by Orrin Konheim

Created on: August 31, 2008

Here is a guide to the top 10 definitive Westerns of all time:
1. The Searchers, John Ford-While High Noon might be a perfectly told story, the Searchers might be considered the most emotionally resonant Western ever made. Easily one of the high points of director John Ford and actor John Wayne's career, the film is present on virtually every list of top American films. It even had such a profound effect on John Wayne that he named his son Ethan after the story's main character. The story revolves around a tortured ex-Confederate soldier who returns home to his brother's house as a Comanche squad attacks his home, kills his brother and kidnaps his niece. Ethan and his adopted nephew spend years wandering the desert in pursuit of the Indians that abducted his niece, but the two have different ideas in mind for what to do with her when they find her. The powerful epic confronts obsession, hypocrisy, and racist undertones in Ethan's attitude towards the Indians which was somewhat of a first for Ford.

2. High Noon, Fred Zinneman- As a piece of storytelling, High Noon is virtually perfect. Gary Cooper plays a town sheriff who gets married at the start of the film but before he is to start a new life with his wife, he feels compelled to save the town from a foursome of outlaws that are set to arrive on the noon train. With only ninety minutes to prepare and a new bride who is anxious to have her husband survive to the honeymoon, the sheriff must rally the town for support or stand alone. The tension in the film is palpable and culminates in a gun fight that does more with just five participants than any Rambo or James Bond film. The film was one of the first to introduce a theme song (a very poignant tune: "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling") over the opening credits and the film's length (85 minutes) and the dramatic time (the clock at the start of the film indicates that the story took 105 minutes) are nearly the same. Think of this as the precursor to a TV show like 24.

3. Stagecoach, John Ford-There is a theory in film that if you get characters from different social classes into a confined space, you get a microcosm of society. In the Western, this played out best in a film called Stagecoach. A crooked banker, an often-misidentified whiskey drummer, a prostitute, a sheriff, a coach driver, a drunken doctor, an expectant mother, and Southern gentlemen all board a coach to Lordsburg, Arizona together and in the face of adversity, some turn out to be heroes. This film

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