Next up on the ranking block on our genre tour,
we are heading out wild frontier way for the western.
>From the genre's roots to its classics, its reinterpretations,
its different variations around the globe, through to today, these are our picks for
the top 10 westerns of all time.
(Music)
Kicking us off at number 10,
we want to look at one of the most essential organizing ideas of the western,
that of the frontier, of the edge of civilization and the life there on.
One of the common features of that theme is the classic western frontier hero
bridging the world between civilization and the wild.
A man who has come from one world, gone across the border into the other,
learned its ways and come back to help those to survive.
This is seven hired gunfighters protecting a Mexican town from bandits,
it's an outlaw defending a stagecoach from a tribe on a warpath.
It's a big part of the winning in How the West Was Won, and
a bleak chase after a raiding party from Ulzana's Raid, but for
our first pick, we prefer the film that inspired it, The Searchers.
(Music). - It's this country killed my boy yes,
by golly, I tell you, Ethan.
(Crosstalk). - Now Lars.
It just so happens we'd be Texicans.
Texican is nothing but a human man way out on a limb, this year and next.
Maybe for a hundred more, but I don't think it will be forever.
Someday, this country's gonna be a fine good place to be.
Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.
- Ford's The Searchers is a mega classic and
it is perhaps the prototypical western for us to learn from.
John Wayne's Ethan is a classic frontier hero and when his brother's family is
raided and his niece is captured, it is a trying five year search.
But when his desert smarts and hard man skills and
fighting predisposition finally reunite his family, he's not much willing or
even able to partake in it as he lingers outside and leaves alone in The Searcher's
uber famous closing shot stuck forever in the in-between that is the frontier.
(Music)
It is that same survival edge that is necessary to weather the external elements
that a burgeoning society needs in order to overcome the growing pains
of its infancy and the darkness from inside that may threaten to consume it.
This is Red River or Ride the High Country or Forty Guns, and for
our second pick on this list, it's Shane.
- A man has to be what he is, Jimmy, he can't break the mold.
I tried it, it didn't work for me.
- We want you, Shane.
- Joey, there's no living with a killing.
There's no going back from it.
- Shane is a beautiful western tale about the necessary pacifism of a developed
civilization and the violence on the back of which its peace was won.
But it is also tragic in its irony, as a portrait of the kind of man,
like The Searchers' Ethan, necessary to win the peace, but
who society cannot permit to stay to enjoy it.
This is the western in a nutshell, where the civil meets the wild,
where the bad meets good, too good to be evil,
too evil to be good, only at home in the ever shrinking frontier.
Sometimes the thing you need your frontier hero for
is a little bit of frontier justice, the kind that society could never endorse, but
sometimes needs when its more civil justice fails.
This gives rise to a particularly bloody subset of westerns
within the revenge subgenre.
Among the best here, you find Rancho Notorious and High Plains Drifter and
The Oxbow Incident and even Winchester 73.
But for our personal favorite, we're pretty partial to Unforgiven.
- You'd be William Money out in Missouri, killing women and children.
- That's right.
I killed women and children, killed just about everything that walks or
crawled one time or another.
And I'm here to kill you Little Bill for what you did to Ned.
- Unforgiven is a crowd favorite and a neo classic, shot much after most of the other
westerns that dot this list, but as much at home here as any of them.
Directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, who is as iconic a western leading man as
anyone not named John Wayne, in a tale of escaping histories.
Good men doing bad things and bad men doing good things.
It has all the classic themes back on display with another half century's
worth of digesting coloring that same old gray in slightly new shades.
Of course, westerns aren't just for thematically complex mythological
proxy heroes constructed to resolve our society's ideological conflicts.
Sometimes it's just good old fashioned cowboys and outlaws.
In fact, the outlaw western is just about the oldest kind there is,
dating all the way back to Edwin S Porter's Great Train Robbery.
And since then, we've loved One-Eyed Jacks, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and
Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.
However, for our number 7 pick, we're going with Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid.
(Music)
- How's it feel?
- It feels like times have changed.
- Times, maybe, not me.
This was Sam Peckinpah's stab at the essential western, emotional, revisionist,
based not on the history it purports to be but the myth surrounding it.
A story of doomed men in the towns they are too big for as the two titular
characters follow their fates to an all too foreseeable conclusion.
Like all the best westerns,
it seems to be made with a sense of longing, nostalgia for a wildness and
a freeness and an anarchy that the filmmakers could have never known.
But it fits, because that's mostly why we're watching too,
just like the man in black looking for an opportunity to live in our own wild world.
