My Video Series on Top Ten Westerns

Jean Renoir said, "the marvelous thing about Westerns is that they're all the same movie. This gives a director unlimited freedom" which helps explain what's great about Westerns and genre movies in general: Watching the same basic template over and over and seeing different directors or film studios have their own take on it. It's also refreshing to see an action film that you can easily believe has zero CGI enhancement to it. The 1957 film "3:10 to Yuma" and its 2007 remake are shot almost the same way.

For a writing assignment (10 greatest Western gunfights of all time), I had to watch old Westerns and ended up remembering what was so great about the genre. I was bummed out when the article proved too time-intensive to be worth it (watching five movies back-to-back will do that for you) and ended up not panning out, but I really enjoyed many of these old films and thought I'd make a pair of YouTube videos about it (the quarantine boredom cure).   

I still have no technical abilities to make a video but I've figured out how to broadcast trailer clips and I started employing a tripod in the second video. Fund me through patreon to get me making better quality videos.

My picks are: 

 10 Unforgiven (1992), dir. Clint Eastwood, starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Richard Harris, Morgan Freeman, Saul Rubineck, Frances Fisher 

9 3:10 to Yuma (2007), dir. James Mangold, starring Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, Ben Foster, Gretchen Mol, Logan Lerman, Peter Fonda 

8 My Darling Clementine (1946) dir. John Ford, starring Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Linda Darnell, Walter Brennan, Tim Holt, John Ireland, Ward Bond, Cathy Downs 

7 McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971) dir. Robert Altman, starring Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Aubejonois, Shelley Duvall, Burt Remsen, Keith Carradine, William DeVane 

6 Cat Ballou (1965) dir. Elliot Silverstein starring Jane Fonda, Lee Marvin, Dwayne Hickman, Michael Cabin, Tom Nardini 

The next video:
5 The Magnificent Seven (1970) dir. John Sturges starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Eli Wallach 

4 Wild Bunch (1969) dir. Sam Peckinpah starring William Holden, Warren Oates, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson, Edmund O'Brien, Robert Ryan, Jaime Sanchez 

3 Stagecoach (1939) dir. John Ford, starring John Wayne, Claire Trevor, Andy Devine, John Carradine, Thomas Mitchell, Tim Holt, Donald Meek 

2 The Searchers (1956) dir. John Ford, starring John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Natalie Wood, Ward Bond, Vera Miles 

1 High Noon (1952) dir. Fred Zinnemann, starring Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Lloyd Bridges, Katy Jurado, Thomas Mitchell, Otto Kruger, Ian MacDonald

I'm also considering doing another video where I talk about some runners-up which include:
Rio Bravo (1959)-Don't remember it well and it's been advertised as a hang out movie but that describes many a Western so I don't buy it as a defining reason why this film is great.

The Shootist (1976)-A wonderful film that pushes the genre forward by asking the question: What would happen if a gunslinger surprised himself by living long enough to die of old age? The platonic relationship with a Christian woman (Lauren Bacall) and her son (Ron Howard) is a nice counterbalance to a genre that. I had a morality problem with J.B. Books's reasoning for setting up the final gunfight: He claimed to never have killed anyone who never deserved it, but he knew Cobb for thirty seconds and never even met Pulford so how did he know that they were worth luring to their deaths in an entirely unnecessary shoot-out. But, still, it was quite a shoot-out!

Gunfight at the OK Coral (1976)-My Darling Clementine deserves more credit because John Ford carved out a story out of disparate historical events whereas John Sturges made something in the mold established by Ford. Among the notable changes, there are some positives such as the fleshing out of the Earps, the grater historical accuracy, the more dynamic development of Doc Holiday, Dennis Hopper as Billy Clanton, and a gunfight that lasted longer.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)-A Western in the outlaw tradition that has won its fair share of accolades. The chemistry between Redford and Newman was heavily praised when the film came out and the film's whimsical celebration of the two outlaws came at a time when cinema was in need of counter-cultural heroes. I love that the film features two guys who are similarly dense that neither of them think very far ahead. The film's also notable in that it takes place across multiple continents. One question is how successful would the film have been if it didn't have its stars?
Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)-The Coen brothers latest (though not only) Western is a comic-tragic look at multiple chapters of the evolution of the genre. It might have been truly cinematic if it tied all its disparate chapters into one story.

