Time Out's 50 Greatest Westerns: Now Disc. 1. McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971)

But it is undoubtedly a masterpiece, albeit a flawed one, and worth $44m of anyone?s money.

Is this critic smoking crack? Heaven's Gate is NOT a masterpiece. It might have been bearable
if it had had a story people cared about, some forward movement, interesting characters to root for,
or an exciting and charismatic villain. In other words, something resembling a movie.

Pretty pictures do not a movie make.
CC: Terence Malick.

 

And they rank it higher than a lot of better movies.

 

But this is a terrible, terrible movie. It's a 4 hour epic built around a performance from Kris Kristoffersen. And they wonder why it failed.

 

11. My Darling Clementine (1946)

Dir John Ford (Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature)

Orange county

"John Ford?s lyrical, definitive take on the none-more-iconic ?Gunfight at the OK Corral? stands as a slow-burn paean to the righteous moral cornerstones of a nascent American society. Henry Fonda plays it satisfyingly low and lazy as Wyatt Earp, the friendly ex-lawman-turned-rancher whose wrath is courted by the no-good Clanton brood, and who decides the best route to revenge would be to pin a tin star on his shirt and take up office as the marshal of Tombstone. Noticeably light on stock western monkeyshines (bar the final, purportedly technically accurate, shoot-out), the film counterpoints the rapid modernisation of Tombstone with the regressive evil of the Clantons, and the encroaching threat of violence is made all the more significant as Earp begins to find his place in the world with the help of religion, patriotism, friendship (Victor Mature, heartbreaking as ailing sharp-shooter ?Doc? Holliday) and a newfound love for Bostonian schoolteacher, Clementine (Cathy Downs). DJ"

Victor Mature looks as consumptive as a raging bull, but he's otherwise surprisingly effective. And Fonda has tremendous grace.

 

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966)

Dir Sergio Leone (Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef)

AAAaaaAAAaaaAAAAAA! Wow wow wow?

"We think of the western as the most unreconstructed of genres: manly men doing manly things. But looking through this list, it?s amazing how many different ?uses? the genre has: a political tool, a mode of social protest and, of course, a way to explore and explain differing concepts of masculinity. In fact, it?s surprising how few of them are purely, single-mindedly dedicated to just telling a damn good yarn. Luckily, we?ve got ?The Good, the Bad and the Ugly? for that. This is one of the absolute peaks of pure narrative cinema: a story which spans many months, hundreds of miles and armies of extras, all of it dedicated to keeping an audience engrossed. Sure, there?s meaning here if you want it (War is absurd! People are ********!) but this is a movie which works so astonishingly well on the surface that digging any deeper doesn?t just feel pointless, but ever so slightly wrong.

And it?s one of those surprisingly rare movies which seem overfamiliar until you rewatch it. You?re always knocked back by how much there is to rediscover: everyone remembers the big set pieces ? Tuco?s ?hanging?, the cigars in the desert, the dusty uniforms, the prison-camp beatings, the battle at the bridge, the final showdown, the entire score ? but there?s so much more to the movie than that. Remember the exploding hotel room, or the fight on the train, or Tuco in the caves, or the heartbreaking monastery sequence? This is not so much a movie, more an entire world which Leone is just hiring out to us for three hours at a time. TH"

It's a highly entertaining movie, but somehow you get the feeling that Leone would like to take his obsession with the US Civil War and run with it.

I think I would rank "Once Upon a Time" higher, too; which this list didn't.

 

9. Decision at Sundown (1957)

Dir Budd Boetticher (Randolph Scott, Noah Beery Jr, HM Wynant)

Wife! Be like a rose

"There?s surely a piece to be written comparing Budd Boetticher?s ?Randown cycle? ? the seven films he made in collaboration with Randolph Scott, starting in 1954 with ?Seven Men From Now? and concluding in 1960 with ?Comanche Station? ? with French maestro Eric Rohmer?s Six Moral Tales. Their similarities may not be immediately obvious, but both series of films saw their directors dealing in simple, moral conundrums and essentially making small but calculated variations on the same simple set up. Where Rohmer traded in the subtleties of temptation and desire, Boetticher examines the specifics of revenge, its applications, its outcomes and its psychological tolls.

In the relentlessly grim ?Decision at Sundown?, Charles G Lang?s script ramps up the moral ambiguities in Randolph?s Scott?s quest for reprisals. He?s typically out to find the varmints what shot his wife (?Ride Lonesome?) or who left buckshot in some cheeky scamp who asked him to pick up some taffy from town (?The Tall T?), but here the stakes are less easy to fathom. Conventional notions of heroes and villains are thrown out. Good has the capacity for evil and evil the capacity for good. Bart Allison (Scott) has got his crosshairs fixed on Tate Kimbrough (John Carroll), the dandy gang boss and head honcho of the grubby border town Sunrise. Kimbrough, we?re told ? and for a while, we believe ? killed Allison?s wife, but as the dark details of this accusation emerge, we soon appreciate that Allison is out to defend a severely warped memory of his late wife that is rooted in his conservative conception of womanhood rather than the bleak reality of the situation. Stunning. DJ"

Haven't seen this, though I have seen three other Boetticher movies, all of which were good.

