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 SAGEBRUSH SUMMER |
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A GOLDEN DOZEN |
These classic westerns
will stand up forever
of TheColumnists.com
If you've seen literally hundreds of western movies from Edwin S. Porter's "The Great Train Robbery" of 1903 through such 21st century classics as Kevin Costner's "Open Range" and Ron Howard's "The Missing," it isn't easy to narrow your favorites down to just a dozen titles.
But I finally figured out a rationale for doing it. Suppose you had to watch all 12 films that you picked over and over each year for the rest of your life? Well, that certainly narrows the list down some. For instance, there's a lot I like about King Vidor's "Duel in the Sun," but Jennifer Jones' performance isn't one of them. No way could I sit through that fingernails-on-a-blackboard performance another 15 or 20 times.
Yet when I made up a list of just the westerns I actually DO watch a couple of times a year, I still had too many.
So I decided to eliminate the silent westerns,
which eliminated James Cruze's "The Covered Wagon,"
John Ford's "The Iron Horse," William S. Hart in "Tumbleweeds,"
Tom Mix in "Just Tony" and "Riders of the Purple
Sage" and Richard Dix in "The Vanishing American,"
all worthy titles.
Then I decided, quite arbitrarily, to list the female-oriented westerns separately which spared me having to skip four of my all-time favorites--"Johnny Guitar" with Joan Crawford and three Barbara Stanwyck classics, "Annie Oakley," "The Furies" and "Trooper Hook."
But when I got down to my rock bottom 12 favorites, I still found I'd left lots of great westerns out in the cold, including Joh;n Ford's "The Searchers," which many critics believe to be the all-time best western; "Yellow Sky" with Gregory Peck and Richard Widmark; John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance"; "Cat Ballou" with Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin; Anthony Mann's "Winchester '73" and "The Man From Laramie," both with James Stewart; "True Grit" with John Wayne's Oscar-winning performance; Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" and "The Outlaw Josey Wales" with Clint Eastwood.
If he left those out, you may be thinking, then my "golden dozen" had REALLY better be good. Well, I know how you feel. So, let's see if I can justify my picks for you. These picks, by the way, are not ranked in order of preference, but rather by year of release, starting with the oldest films first:
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with John Wayne, Claire Trevor, Thomas Mitchell, Andy Devine, John Carradine. Directed by John Ford. Academy Awards went to Mitchell as Best Supporting Actor and to the four who did the musical score: Richard Hageman, Frank Harling, John Leipold, Leo Shuken. The film also was nominated for Best PIcture of 1939, Ford for Best Director as well as nominations for cinematography, set decoration and film editing. |
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This low budget western was based on Ernest Haycock's short story
"Stage to Lordsburg," but was really inspired by an
even earlier story by Guy DeMaupassant about passengerx on in
a carriage who shun a "fallen woman" passenger, but
eventually need to rely on her help. John Wayne is The Ringo
Kid, who's a suspected outlaw on the run. He hails the crowded
stagecoach to a halt and joins the motley crew aboard, including
prostitute Claire Trevor, gambler John Carradine, drunken physician
Thomas Mitchell and so on. It's a tightly-made, character-based
film that gave veteran western star Wayne his first really significant
role--and made him a major movie star after nearly a decade in
"B" pictures. It was Ford's first film to utilize,
quite effectively, his favorite outdoor location: Monument Valley,
Utah, and launched him on a lifelong collaboration with star
Wayne. "Stagecoach" was remade twice, but the original
remains an iconic masterpiece--loaded with scenes you've seen
repeated scores of times since, but never as effectively as Ford
did them in this truly great film.
| 2. MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946) with Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Linda Darnell, Walter Brennan, Jane Darwell, Cathy Downs, Tim Holt, Alan Mowbray, John Ireland, Ward Bond, Grant Withers. Directed by John Ford. |
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How many times have you seen Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday face the Clantons at the O.K. corral? Too many, I'm sure. But this is the best ever telling of the story--with lanky, slow-talkin' Hank Fonda as Earp and robust-looking Victor Mature as the supposedly tubercular Doc Holliday facing Walter Brennan, as ornery as he ever was on the screen, as Pa Clanton, mean-spirited "dad" to a band of rotten gunslingers. Fonda was never better and director Ford would bring him back two years later for an even more impressive performance in his classic "Fort Apache." Fonda is supported by one of the best casts Ford ever assembled, including three-time Oscar winner Brennan, Oscar-winner Darwell from his "Grapes of Wrath" and future leading men Tim HOlt and John Ireland. And if you think the gunfight is the highlight of this classic, guess again. I'd say it's the oddly romantic, truly offbeat dancing sequence between Fonda and Darnell earlier in the picture. I love this movie and can't see it often enough.
