Best Western movies of all time, according to this old fan, were made at least a generation ago, long before anyone worried about bigotry, sociological considerations and, quite frankly, deep thinking about being deep. Although many thinkers since have found hidden political agendas in some of the Westerns, I just like to sit back and enjoy them for what they are: great entertainment.
1. High Noon (1952) is considered the one of best Westerns ever for several reasons. First, it stars the lank, craggy Gary Cooper in the sunset of his long career, and his quietly brave Marshal Will Kane is a masterpiece of casting and acting. Additionally, the story line, which actually is a morality tale, is so starkly simple, the viewer can't help following every dramatic step.
The marshal, hero of the town for cleaning it up, is told that his deadly enemy, Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald) is on his way with three gunmen to kill Kane. The marshal and his new bride, Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly) leave on their honeymoon, but Kane feels he must return to face the bad guys. When Kane goes to his deputy and various man of the town asking for help, each turns him down for fear of being killed with him.
There's an hour or more of Kane pacing, tense waiting and ticking of the clock until Miller and his gang arrive on the noon train. The film ends with a ferocious gunfight. Kane manages to kill two of the gunmen, but as he's being cornered in a store, the third is suddenly shot in the back. It was Kane's loyal wife, Amy, who did it, but Frank Miller grabs her and threatens to kill Amy if Kane doesn't stand and be shot. She breaks free and kills Miller.
Then, as the townspeople come running to praise Kane, he glares at them in disgust, grinds his marshal's badge in the dust and rides off with his loving wife.
2. Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) is not really a western in the usual cowboy shoot-'em-up sense, although there is enough gunplay to satisfy the rabid western fan. It is the tale of three down-and-out prospectors in the early 20th Century who find gold in Mexico's Sierra Madre Mountains.
The scruffy anti-hero is Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart), a blustering tramp who teams up with old-timer Howard (Walter Houston) and young friend, Bob Curtin (Tim Holt). After heavy work on the mountain and fighting off bandits, they agree to divide the gold into three equal shares. However, Fred's normally suspicious mind slips into paranoia, and while Howard is on a medical mission to a nearby Indian village, the insanely greedy Fred shoots and wounds Bob, then makes off with their burro and bags of gold dust.
As Fred attempts to take his loot to Tampico, he's waylaid and murdered by Gold Tooth (Alfonso Bedoya) and his bandit gang. Not realizing the bags contain gold, the bandits toss them and steal Fred's clothing. They're caught an executed, and Bob and Howard dash out to the area where the bags were abandoned. They discover the gold dust has all blown away, and after a moment of disappointment, they laugh at the inevitable uselessness of all their efforts.
The acting in the film is superb, with Bogart doing his usual superior work, and when Academy Award time came around, Walter Houston won as Best Supporting Actor and his son, John Houston, won as best director.
3. Westworld (1973), in spite of its name, is another Western that doesn't quite fit the mold of cowboy vs Indians routine. Instead of going back to the traditional Western past, it creates a future world where an adult amusement park, Delos, offers almost real life adventures in three settings: the Old West, a Roman orgy and a King Arthur type of merry festival.
By today's miniaturizations and digital advancements in computers, the 1973 enormous computer room that runs Westworld seems hokey and old-fashioned. However, the concept of creating entirely lifelike robots to interact with the park's guests as thinking and acting humans. Two wealthy young vacationers, Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin) and John Blane (James Brolin) choose the Western adventure for their week in Delos.
To their delight, they can drink, kill and fornicate with realistic robots without any limits. One particularly nasty one, a black-clad gunfighter (Yul Brynner) shows up several times, challenges the guys and regularly gets gunned down in a realistic bloody scene.
Then, the entire park's robot system begins to break down, as the robots who are supposed to be victims begin to fight back. When the gunfighter kills John with real bullets, it is the beginning of a wholesale killing of guests in all three parks. The gunfighter doggedly pursues Peter through all areas of the park, until Peter manages to throw acid on the android and then set it on fire.
4. The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) is a very claustraphobic Western, with everything taking place within a clearing where a posse has gathered. Like "High Noon", the story is wonderfully simple and easy to get into. The posse has captured three guys herding some cattle, and accuses them of killing a local rancher and stealing his cattle. The three accused are Don Martin (Dana Andrews and honest rancher and father, Juan Martinez (Anthony Quinn) a Mexican drifter and Monty Smith (Paul Hurst) a confused old man.
Everyone in the posse wants to hang the men immediately, except for two who object. They are local cowboys Gil Carter (Henry Fonda) and Art Croft (Harry Morgan), who doubt the guilt of the men, and ask that the mob at least wait until the sheriff arrives before hanging. They are overruled by the passionate hatred of the mob, and the men are strung up. Of course, several minutes later, the sheriff arrives with the news that the real killers have already been captured.
5. Blazing Saddles (1974) proves I could never compose a list of favorite movies of any genre without including at least one crazy example by Mel Brooks. This disgraceful film is a send-up of every cliche in every cowboy movie since "The Great Train Robbery" in 1903.
For his blasphemy against the law west of the Pecos, Mel Brooks should have been taken to the town square and hanged by his neck. What am I saying? This is one of my favorite cowboy movies of all time, and it took the insane Brooks and his gang great comic actors to refute and burlesque western legend in ways that cause any fan fits of uncontrollable laughter.
