film is the incredible amount of tension Daves wrings from the one-on-one scenes between Ford and Heflin, neither of whom has ever been better.
The remake adds a lot of superfluous gunfights and alters the ending to make it both more obvious and conventionally crowd-pleasing, but in the process loses some of the original’s economical perfection.
7. The Shooting (1967, Monte Hellman) – A moody, existential western with a skeletal plot involving Warren Oates being hired to accompany Millie Perkins across the desert on a revenge mission. They’re joined by Oates’ slow-witted friend Will Hutchins and a young Jack Nicholson as an eccentric, dangerous gunman. Something like a western as filtered through the sensibilities of Antonioni, this quiet film becomes hypnotic as it marches slowly toward its powerful, mind-blowing ending. If you’ve seen and enjoyed other Hellman pictures of the period (Two Lane Blacktop, 1974’s brilliant The Cockfighter) you’ll have a head-start on grasping and enjoying this one; others may find it slightly “challenging.”
8. Hour of the Gun (1967, John Sturges) – Like the story of Jesse James and his assassination, the tale of Wyatt Earp and the battle of the O.K. Corral has been put to film numerous times (Tombstone, My Darling Clementine and Sturges’ own excellent Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, to name but a few); Hour of the Gun starts off with that shootout and then covers, with a great deal of historical accuracy, the aftermath.
James Garner plays Wyatt Earp as a tormented, stoic individual in one of the best performances of his career, joined by Jason Robards as a less flashy but more realistic Doc Holliday than that of Val Kilmer. The incomparable Robert Ryan is Ike Clanton, a wealthy businessman content to let others do his dirty work for him — much of which involves attempting to rid the Arizona Territory of the Earps and Holliday.
If the film has a flaw it’s that it hems a bit too closely to historical fact, at times making the proceedings a little dry, but Robards, Ryan and especially Garner are so good that any quibble made about the film has to be a minor one.
9. The Ox-Bow Incident (1943, William Wellman) – Though set in 1885 Nevada, this film really doesn’t have much to do with the western genre — there are no cowboys, no indians, no gunfights, no cattle drives and none of the glorious vistas of the wild west seen in the films of John Ford and Anthony Mann. In fact, most of this low-budget picture was shot on sparsely-decorated sets on a soundstage. So if it lacks so much of what we generally love in a good western, why is it on this list? Simple: it is — even after more than seventy years — probably the single best examination of mob rule ever filmed.
Henry Fonda (in a role that echoes Tom Joad and Juror #8, though his Gil Carter here is by no means such a white knight as those two paragons of virtue) and Harry Morgan star as cattlemen who ride into a curiously lifeless town to unwind ater several months of hard work. In the saloon they hear talk of a bunch of recent cattle-rustling incidents and, shortly after, well-liked local rancher Larry Kinkaid’s murder. A posse — illegally “deputized” by a hot-headed deputy (only a sheriff has the authority to deputize) in the sheriff’s absence — quickly forms. Conscientious storekeeper Mr. Davies tells the mob that without the sheriff’s blessing they’re merely a lawless, angry mob and begs them to disband. They won’t. Gil (Fonda) and Art (Morgan) join the mob out of fear that, as relative strangers in town, they may be accused of Kinkaid’s murder. The mob sets out into the mountains in search of the murderer(s).
What follows is a terrifying look at what happens when a mob forms and people take the lw into their own hands. Well written, beautifully acted and without a single wasted shot (the feature runs about 75 minutes), The Ox-Bow Incident pulls no punches as it marches toward its grim and all too believable conclusion.
10. Day of the Outlaw (1959, Andre de Toth) – Of all the films on this list, this is probably my favorite and the one I most want to turn others on to. de Toth, a one-eyed Belgian, is best remembered today for House of Wax (oddly enough a film frequently presented in 3D) but during the fifties he made a number of quality westerns, the best of which are 1955’s The Indian Fighter, starring Kirk Douglas, and this one, starring Robert Ryan and Burl Ives.
Filmed on location in Wyoming by Russell Harlan, the same cinematographer who shot Rio Bravo the same year, Day of the Outlaw couldn’t look less similar to that picture; whereas Rio Bravo — a frequently emulated masterpiece in its own right — is colorful and bright, Day of the Outlaw looks as cold and foreboding as the mountainous, snowy town of Bitters that acts as its setting.
I don’t want to give away too much about the film’s plot, as part of the enjoyment of it is seeing how the story’s focus shifts from its initial subject of a love triangle into the small town’s struggle to survive an occupation by a band of violent outlaws. Along the way much is said about heroism and courage.
The direction of de Toth, cinematography of Harlan and acting of everyone — most especially Ryan and Ives — are incredible, among the best of the 1950s. The film is diamond-hard and not in the least bit dated, a classic that deserves to be talked about not just as one of the best “forgotten films” of the decade, but as one of the best films of any genre of the decade.
Photo–Flickr/Sam Howzit
Great list. This article should be called ‘Ten Amazing Westerns Everyone Should See’. All kinds of people like Westerns.
Sorry, I thought Unforgiven outshone the Shootist although I loved them both. I’d put The Big Country on any top ten western list. That’s a story where the gentleman outdoes the cowboys and shows that toughness is based on principles and not just a strong mental state.
The Trinity Movies are awesome and the Shootist is the movie that I wished Unforgiven could have been.
YOU MISSED ONE!!! It’s one of the best Westerns ever (in the tradition of the Spaghetti Western)… “Sukiyaki Western Django”. . . Starting QUINTIN TARANTINO (yes, THAT Tarantino)… A Japanese western where all of the Japanese cast speaks English phonetically (since most don’t know English).
Be Blown Away: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nluPs-nGngk
James
http://www.jameskelseystudios.com
My favorite “Spaghetti Western” was the Trinity series, They Call Me Trinity and Trinity Is Still My Name. They’re a bit campy and I heard they were a spin off of My Name Is Nobody, which is a bit more traditional, but still with a wacked out premise. A young gunslinger (Terrence Hill) wants to see his idol go out in a blaze of glory, but of course his idol (Henry Fonda) would prefer not to die.