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3. RED
RIVER (1948) Oscar nominations for Borden Chase for the original story and Christian Nyby for film editing. (Nyby later became a director, under Hawks' wing, and directed one of the most famous of all sci-fi films: "The Thing From Another World." |
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Until maybe "Lonesome Dove" came along, this was by far the greatest of all trail drive movies--an epic story of the hardships of the trail, which began with Borden Chase's story in the Saturday Evening Post magazine. The heart of the story is the tortured relationship between trail boss John Wayne and his not quite ready for manhood son, played by Montgomery Clift in his first-ever movie role. (Clift's first film seen by moviegoers was "The Search," but he worked on "Red River" first.) One can only imagine how things went on the set between the macho Wayne and Clift, who was a closeted gay man who didn't take well to saddle sores. Whatever, the tension between Wayne and Clift looks real and it adds tremendous credibility to their on-screen relationship. This was Wayne's first real heavy character part, playing an older, graying man who isn't exactly all that likeable. The musical score by Dimitri Tiomkin is truly rousing, the supporting cast fabulous and leading lady Joanne Dru was at her most alluring in 1948. She later married and divorced co-star John Ireland, an under-appreciated actor who was Oscar-nominated a year later for his supporting role in "All the King's Men." Wayne and Clift are really magnificent in this never-a-dull-momen, character-driven wester. "Red River" was remade for TV in 1988 with James Arness, a protege of John Wayne, in the Wayne role.
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4. THE
GUNFIGHTER (1950) Andre DeToth and William Bowers were Oscar-nominated for their original story. (DeToth is best remembered as the director of the most famous of all 3-D movies, "House of Wax.") |
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Many consider this the first of the so-called "psychological" westerns. Gregory Peck plays a gunfighter who's trying to live down his past, but young punks (like Skip Homeir) keep calling him out, hoping to make their reputations over his aging body. Peck is superb in this dark western that followed closely on his earlier dark western "Yellow Sky." Like John Wayne in "Red River," Peck risked his star status by taking on the role of an aging man who wasn't exactly a role model for Boy Scouts. But the risk was worth it, enhancing Peck's standing in the business and leading to more complex roles that eventually led to his Oscar-winning performance in "To Kill A Mockingbird."
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5. HIGH
NOON (1952) Cooper won the Best Actor Academy Award and composer Dimitri Tiomkin won two Oscars--one for his musical score, the other for Best Song, "High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me)," written with lyricist Ned Washington. Film editors Elmo Williams and Harry Gerstad also won Oscars. "High Noon" was nominated for Best Picture of 1952 and Carl Foreman's screenplay also was Oscar-nominated. |
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As if that weren't enough to discourage prospects for "High Noon," it seemed at first to be a conventional western about a sheriff facing a shootout on the main street--not exactly a fresh concept for westerns.
But nobody who sat down to watch "High Noon" failed to notice it was an amazing new turn for the western. First, Foreman and Zinnemann conceived it as taking place in exactly the running time of the movie. As the clock ticked down toward noon, the suspense built and built, thanks to Cooper's best-ever performance, the taut direction of Zinnemann and the lean, but intensely dramatic screenplay. Everywhere Cooper went to round up men to stand with him against the men who had vowed to kill him, he got excuses. Meanwhile, this was his wedding day--to a Quaker girl (Grace Kelly) who had demanded he turn in his badge and never pick up a gun again!
What nobody seemed to know at the time was that Foreman was telling his own story in this classic western. He was the sheriff--a screenwriter who decided to stand up against the witch-hunters led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, then was abandoned by nearly all his left-wing pals, who feared they, too, would be blacklisted. (Foreman settled in England, wrote the Oscar-winning Best Film of 1957, "Bridge on the River Kwai," then wrote and produced the mega-hit "The Guns of Navarone," before returning to the U.S., his reputation redeemed.)
