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 established master of his genre, John Ford, as a viable director of Westerns and turned his protg John Wayne into a breakout star. It also was one of the first Westerns to be shot on location and featured beautiful panorama shots of Monument Valley, Utah where many later Westerns were set.
4. Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpaugh-The Wild Bunch represents an evolution in the Western. At the start of the genre, the Western hero was a protector of civilization and played an integral role in the town. By the time, Peckinpaugh's Wild Bunch came around; the town was out of the equation. Wild Bunch and later "Professional Westerns" pitted gunman against gunman for personal glory (or in some cases the glory of a small group of outlaws) and it was a celebration of anyone with a gun in their hand regardless of the side of the law that they were on. The film stars Robert Ryan as a former renegade who is granted his freedom on the condition that he capture a group of outlaws (led by William Holden and Ernest Borgnine) that he was once a member of.
5. Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Leone-It is hard to have a thorough understanding of the genre without looking at it through the eyes of Italian Sergio Leone in his spaghetti Westerns. Having already made a name for himself and Clint Eastwood with the Fistful of Dollars trilogy, Leone sought to take on the Western with broader strokes. He distilled what he saw in dozens of American Westerns to create an operatic masterpiece about the demise of the American West as told through the efforts of two strangers who join forces to protect a young widow from a railroad assassin. Ennio Morricone's score, in which every character has a separate motif, has become one of the most memorable of all time.
6. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kidd, George Roy Hill-Paul Newman and Robert Redford might be considered the rock stars of the Western: They were flashy, handsome, and in this film, they give us an exciting ride from start to finish. The two, who have since become close friends and professional collaborators, star as two bandits who through resourcefulness and sheer luck eluded their captors on two continents.
7. Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks-Starring John Wayne as a sheriff who must rely on a band of deputies of questionable capacity to fend off a powerful gang, Rio Bravo epitomizes the sense of fun and adventure that the Western is capable of offering when done right. With his background in screwball comedy, Hawks is able to create one of the genre's most endearing romantic stories between John Wayne and Angie Dickinson as a mischievous traveler who joins his cause. Westerns were mostly about male bonding, and the film provides colorful personalities in Dean Martin's heroic alcoholic and Walter Brennan's crippled has-been.
8. Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood-Although many sources will include 1930's "Cimarron" and 1990's "Dances with Wolves" to the list, "Unforgiven" is the only true Western ever to win the best picture Oscar and while it's not the best Western ever made, it stands out as a very personal statement from a former icon of the genre that made him. Within Eastwood's hesitant aging gunman, the director explores the myths of the genre and how through a pulp fiction writer and hired biographer by the name of W.W. Beachamps (Saul Rubineck), the Western was glamorized through myth, even as history was being rewritten. Jamez Woolvett, Morgan Freeman, and Gene Hackman (in an Oscar-winning role) round out an excellent cast in this meditative and carefully constructed film.
9. My Darling Clementine, John Ford-The battle of the O.K. Corral was one of the very few gunfights in history to occur exactly as they were portrayed in the movies (as opposed to guys shooting each other in the back or in their sleep), so it's only natural that throughout the decades, several versions of this story would appear in the Western genre. The best of them, My Darling Clementine, is one of John Ford's moodier masterpieces.
10. McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman-Altman liked to take genres and turn them upside down and he never succeeded better than when he made this decidedly unwestern Western. Rather than give us the open panoramas of John Ford's Monument Valley, Altman gives us a rainy town in the Northwest where it always rains, love is a business and the town church is less important than the town Brothel.