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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.

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