Other factors combined to make "High Noon" a modest hit--the rising tide of interest in Grace Kelly, the revival of Cooper's career with his second Oscar and the chart-topping hit record by Frankie Laine of the "High Noon" theme (sung on the soundtrack, behind the opening credits, by veteran western star Tex Ritter, father of actor John Ritter.)
The result: "High Noon" did the
typical western shootout tale so well that it has become the
standard by which all future shootout movies are measured. It's
an endlessly entertaining film, loaded with perfect supporting
performances (even bit player Jack Elam, as the town drunk, is
marvelous!) throughout and a reminder that Gary Cooper was one
of the greatest western heroes in movie history.
Director Zinnemann won the Best Director Oscar the following
year for "From Here to Eternity" and a second Oscar
for "A Man For All Seasons" in 1966. Bad guy Lee Van
Cleef went on to become a western hero in Italian "spaghetti"
westerns a decade later while fellow bad guy Sheb Wooley had
a chart-topping pop record hit, "One-Eyed Purple People
Eater."
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6. SHANE (1953) with Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, Jack Palance, Brandon deWilde, Ben Johnson, Elisha Cook Jr., Emile Meyer, John Dierkes, Edgar Buchanan. Directed by George Stevens. Leon Shamroy won the Oscar for his awesome color cinematography. "Shane" was nominated as Best Picture of 1953. Nominations also went to director Stevens, screenwriter A.B. Guthrie Jr. and Jack Palance as Best Supporting Actor. |
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This is my all-time favorite western--a perfectly-realized story of hardy sodbusters standing up against a land baron (Emile Meyer), then recognizing that their fate well may be in the hands of a mysterious stranger named Shane (Alan Ladd) who has no intention of fighting anyone else's battles--until he realizes the family he's working for will very likely be destroyed by the villains if he doesn't pitch in on their side.
Jack Schaefer's slim novel "Shane" is one of the greatest of all western stories. It was beautifully adapted by another fine frontier novelist--A.B. Guthrie, Jr.--whose own great books, such as "The Big Sky," often were turned into great western movies. Director Stevens elevated the humble story material to the classic level of Greek drama. Shane was a lone ex-gunfighter, seeking anonymity and peace, who is forced by his own conscience to strap on his guns again, becoming an element of man's fate, destined to use his deadly skills for the good of his fellow man, regardless of his own personal end. He is hopelessly smitten by decent farm wife Jean Arthur and idolized by her adolescent son (Brandon de Wilde), yet Shane realizes he can never have a family like this because of his shady past. He's a tragic figure, who seems to know the role he's intended to play in this frontier drama--and doesn't shirk from it, doing what may be the only noble act of his lifetime.
Though beautifully filmed in lush color and blessed with a sublime musical score by Lionel Newman, "Shane" takes place in a stark, isolated prairie setting, where the streets are thick with mud stirred up by thousands of passing hooves. Boot Hill looms on a rise overlooking the town, a grim reminder of the fate awaiting anyone who challenges the land barons and their hired gun, Jack Palance at his coldest and meanest, dressed all in black.
Stevens gives us several unforgettable sequences--Palance's cold-blooded killing of bold, but inept rancher Elisa Cook, Jr.; Shane's furious fist-fight with tough guys in the town saloon; Shane reluctantly giving the little boy a demonstration of his pistol marksmanship that leaves the youngster blinking with awe; Ladd and Heflin forming a manly bond as they work fiercely together to pull a tree stump from the ground and, finally, Shane's steely-eyed shootout in the saloon with Palance and all the gunmen waiting in ambush for him.
"Shane" is a masterful film that gave the pint-sized Alan Ladd his greatest opportunity to prove he could stand as tall as Wayne, Fonda, Peck and the others when given a great role and a great director. The final image of the mortally wounded Shane riding off to die alone, the youngster running after him, crying, "Come back, Shane," is one of the most enduring images in all of American film.