My favorite film for each letter of the alphabet: Alphabet Meme

This was started by a guy who runs the website blogcabins.blogspot.com/ and it's made it's way around the internet like chain mail. I was tagged by Dan Johnson at filmbabble.blogspot.com:

A is for Apollo 13 (1995), my favorite film from my childhood. It's an amazingly tight and exciting docudrama that even made me want to go to space camp and be an astronaut. Ron Howard has rarely ever been so good. There are a lot of good As, however: American Graffiti, the best coming-of-age film ever, in my opinion, as well as

B has a lot of good sci-fi flicks: Blade Runner, Brazil....but I'm going to go with Back to the Future (1985), another classic film that I grew up on and I find unforgettable.

C is for Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1973), neo-noir film and one of the greatest classics of all time. A great story of such emotional resonance and poetry. The dialogue and performances by John Huston and Faye Dunaway are to die for. Charade, Citizen Kane, City Lights, City of God, City Confidential, and a family film I really like called Cheaper by the Dozen were all ones I considered

Although, I was thinking of drawing attention to the old-school sci-film The Day the Earth Stood Still which is being remade, D is for Double Indemnity (1944). When we talk of good dialogue, the way Billy Wilder was superhuman in his ability to write sharp stylized dialogue, and there's no better example of this than the interplay between Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck's characters as they attempt to plan a perfect murder.

For E, I couldn't really think of too much, except the musical Evita (1996), which made a splash in the 90's but had a rather short shelf-life and only people who followed Madonna's career incessantly would even remember this. Perhaps, Alan Parker's dismal rep or the timing (musicals didn't really regain their steam until Moulan Rouge or Chicago, let alone operettas) sunk the film, but it was an interesting piece of work. The score was great, Antonio Banderas did his best work here, and the subtext is almost as detailed as a textbook on Latin American history.

F is for From Here to Eternity (1953) which stands as my favorite war film. Montgomery Clift plays a tragic antihero in an army private in Hawaii during World War II who refuses to play the bugle or box for his company, out of principle and Frank Sinatra won an Oscar as the man who befriends him and lives to tell the tale. Also famous for the make-out scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr.

G is for Grand Hotel a Best Picture Oscar winner that doesn't get much credit for anything these days. It starred five of the biggest stars of the 1930's and was set in a hotel where the lives of five guests intertwine, it’s breezy, lively and light-hearted enough to rival an art deco musical in escapist value. At the same time, it is a very telling story of class conflict that resonates with a lot of weight when the five stories come together so serendipitously

H is for High Noon, socially powerful, tightly coiled, notable for its score, cinematography, social climate in which the film was made, the gun battle at the end, and its real-time gimmick that was the precursor to the TV show 24. I can't really think of too many other H's but House of Sand and Fog comes to mind, or from the same year (2003) Hollywood Homicide. In the latter, Harrison Ford sort of mails it in as a cop who doesn't care about his job and wants to sell real estate while on duty. Not many people got the joke but I did.

I could be for It's a Wonderful Life or another Frank Capra classic It Happened One Night, but I'll go with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

J is for Junebug (2005), the North Carolina-set family melodramedy (new word I just coined) that launched Amy Adams' career. The other ones that come to mind are the historic picture Jazz Singer, Sam Mendes' docudrama of an uneventful war Jarhead, and the recent It film Juno. However, Juno tried just a little too hard to be hip, and Junebug just let it all flow naturally.

K could easily be for King Kong, but I wasn't crazy about the old King Kong and have yet to see the new one, so I now have a choice between two older films, neither of which is regarded as a great classic but which I'm personally fond of. There's Vincente Minelli's musical Kismet which came at a later point in his career and he denounced as a failure in his autobiography. Don't be so hard on yourself, Mr. Minelli, I personally loved the musical take on the Arabian Nights tale with the enchanting songs including "Stranger in Paradise." However, in honor of my grandmother's birthday, I will go with the John Huston film Key Largo (1948) where the bar where much of the film was shot at, still stands on Key Largo. Modern-day gangster films need to show a lot of carnage to illustrate just how bad the gangster is, but Edward G. Robinson showed that all you need is some flair and style and a muggy facial expression.