 

8. Johnny Guitar (1954)

Dir Nicholas Ray (Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge)

Woman trouble

"Nicholas Ray?s resplendent Western bitchfest, ?Johnny Guitar?, was emblematic of the tireless efforts of the Cahiers du Cinema critics of the late 1950s and 1960 to celebrate small-scale genre films that might have otherwise slipped through the cracks of history. Indeed, Godard liked it so much that he had Jean-Paul Belmondo puckishly cite it as historically relevant viewing to his maid in ?Pierrot le Fou?. Similarly, Truffaut sent Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve to catch the film in ?Mississippi Mermaid?, after which Belmondo accurately notes that, ?It?s not about horses and guns. It?s about people and emotions.?

It?s also ? surprisingly for a Western ? about sexual longing, and not always of the heterosexual variety. Joan Crawford tears apart the screen as Vienna, the ball-busting proprietress of a casino that?s been built to take advantage of the town?s impending railroad connection. She?s called up an old beau, fancy-boy gunslinger-turned-troubadour Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden) to cover her back during a series of bitter confrontations with hard-nosed town busybody, Emma (Mercedes McCambridge). There?s love, hate, intrigue, politics and action, but these facets amount to mere window-dressing when placed next to the film?s revisionist central idea of having Crawford?s character exhibit the brusque attributes we might commonly associate with such mythic creatures as John Wayne or Randolph Scott. Budget-wise, this was a tiny production, but that didn?t prevent Ray matching the bombastic sound and fury and heady emotionalism of studio behemoths like ?Gone with the Wind?. DJ"

It's definitely a very strange film.

 

7. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Dir John Ford (James Stewart, John Wayne, Vera Miles)

?This is the west, Sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.?

"Five years after the entrancing bitterness of ?The Searchers?, John Ford reached a kind of accommodation with his favourite mythologies in this bundle of contradictions. This western, that opens just a few years before World War I, is a tragedy shot through with mischief and boisterous humour. And it?s a film that comes to bury the Old West but can?t help but praise it.

The end of the frontier life is heralded by the collision of James Stewart?s principled eastern lawyer, Stoddard, with rancher Tom Doniphon, played with rough charm by John Wayne. Stoddard?s civilisation competes with Doniphon?s western gun law as they both try to free the town of Shinbone from the grip of outlaw Liberty Valance and vie for the love of the same woman. It?s a contrast that?s played out from the start, when Stoddard, now an ageing and respected senator, arrives back in Shinbone for Doniphon?s funeral only to find the great symbol of the west ? it?s John Wayne in that pine box after all ? is bound for a pauper?s grave. As Stoddard relates his story in flashback to the editor of the Shinbone Star, the layers of western legend are peeled away, exposing not lies but a collective will to mythologise and an amnesia necessary for progress.

Ford?s vision is remarkably unsentimental. He pays tribute to the Doniphons who built America while accepting that that their usefulness died with the frontier. Strangely, for all the director?s identification with The Duke, it?s Stewart who delivers what is surely a deliberate reference to the journey Ford has taken. ?When I first came to Shinbone,? he begins, ?I came by stagecoach?? More than 20 years after Ford?s own arrival with ?Stagecoach?, he had reinvented the western again and in ?Liberty Valance? bequeathed a sad, warm-hearted reproach to modernity?s forgetfulness. PF"

The problem with this movie is that Stewart and Wayne are 30 years too old for their roles. (They were 55 and 54 respectively).

 

6. Dead Man (1995)

Dir Jim Jarmusch (Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Crispin Glover)

Songs of innocence and experience

"Easily the bleakest film on a very bleak list, Jim Jarmusch?s intoxicating and dismally poetic exploration of physical and spiritual death sees Johnny Depp as the coincidently named traveller, William Blake. He?s a meek and mild bookkeeper whose journey into the abyss commences with a strangely confrontational tête-à-tête with a train fireman played by a blackface Crispin Glover. It then proceeds to more unsettling as the minutes tick by. He arrives at the hellish industry settlement of Machine, only to be forced straight from it as a wanted man when he catches a bullet in his chest and steals the prize stallion from factory owner Robert Mitchum? and murders his son.