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7. THE
NAKED SPUR (1953) with James Stewart, Janet Leigh, Ralph Meeker, Robert Ryan. Directed by Anthony Mann. |
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Some of the very best westerns ever made were those directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart. Before Mann's "Winchester '73," Stewart had made only one western--the classic 1939 western comedy "Destry Rides Again"--and Mann had made none. Their collaboration on "Winchester '73" in 1950 launched Stewart on a completely new trail as a western star and put Mann in the front ranks of western directors. They followed that film with a long string of hard-edged westerns, the best of which is "The Naked Spur," which cast Stewart as a hard-eyed bounty hunter, trying to track down fugitive Robert Ryan. All their westerns are superb, but this one can't be missed if you're a true fan.
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8. 3:10
TO YUMA (1957) with Glenn Ford, Van Heflin, Felicia Farr. Directed by Delmer Daves. |
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Sophisticated, urbane, Stanford-educated Delmer Daves was an unlikely choice to direct this western, suspense story by Elmer Leonard, but his mastery of all film genres was legendary and he'd already turned out several "A"-quality westerns, including "Broken Arrow," "Drum Beat" and "Jubal." This is surely his best--and one that usually appears on everyone's "best westerns" list.
Van Heflin plays a farmer who's desperate for money and agrees to watch captured outlaw Glenn Ford until the train arrives to take him away. But Ford is a nasty piece of work and he begins to work on Heflin psychologically, trying to wear down this decent, hard-working man and open some avenue for his escape. This is an extremely successful suspense film and might have worked if the whole setting had been shifted to modern times, but as a western it's a classic.
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9. THE
BIG COUNTRY (1958) Burl Ives won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and Jerome Moross was nominated for Best Musical Score. |
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Donald Hamilton's wonderful novel was transformed into a spectacular big screen western by director William Wyler, whose ability to handle almost any genre of film was well-established. His earlier westerns had included two great ones--"Come and Get It" (1936) and "The Westerner" (1940)--and this was his greatest achievement in the genre.
Gregory Peck plays a seafaring man who rides into the unfamiliar west to marry Carroll Baker, spoiled daughter of land baron Charles Bickford. He's resented by the cowboys, who see him as a helpless "dude," especially ranch foreman Charlton Heston, who covets Miss Baker and the chance to become an heir to Bickford's empire. His constant challenge is to prove himself a real man in the eyes of the skeptical cowboys. Meanwhile, Bickford is locked in a range feud with rival Burl Ives, whose mining activity interferes with Bickford's cattle ranching.
The animosity between Peck and Heston grows until they finally settle things in a fist-fight, alone together on the plains, just before daylight. Wyler photographed this mostly from a distance, giving it a totally new twist that underscores the isolation of these two hardy men. Gradually, Peck realizes how unsuitable Baker is for his bride--while falling in love with her older sister, Jean Simmons.
For longtime folk singer and sometime actor Ives, "The Big Country" was the Big Payoff, earning him an Oscar in the same year he riveted audiences as Big Daddy in the movie version of Tennessee Williams' "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof." His acting career was cemented for good in 1958 and he was in great demand for the rest of his life.
"The Big Country" was the ultimate in big screen westerns, filmed in majestic Technirama, which rendered the sprawling frontier landscapes in all their wide-open glory. The opening sequence--credits playing over closeups of the fast-running team of horses bringing Peck west--is one of Hollywood's most memorable, especially accompanied by one of the best western musical scores ever.
| 10. RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962) with Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, Mariette Hartley, Edgar Buchanan, R.G. Armstrong, Warren Oates, James Drury. Directed by Sam Peckinpah. |
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Though most western fans probably would pick "The Wild Bunch" as their favorite western by Sam Peckinpah, I've always supported "Ride the High Country" for its realistic portrayal of frontier life and the earlier example of Peckinpah's abiding theme--frontiersmen facing the fading of their era while facing the sunset of their lives and their environment.
The heroes are two old gunfighters, hired to guard a gold shipment that the bad guys are determined to get. Peckinpah made sure his theme would be underscored by hiring two faded Hollywood western stars--Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea--to play characters that both must have had strong emotional ties to from day one. Their final scene together, rising up to have a final shootout, is one of the Hollywood western's most memorable codas because the actors, like their characters, were also facing their certain end. (Scott retired right after the film; McCrea made only a few more pictures, none of them significant.)