L is for Last Samurai (2003). The art direction is superb and it stands out quite a bit from all the recent historical epics because of its sincerity. Ken Wattanabe gives a great performance that's deserving of that Oscar nomination and as an interesting footnote, it was Tom Cruise's last big successful role before Oprahgate derailed his career.

M is for Manchurian Candidate (1962), an amazing story, political thriller, mystery, and showcase of great acting. This movie had people worrying about ammending the constitution to include foreign-born citizens as eligible for the President and had me worrying about John McCain, a former P.O.W., as being President as well.

N was originally for Network, before I remembered that North by Northwest (1959) also begins with this letter. Thrilling, romantic, endearing, shot in great locations, everything a good film should be, and it's the epitome of Hitchcockian style

O is for On Golden Pond (1981), the story of a somewhat dysfunctional father-daughter relationship that a daughter attempts to fix in her father's last days, starring real-life father and daughter Jane and Henry Fonda. Katherine Hepburn was also in the film. To show that I don't completely dislike the Coen Brothers, I would have included their Mississippi-set epic Oh Brother Where Art Thou, and truth be told, it was pretty much a tie between these two great films.

P was one that I had the most difficult time with, I could think of three that I really liked: Prairie Home Companion, Pirates of the Carribean and Paths to Glory, but I chose Prairie Home Companion (2006) largely because I already have enough from the action/blockbuster genre on my list. PHC was Altman's swan song and was an eerie foreshadowing of his imminent death within a few months of the film being released. The movie is highly entertaining, quietly profound, and has all the strengths of an Altman film.

Q is for Quiz Show (1994), Rob Redford's gripping docudrama about the Game Show scandal of the 1950's with performances by John Turturro and Ralph Feinnes that make for two very interesting portrayals of real-life figures who everyone knew so little about beneath the surface (i.e. they are basically remembered as two guys who cheated on a game show but no one even knew why)

For R, I'm going to go a little foreign with Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game (1939), rated consistently near the top of the best films of all time by Sight and Sound's decennial poll.

S, like P, has a lot of options I consider of equal merit: Star Wars, Singing in the Rain, Swing Time, Stagecoach, Searchers, etc. To break this tie between musicals and Westerns, I'm going to go with a biopic, Billy Wilder's Spirit of St. Louis (1957), which I saw in 9th grade and absolutely loved. It was quite an achievement to be able to make us engaged to what was essentially a one-man show.

People will always remember Citizen Kane, but for me Orson Welles is a genius because of his last film (in America, at least) Touch of Evil (1958) which is my T.

The letter that took me the longest to think up a film is Undeclared (2006) for the U. Starring Justin Long, Jonah Hill, Lewis Black and Maria Thayer, the film is a spot-on comedy that brought me back to the days in high school where I was scared to death over not getting into my top choice college.

V is for Vertigo (1958). Just the story alone makes it a winner. Tell a three-line summary of this film to anyone and see if they're not intrigued. I imagine that there was the most consistency on this letter among the other lists without actually looking.

For W, I'll go with the culturally delicate and serene cop drama Witness (1985) in which Harrison Ford must hide an Amish boy from corrupt cops in an Amish community where he is a fish out of water. I was also strongly considering Wild Strawberries, just to prove that I've seen more than one foreign film, but no need.

X is for X-Men 2 (2003), the best in the trilogy although I will take a bold stand in saying that X-Men 3 is almost as good.

Y is for You Can Count on Me (2000), the brother-sister relationship piece which launched Laura Linney and Mark Ruffallo's careers. It almost won Kenneth Longorean an Oscar for screen-writing as well.