Though it quotes liberally (and jokingly) from the book of western lore, the structure of Jarmusch?s film is more like an epic poem ? the tall tales of Chaucer infused with the macabre gothic of Poe ? while its style comes over as a malevolent homage to Tarkovsky?s bucolic quest for spiritual enlightenment, ?Andrei Rublev?, or to Bosch?s ?The Garden of Earthly Delights?. Blake is helped along his deathly trail (which takes in a who?s-who cast of American supporting character actors) by a Native American outcast called Nobody (Gary Farmer). A brilliant scene in which he?s scrambling through the brush calling ?Nobody! Nobody! Nobody!? encapsulates the film?s strange and surreal beauty. DJ"

Never even heard of it.

 

5. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

Dir Clint Eastwood (Eastwood, Chief Dan George, Sandra Locke)

What?s so civil about war, anyway? (© Axl Rose Holdings)

"In much the same way that Josey wants to put the violence and horror of the Civil War behind him, so, in 1976, America was emerging from a war in Vietnam that had split the country in various ways. The search for harmony that?s at the core of ?Josey Wales? undeniably mirrors this trauma. The spite, darkness and Nixonian self-destruction of 1973?s ?High Plains Drifter? are replaced by the calm resolve, humanity and Southern gentility of the oncoming Carter administration for a film that puts peace pipe before pistol every time.

All of which makes it sound like some high-handed sermon, rather than the rollicking road movie it is ? a ?Little Miss Sunshine? for the Smith & Wesson set. On the run from bounty hunters and Union Redlegs, Josey becomes a legend in his own time, but he wants nothing more than to find somewhere to settle down and get back to the land. Things are complicated by the fact that his reputation is such that everyone he comes across wants a piece of him ? from soldiers and opportunists desperate to be the one who gunned down ?Mr Chain-Blue Lightnin? himself? to the hippie-tastic band of waifs and strays he picks up along the way. The salty script is spot on, Bruce Surtees?s photography is magnificent and, last but not least, the lithe, liquid way in which Clint pulls on those two long-barrel Walker Colts is sheer poetry. ALD"

 

4. Winchester ?73 (1950)

Dir Anthony Mann (James Stewart, Shelley Winters, Dan Duryea)

The gun club

"1953?s ?The Naked Spur?, in which a counter-cast Jimmy Stewart plays the leading ma, usually tops any list of Anthony Mann?s westerns. But we?ve gone for this stranger, earlier work, not only for its distinctive roundelay structure, but in recognition of its utter pessimism towards the notion that guns and gunplay stand as the last bastion of honour and justice in the Old West.

Though Stewart is on splendidly prickly form as stubborn bounty hunter-by-proxy Lin McAdam, the real star of the film is a limited-run Winchester repeater rifle that he manages to win in a Dodge City competition of stunt shooting. His vicious competitor, ?Dutch Henry? Brown (Stephen McNally), subsequently mugs him and relieves him of the phallic firearm as he?s leaving town, revealing to us that Lin and his faithful cohort ?High-Spade? Frankie Wilson (Millard Mitchell) are actually on the trail of this dastardly killer, for reasons that remain cloudy until the shocking final moments.

While Mann expertly switches back and forth between the unpredictable progress of his two protagonists, his real interest is the fate of the rifle, as it falls in and out of the hands of a hustling bar owner, a mob of belligerent Indians and eventually the violent outlaw ?Waco? Johnnie Dean (Dan Duryea). It seems that anyone who succumbs to the charms of this gorgeously crafted firearm ends up in a pine box, and in that sense the film can perhaps be read as a brittle parable about the futility of resorting to arms as a shortcut to peace. Nuclear warhead owners, take note. DJ"

If you can ignore the inadequate and not-in-period Shelly Winters, a great film. Careful watching yields Rock Hudson as an Indian and Tony Curtis as a soldier.

 

3. The Searchers (1956)

Dir John Ford (John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Natalie Wood)

Homer, Homer on the range

"Just what is it about ?The Searchers? that makes it so fascinating and compelling even after all these years? Years during which ? get this! ? hostile intolerance toward hard-put ethnic minorities has become somehow unacceptable. Why in the name of hell?s horses does John Wayne?s Ethan Edwards have such a righteous racist hard-on for the Comanche, and why do we, as modern audiences, still find his despicable attitudes not only intriguing but mesmerising? The plot sees Wayne?s embittered Civil War veteran take up the search for a niece (Natalie Wood) who has been abducted by the Indians, who, Ford takes minor pains to inform us, are as smart, conflicted and enlightened as anyone else on the continent. So follows an obsessive, futile and disconcerting attempt to rescue and reintegrate Wood ? long since ?gone native? ? into a society to which Edwards himself has no real connection.

Both the hero and villain of the piece, Edwards is a foul, bruised wanderer; a questionable hero with no one awaiting his return. His hatred has no home and deserves none. If by the end of the film he has shifted from a state of outright fury to something approaching tolerance, then he is at least closer to humanity. It may not be much, but it?s a desperate something. When, however, at the last ? and in one of the most iconic shots of all cinema ? the door shuts on a lonely, wounded Ethan Edwards, it is clear that his search has only just begun. ALD"

This isn't my favorite Ford, but it is very good. Possibly Wayne's best performance, which helps you to ignore the Fordian low comedy, and the inadequate actor who plays his younger sidekick.