Filmed in the CinemaScope widescreen process by Lucien Ballard, "Ride the High Country" is a beautiful film that leaves you in a much better spirit than does the hard, cynical and excrutiatinly violent "Wild Bunch."
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11. ONCE
UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968) with Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Jack Elam, Woody Strode, Lionel Stander, Keenan Wynn. Directed by Sergio Leone. |
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Nobody took Italian film director Sergio Leone too seriously as a filmmaker while he was turning Clint Eastwood into an international star with his "spaghetti westerns" of the early 1960s. But he finally began to hear widespread critical praise after this long, sprawling "big" western that attempted to out-do Hollywood at one of its most beloved homegrown genres--the western.
In the story by Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento--all noted Italian film directors--Claudia Cardinale is waiting for the railroad to come through her property, making her a rich woman. But into her path comes Henry Fonda, leading a cold-blooded band of gunmen wearing those long "duster" overcoats we began to see in all westerns from the 1960s on. As a villain, Fonda is nastier than you've ever seen him. He even shoots children and spits tobacco! His job: Grab the land for his boss, a crippled tycoon who travels the west in a private railroad car.
Who stands up for Claudia? Of all people, it's former screen villain Charles Bronson, a vicious gunfighter who plays a mournful harmonica dirge every time he blows somebody away. (We find out why he carries that harmonica in a flashback sequence at the movie's climax.)
By 1968, Leone had nailed all the great Hollywood western cliches and managed to do them better than they'd ever been done before. The long opening sequence is a perfect example: Three unsavory outlaws--all American western heavies imported to Italy--wait for Bronson at a frontier railroad depot, planning an elaborate ambush. One of them--notorious Jack Elam, with his cadaverous features and gimlet eye--amuses himself by trying to trap a fly in the barrel of his gun. A windmill overhead slowly turns, producing an irritating creak every 30 seconds. When the train pulls in, Bronson suddenly appears in a cloud of steam--and the mayhem begins.
This grand-scale western epic lionizes all the Hollywood western lore and does it with one of the greatest musical scores ever attached to a western, composed by Ennio Morricone at the top of his form. See this film uncut and on the biggest screen you can find. It's a keeper.
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12. UNFORGIVEN (1992) The film won 1992's Best Picture Academy Award, Eastwood won his first Oscar as a director and Hackman won his second Oscar, this time in the supporting category. |
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Most of the westerns from the 1980s on have been "revisionist" in flavor, trying to add modern cynicism and reality to what had become a heavily iconic genre. Eastwood's greatest of all westerns is the most organic of all revisionist films in that genre. He doesn't seem to be simply turning the old cliches upside down, but forcing the changes to grow out of his initial story setup.
Eastwood plays an aged former gunslinger who has retired to the life of a hog farmer, raising his young children without their mother. Seeing him sprawling in the mud, trying to move his pigs around, one would never suspect what he'd once done for a living. But one day an offer comes to him for one last payday as a gunfighter: A group of prostitutes want him to get the men who raped several of them and cut one of them up badly with a knife.
At first it seems an easy job, especially when he's joined by old partner Morgan Freeman and young would-be gunfighter Jaimz Woolvett. But local lawman Gene Hackman resents his coming, wanting to maintain his own dominance over town affairs, and stands in his way. Another legendary gunfighter (Richard Harris) also gets into it, looking to impress a writer who's about to write his biography.
But Eastwood methodically goes about his business, knowing he must do two things above all: Intimidate everyone from the get-go, then get close enough to them so he can see them clearly enough to shoot.
Eastwood's performance is his "coolest" ever as a western hero and, aside from the final shootout sequence in a darkened saloon, his best sequence may be the one in which he calmly explains to young Woolvett, who has just killed his first man, what a thing it is to actually take someone else's life. It's perhaps the best of all movie speeches about the sanctity of human life--and the emotional impact of doing a killing.
"Unforgiven" is loaded with such pleasant surprises and Eastwood never was better. After all the years since his western debut in the TV series "Rawhide," he finally had grown into the part so completely that he now seems a permanent fixture of the American west, real or imagined.
©2006 by Ron Miller.
This column first posted June 19, 2006.
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