Z is for Zoolander (2001). To be clear I don't really like this movie and only find it mildly tolerable, but Z is a letter which gives me very little manuevering room

Prediciton for the AFI list: top 10 Westerns

1. The Searchers, John Ford-High Noon and The Searchers are usually what most film scholars will tell you are the two greatest Westerns ever made. The Searchers had an outrageously low ranking in the 1998 list of 96, but in the 2007 list, The Searchers skyrocketed up to somewhere between 10 and 20 (if I were to go check, than I might see more results than I want to). The Searchers is the seminal moment in John Ford's career and was John Wayne's richest character, both the two main icons of the film Western. It's also the only Western that some people in the film community cite as the greatest American film ever, period.
2. High Noon, Fred Zimmerman-The other Western that's truly an American classic. It's casting was perfect, it has the most tightly coiled narrative and introduced a number of innovations: The theme music contained an opening song, the film moving in real time, etc. It also had political subtext and the people behind the movie are rewarded with bravery, in retrospect
3. Stagecoach, John Ford-If The Searchers was the apex of Ford and Wayne's career, it all started with Stagecoach which revolutionized the Western by introducing both of them to the big stage. Stagecoach is a masterfully done tale that's admired and next to Searchers and High Noon, I'll bet it's the only film that most people in the film industry agree deserves to be included on the pantheon of classics.
4. Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpaugh-Wild Bunch revolutionized the use of violence in movies and has a terrific narrative. It changed the nature of Westerns toward outlaws vs lawmen rather than on conflicts within a town that a hero would have to chose the right side to be on. It's also a very fun movie, but I most believe it's going to be #4 simply because it was ranked pretty high on both AFI lists, previously.
5. Shane, George Stephens-I find it to be kind of a corny film, but the experts consider it in the realm of classics and it has been voted both times. Jack Palance from City Slickers got an academy award for it. Perhaps, they view it as the definitive Western from the point of view of a child, since the star of the film besides Alan Ladd's Shane character is really a 12-year old kid.
6. Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood-Unforgiven might rank closer to 10 or 12 on a list of Westerns among film scholars who are experts specifically on the evolution of the Western, except for the fact that Clint Eastwood is so hot right now, so retroactively his film career enjoys a big bump. It is truly a good film but it would be an oversight to label it as the first retrospective Western that demythified what came before it. (That might be McCabe and Mrs Miller)
7. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kidd, George Roy Hill-Kind of like the rock stars of the Western, Paul Newman and Robert Redford's characters defined the Western heroes as supercool. But else why would Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kidd be selected at #7? Redford and Newman are both still alive and command a lot of respect, and this film made the top 100 twice.
8. Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks-All the John Ford films She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, How the West Was Won, My Darling Clementine, and Man Who Shot Liberty Valance will open the way to some sneakers to make it through do to vote splitting. With the help of Quentin Tarantino's tireless promotion (it's his favorite film) and the crowd that enjoys a light-hearted Western that can make them laugh, fawn over the romantic interests, and root for sympathetic characters plus the Dean Martin fan contingent, Rio Bravo should be able to seperate itself from the rest of the pack nicely.
9. How the West Was Won, John Ford-Is this John Ford's 3rd best film? Not necessarily, but it's his most grandiose title and some voters (like myself at first glance) might confuse this with Once Upon a Time in the West and vote for it. Plus, I hear it has Debbie Reynolds in it, who is still alive and actively pimping her career.
10. McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Rob Altman-I seriously think that whether McCabe & Mrs. Miller makes this list will serve as a litmus test to whether the film community truly feels that Altman's work was great enough to be considered among the classics. Altman had an extra entry in the top 100 last year with the addition of 1975's Nashville, and I know there are a lot of other good films after the first 9 such as Duel in the Sun, Red River, Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and My Darling Clementine but are any of them as definitive as this film (and like I said, there's vote splitting to worry about)? McCabe & Mrs. Miller demythified the genre significantly more than anyone else, and was such an interesting take on existing genre conventions.

Rio Bravo's influence on Quentin Tarantino

I just saw Rio Bravo and couldn't help but remember that Quentin Tarantino has it listed in his three favorite movies and there's a youtube clip out there of him giving an introduction to the film at a private screening at Cannes Film Festival this past year.

When I think about it, Rio Bravo is very much a prototype to the kinds of buddy cop films and action spectacles we see today. The action sequences in Rio Bravo are brief but they are gripping, and more importantly masterfully and carefully choreographed. The scene where Chance ducks out of the way while Stumpy shoots two guys dead in the jail room, seems like a power play pulled out of a Jean Claude Van Damme film.

That kind of masterfully planned out violence combined with the light-hearded camaraderie is so prevalent on modern filmmaking and in Quentin Tarantino's own stuff that I'm surprised it's not more obvious.