(Sound) Of course, where there are outlaws, there must be lawmen and
it follows as a corollary that where there are outlaw movies,
there must be lawman movies too.
Some of our favorites are the various takes on The Shootout at OK Corral,
from Tombstone to My Darling Clementine or either of the True Grits.
However, for our number 6 pick, we actually have a tie for
our favorite between Rio Bravo and High Noon.
- Listen, the judge has left town, Harvey's quit and
I'm having trouble getting deputies.
- It figures, it's all happened too sudden.
People gotta talk themselves into law and order before they do anything about it.
Maybe because down deep, they don't care.
They just don't care.
- Talking about why you haven't asked for
any new deputies, you can get some you know.
- Yeah. - How about my drivers,
you could use them.
- Suppose I got them, what'd I have?
Some well meaning amateurs, most of them worried about their wives and kids.
Burdett has 30 or 40 men, all professionals.
Only thing they're worried about is earning their pay.
No, Pat, all we'd be doing is giving them more targets to shoot at.
- Now we haven't arranged a tie here simply because we're bad pickers.
We think we're pretty good pickers actually, it's basically our job.
But these two films have a story to tell together.
You see, High Noon is a wonderful western about a marshal who has been
abandoned by his town people to fight off a gang of bandits on his own.
It was written by a former member of the Communist Party,
under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee,
which ended up earning it quite a bad name as an obvious metaphoric protest
against McCarthyism and blacklisting.
So, along came Rio Bravo, a film made by Howard Hawks and John Wayne,
as a not so secret response to High Noon, which they thought was
just about the most un-American thing they'd ever seen in their whole lives.
Filled with a sense of camaraderie and justice and
duty possessed by all the good citizens, not just a single scared sheriff.
Their dueling ideologies vividly place the western as a genre not just about cowboys
and Indians but about what it means to be an American hero.
(Sound) Now one of the more interesting things about the western's particular
form of slightly historic anachronism is that we're living in
a world where the frontier has already disappeared.
There's no more uncharted land, no Wild West that remains to be tamed.
So often we get the western as a swan song, a love letter to a bygone era
none of us remember, a lament for a world that has long since passed into legend.
It's The Wild Bunch, it's The Shootist, and it's one of our favorites,
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
(Music) - The place has sure changed.
Churches, high school, shops.
- Well, the railroad done that.
(Sound) Desert's still the same.
(Music) - Here we have John's Ford and Wayne,
again, at their most introspective, taking a long hard look at the genre for
which they are both best known.
The film is framed in retrospect, it waxes nostalgic,
tracing a line from how the west was to how it has become.
A legend on the back of an honored man,
a political career founded on the borrowed violence of a gunfighter, in a place,
like a genre where legends are sometimes more valuable than facts.
- (Sound) - You'll notice that most of our picks so
far, with the exception of Unforgiven, have been from the classic American
western era, somewhere between the 40s and the 60s.
While the death of the classic western mirrors the death of the Wild West it told
its stories about, the genre didn't just stop there.
Somewhere around the late 1960s,
the disappearance of the classic western gave way to the post-western.
In place of the Old West frontier, we moved to society's other edges.
Instead of brave cowboys, we met tired and obsolete men.
Instead of horses, we rode pickup trucks.
We got Lonesome Dove and Paris Texas and El Topo and Blazing Saddles and No Country
for Old Men and Brokeback Mountain and Hell or High Water and even Logan.
For our favorite post-western, we prefer one of its very first, McCabe & Mrs.
MIller.
- What are you wearing that gun for?
- Nothing, I just wear it.
Can't hit nothing with it.
- Well, that don't make no sense.
What kind of a gun is it?
- Colt.
- Them's good guns.
That's what I got.
Must be something wrong with it.
- Nah, it's me, I just can't shoot good.
- Well, let me see it.
Come on.
Maybe I can fix it for you.
- Okay. (Sound)
- Dubbed an anti-western by director
Robert Altman himself, McCabe & Mrs.
Miller often does exactly the opposite of what the genre would tell us to expect.
It substitutes snow drifts for tumbleweeds, fear for
heroism, and a hidden cat and mouse chase for a stare down mid-street duel.
In that way, it is a reflection of the evolving American sentiment.
Gone is the post-World War II sense of pride and heroism and
American patriotism, giving way instead to Vietnam era pessimism and shame.
The western genre tracking the shifting ideologies that underlie it.
Altman doing to the western in McCabe much the same as he did to the war film in Mash
bringing it into a newer, bleaker world where we weren't always such clear heroes.
(Music)
Just how not all westerns have much to do with the Old West,
not all of them are made in the Hollywood system either.