Brooks, who also acts the part of the cross-eyed Governor Lepetomane, has stuffed his script just about every racist cliche possible. He's also a feathered Indian chief who massacres a wagon train of whites, but, with a Yiddish accent, he lets the "Schvartze" family go free. When Black Bart (Cleavon Little) becomes sheriff of a Western town full of unbelievably stupid whites, he meets all the stereotype racial insults.
He teams up with drunken gunfighter, Jim (Gene Wilder), and together they manage to clean up the town and get rid of the baddies. Along the way, of course, there must be a black guy and white girl cliche to satisfy any redneck bigot who may have missed all the other hints.
So, Bart gets to turn out the lights with the town trollop, Lili Von Schtupp (Yiddish for the sex act), as magnificently done by Madeline Kahn in a send-up comic imitation of Marlene Dietrich's famed singing dance hall whore in an old Western, "Destry Rides Again."
The ending is, if possible, even goofier than the convoluted Western story. Probably Brooks ran out of jokes, or just for the hell of it, he had all the actors break into a fight, leave the 19th Century Warner Brothers studio lot and emerge onto today's Hollywood Boulevard. The two heroes, arm in arm go into Grauman's Chinese theater to see their movie. Go figure?
6. The Shootist (1976) is quite obviously John Wayne's final film. He plays a cancer-ridden aging gunfighter named J.B. Books who comes to Carson City, Nevada, in to set his affairs in order. He gets a room at widow Rogers (Lauren Bacall) boarding house, where she lives with son Gillom (Ron Howard).
When two of his many enemies tries to kill Books in his room, he blasts them. Mrs. Rogers, a Quaker, orders him out, but he asks for a couple of more days. He knows he hasn't long to live, so he sets up a visit to a town saloon where he knows three more of his enemies are waiting.
The final gun battle is, like the one in "High Noon" a sort of morality tale. Books kills the three bad guys, but is wounded. When Gillom comes running into the bar to help, he arrives at the moment when the bartender empties a shotgun into the old shootist's back. Gillom grabs Books' pistol from the floor and kills the bartender.
As Gillom stands there, smoking gun in hand, the dying Books looks at him with concern. The unspoken question is: will this Quaker boy now become a gunfighter? Gillom, with a grimace of disgust, throws the gun away. Books nods in approval and dies.
7. They Died With Their Boots On (1941) isn't a typical Western of cowtowns and cowboys, but because it tells one of the most thrilling legends in Western history, the Battle of Little Big Horn, it always ranks way up there with me. Errol Flynn swashbuckles all over the place as George Armstrong Custer, and Mrs. Custer is long-time Flynn movie co-star, Olivia DeHaviland.
The story, highly fictionalized but constantly entertaining, covers Custer's days at West Point as a record-holder in punishment demerits, through his supposedly-unintentional promotion to major general and personal heroics in Civil War combat, to his glorious death at Little Big Horn with his Seventh Cavalry troopers. History shows that Custer was actually an impulsive, foolishly brave, often stupid officer, whose final errors of judgement doomed him and his men to "die with their boots on". But, what the hell, it made a memorable movie.
8. Fort Apache (1948) proves it is practically illegal to compose a top ten Western movie list without John Wayne being in at least two of them. In my case, it will be three. This one is a rousing U.S. Cavalry epic that includes most of director John Ford's usual list of favorite actors for his films.
I also thought he may have been influenced by the theme of "They Died With Their Boots On", because it concerns a martinet Colonel Thursday (Henry Fonda) who ultimately, and quite stupidly, leads his troop into an Indian ambush where all are wiped out. John Wayne, as his subordinate Captain York, is the calm, experienced officer who attempts to prevent the disaster. However, at the end of the film, York, now a colonel and leader of the troop, tells reporters that, like Custer, Thursday was a valiant hero whose name will go down in history, but York grimly remains silent about how stupidity was the real reason for Thursday's actions.
There's an interesting side story about the colonel's teen daughter (Shirley Temple) and her love affair with young Lieutenant O'Rourke (John Agar). In real life, the young lovers were married after the movie, and lived happily ever after for about 18 months. Agar died of alcoholism at age 35, while Shirley remarried, bore four children and went on to a distinguished government career as Ambassador to Czechoslovakia and later to Ghana.
9. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) is about the breezy adventures of a pair of happy-go-lucky bank and train robbers, Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford). The new 20th Century is dawning, and there is no more tolerance for old-fashioned desperados, so they make one heist too many and are tracked down by a posse. They arrive at a tall cliff above a river, their only escape, but Sundance shamefully admits he can't swim. Butch laughs and shouts that the fall will probably kill them anyway.
The do get away, but meet their fate when holed up in a failed bank robbery in Bolivia. As they face platoons of police guns, and with a final joke, a grin and a wink, they burst out the door into sure death with their guns blazing.
10. The Searchers (1956) is one of John Wayne's more thoughtful films, and for director John Ford. Although Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards, is a Western man of action, he's forced to decide between his deep hatred and racial prejudice for Native Americans and his basic decency. After surviving a Comanche raid where his family is killed and niece carried off, he is asked by his nephew, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) to help rescue Debbie (Natalie Wood).
The search takes nearly five years, and while Martin's intent is to rescue her, Ethan plans to kill her for being "soiled" by living with "the savages". After a harrowing rescue, and Ethan aims his rifle at the girl, Martin steps in front of her to save her life. Ethan finally relents, and the three return to town just in time for Martin to reclaim his girlfriend at the last second before she is married to another man.