 

2. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)

Dir Sam Peckinpah (Kris Kristofferson, James Coburn, Bob Dylan)

Mama, put my guns in the ground

"By 1973, the western had come full circle, from tool of the establishment during the Wayne-Ford years to a countercultural playground populated by disaffected loners, social dropouts, anti-violence activists and rock ?n? roll rebels. And there was nothing on Earth cooler than an outlaw: the real William Bonney may have been a jumped-up teen murderer (and former cheesemaker, fact fans) who barely knew the real Garrett, himself a foul-tempered saloon owner-turned-lawman who shot the Kid in cold blood and without warning. But in Peckinpah?s hands, and with the weathered faces of Kris Kristofferson and James Coburn, these men became beautiful icons, scruffy saints for a self-consciously screwed-up generation. ?Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid? is a film with few pretensions to realism: the world it creates is authentically shabby, dusty and wild, but the poetic antiheroes who populate it are knowingly grandiose, gloriously flawed and elegantly doomed. Billy even throws his arms open, Christ-like, when he?s first arrested: Jesus with a six-gun.

And yet, pretentious though it may occasionally be, there?s simply nothing like Peckinpah?s film anywhere else in the western genre, and perhaps in cinema as a whole. It?s a film where image, music and meaning fuse inextricably to create unexpected and unprecedented moments of high emotion: that shot of Billy, arms akimbo, would be nothing without Dylan?s music, or Kristofferson?s beatific half-smile, or Peckinpah?s glorious early-morning lighting, or the knowledge that Billy?s surrender is inevitable, and so is his escape, and so is his death. These moments recur throughout the film: the death of Slim Pickens?s Sheriff, as the heavenly choirs of ?Knockin? on Heaven?s Door? come drifting along the riverbank; the giddy ?turkey shoot?; the climactic march of doom; the framing scenes of Garrett?s murder by the very men who sent him after Billy. The result is perhaps the strangest and richest of all westerns, the point where old-school mythologising and countercultural revisionism join forces to create something new: the existentialist outlaw, a cowboy Christ, a Bible myth for modern America. TH"

 

A stone-cold classic of the highest order.

 

McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971)

Dir Robert Altman (Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois)

Another good man done gone

"By the early 1970s, the western had boxed itself into a canyon. Woop-wooping Indians, fusty range wars and duded-up gunslingers were the stuff of mockery in films like ?Blazing Saddles?. It was only by breaking the western down and reassembling it bit by bit that it could break new ground. No film re-imagines the western myth as powerfully and heartbreakingly as Robert Altman?s dreamlike, snow-covered masterpiece, ?McCabe & Mrs. Miller?.

This deceptively simple frontier story follows John ?Pudgy? McCabe (Warren Beatty), a gambler, businessman and alleged gunfighter ? a fact he never confirms or denies ? as he arrives in the mining town of Presbyterian Church, high in the cold, damp, muddy folds of the Pacific Northwest. He plans to open a brothel with the aid of Julie Christie?s plain-talking cockney madam, Constance Miller. Clad in a huge bearskin coat and wearing a bowler hat and beard, McCabe bears no relation to western protagonists of old. Sure, he wears a gun, but only for form?s sake. Our hero is a pimp, dandy, coward and fool. McCabe?s thriving brothel, under the stewardship of Mrs Miller, becomes a civilising influence. It?s also a democratic concern, where one man?s money is no better or worse than the next man?s.

No doubt many will quarrel over Altman?s film topping our list ahead of favourites such as ?The Searchers? or ?Unforgiven?. It?s not even set in what we think of as the west. But we should remember that the frontier expanded in all directions ? into the harsh northern territories as well as the furnace-hot dog patches of California.

Some may argue that the film lacks suspense or action. And yet, it contains one of the sweatiest stand-offs on celluloid as McCabe fronts up and then caves in to three company stooges sent by mining barons to persuade him to relinquish his holdings. And the film?s finale is one of the most gripping, explosive and naturalistic gunfights in all cinema. It?s also an extraordinarily beautiful film. Altman offers a portrait of the west that?s dingy, grimy, hazy, stinky and chilled to the bone. The soundtrack is also eminently important to the film?s success, with Leonard Cohen's ballads lending the proceedings a fateful air, a sense that some things are written in stone, and Pudgy McCabe?s fate was sealed the moment he arrived in Presbyterian Church. ALD"

My favorite Western is *not* directed by Robert Altman.

My theory is: you either like Altman, or you don't. I have no affinity for him at all, and can usually be seen snoring under my seat.