We'd be fools if we didn't take some time to look at one of the most reliable
sources of some of the best westerns ever shot, Italy.
These are the spaghetti western, originally low budget Italian B
movies shot in the deserts of Spain that blew up with Leone's highly visual and
musical interpretation of the American West.
They gave classics like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, For a Few Dollars More, and
A Fistful of Dollars.
And deeper cuts like Django, Bullet for the General, and The Great Silence.
But on a best of list we couldn't possibly pass over the master and
his masterpiece, Sergio Leone and his Once Upon a Time in the West.
- Morton once told me I could never be like him, now I understand why.
Wouldn't have bothered him knowing you were around somewhere alive.
- So you found out you're not a business man after all.
- Just a man.
- An ancient race.
The other mortals will be along and they'll kill it off.
- Developed with Bertolucci and Argento in response to heavy review of their very own
list of top westerns that didn't look too different from ours, frankly,
Once Upon a Time in the West was yet another of Leone's western revolutions.
Through in Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson in lieu of Eastwood,
a slower, bleaker tone than his quirkier early westerns and of course,
a score by the one and only Morricone and
you've got the makings of one of the best crafted westerns of all time.
A great, grand crescendoing symphony to the American West.
(Sound).
Now most people would stop there.
We've got Hollywood, we've got Leone and his English language pasta pictures,
time to bring it home, but that would be a disservice to a genre that has seen almost
every single country's industry take a stab at remaking and remixing it.
You have bizarro Korean westerns like The Good, The Bad and
The Weird, curry westerns like Sholay, Brazilian westerns like Black God,
White Devils, sauerkraut westerns like the Suns of Great Bear or Whity.
There are red westerns from Russia and Aussie kangaroo westerns which is
a term we totally just didn't make up, so leave us alone.
However, our favorite flavor of exotic western has got to be the Ramen western,
the lovingly named Japanese interpretation that gave us our number two pick,
Sukiyaki Western Django.
- What is that sound?
- That's the sound of the Temple bells.
- What?
- You know them AK and Ginga boys.
On a distant island, these two clans split into the reds and the whites.
Wage war.
- Sukiyaki Western Django is the ultimate post-modern statement on the continuous
cross pollination of the American West and Japan.
As inbred as a family tree shaped like a loop, Takashi Nike uses the western to lay
bare the bizarrely incestuous connection of the samurai film to the American West.
You've had Akira Kurosawa who grew up on John Ford westerns
refashioning the samurai costume drama in their style.
And then Leone ripping his cowboy plots from Kurosawa who's taking his
plots from pulp western.
When Nike comes along and brings it full circle, self-reflectively stealing from
the spaghetti, stealing from the samurai, stealing from the American west
to build an insane melting pot that you just have to see for yourself.
(Sound) Finally, in our top slot, we've been through the entire history of
the western, traced its thematic course around the world and back and
it's time to bring it home.
Because not all cowboys wear hats, not all shootouts use revolvers,
not all sheriffs ride horses, and not all westerns take place in the west.
Sometimes the genre bends in unpredictable ways to wonderful results,
like Big Trouble in Little China, the kung fu western in Shanghai Noon,
the eastern western in Red Sun, the horror western in From Dusk Till Dawn,
and our favorite, the space western.
Which is pretty on the nose in Cowboys and Aliens, an absolute riot in Serenity and
pretty god damn unforgettable in our number 1 pick, Star Wars.
- Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster (Inaudible)
- It's not over yet.
It is for me, sister, look, I ain't in this for your revolution and
I'm not in it for your Princess, I expect to be well paid.
- Over my dead body.
- (Foreign) - Yes, I'll bet you have.
(Noise) - You were all complaining on our sci-fi
lists, that's Cinefix had gone and plumb forgot about poor little old Star Wars.
But besides its interstellar setting, we don't think it actually has all that
much in common with sci-fi flicks, but it does a lot in common with is the western.
Think about it, you've got saloons and
bandits and gun duels and a frontier hero wild man who doesn't quite belong and
who can't quite leave saving the day on the borders of civilization.
And that's all because it actually fits perfectly into that same tradition of
influence, borrowing, and remixing that gave us Sukiaki Western Django.
We've got a whole fFilmschool'd episode about it which can fill in some of
the more interesting blanks.
But it's perhaps the most fun entry at the further stage in what has been an art form
long evolution of one of the most curious genres to ever hit the silver screen,
which is why it's our pick to be best western of all time.
What do you think?
Disagree with any of our picks?
Do we leave out any of your favorite westerns?
Write us a haiku about it.
Leave it in the comments below for us to make fun up and be sure to subscribe for
more Cinefix movie lists.