To be honest, Rio Bravo is one of the few Westerns I've seen where a lot of white people are getting shot at and killed and none of the characters seem to think much of it and I don't think the camera/director wants us to think much of it either.

Let me try to compare this to the Westerns I've seen: In Shane, how many deaths were there in the film? Jack Palance kills someone and that's made a big deal of because he's been humanized, there were people in the community who cared for him. Then Shane shoots i think 3 people in the final showdown (maybe 4).

In High Noon, a big deal was made out of this sheriff killing 4 people and no one would risk their lives to help defend him because that meant not getting killed either.

In films like The Searchers and Stagecoach there's a lot of aimless shooting but at Indians, which were kind of marginalized in the films. When someone is killed in The Searchers, be it Lucy or Ethan's sister-in-law, then it's treated with a lot of gravity.

Then there were later pictures like Wild Bunch and Leone's films which had a lot of killing but Wild Bunch was like 10 years later. Dean Martin shoots one guy dead when he's checking to see his shoes, they shoot 2 or 3 more in the prison and at the final showdown they shoot another 10 people dead without thinking much of it. This is the kind of stuff I'm used to seeing in a James Bond or Death Wish film but not a 1959 Western.

The final verdict on the Oscars: Genre Pictures and Oscars

Looking back, I personally think Babel should've won because The Departed was simply near-perfect execution of a good Cops and Robbers movie, while Babel was an innovative picture that made a sweeping statement.

I think in general, genre pictures that are honored by the academy (My Fair Lady, Broadway Melody of 1929, Great Zigfield for musicals, Cimarron for Westerns, and French Connection for cops movies) can get dated pretty quickly. Whereas epics and films with sweeping statements or films that touch on relevant themes. There are obviously exceptions to this rule (i.e. The Godfather was the hallmark of gangster films and American in Paris, West Side Story and Sound of Music are among the best remembered musicals) but generally films that revolutionize and bend the genre like High Noon, McCabe and Mrs Miller, and The Searchers for Westerns or Singing in the Rain for musicals or Little Cesar or pretty much the entirety of film noir don't get recognized in their day and only get appreciated later in retrospect.

So in essence what I'm saying is that the genre pictures that really revolutionize the genre and find an innovative method of redefining it, generally don't get honored right then and there because it takes time to realize the brilliance of it. You need films to follow the particular trend that a revolutionary picture like High Noon is starting before you see how significant of a film it is. This is not neccessarily true: sometimes films that are innovative like West Side Story or the Godfather get honored, but these examples are rare and if a genre film wins, the academy usually will honor a film that executes the existing conventions well. The Departed is in no way revolutionary, but it is an excellent execution of a gangster film. It is also a personal triumph within the Martin Scorsesee canon, in that he was able to return to form. He was able to leave the grandiose ambitions with which he brought to the Aviator and Gangs of New York behind and buckle down to make a solid gangster film. However, the best picture award he received reflected more of a decision to avoid a director/picture split than it did a convincing vote for a best picture. While I concede it was a close race, I personally think that Babel was that epic thematically relevant film which was well-made and spoke to the problems facing the present.

The indiscriminate nature of the gun and Departed

I spent a third of a semester in my film genres class on Westerns, and one of the first ones our class saw was High Noon. My class had an interesting reaction to that film. There general sentiment was: "This was totally lame. Why did Gary Cooper have to go out into the street? Why didn't he just climb on a rooftop and shoot them from above like a sniper?" Our film professor who had noted at the start of the semester that he had seen easily over 100 Westerns, was somewhat baffled at this assertion. He had trouble explaining it but he just said, "That just wouldn't happen in a Western." It's not what a Western hero does. And that's what we call a film convention. Something we're used to seeing in a certain genre to the point where audiences expect it and filmmakers use it as a language.

I was watching a program of the history channel this afternoon on sharpshooters of the Old West and most historians, apparently, would've sided with my class. Historians said that there might have only been one or two shootouts in the history of the West that happened like High Noon. Most of the time, people shot each other in the back or in their sleep, which would have sent my old film professor into shock that there was little sense of an honorable way to shoot someone back then. The quickest and most efficient way to lodge a bullet into your enemy's head seemed to be the route that was more often taken. It was the pulp fiction novelists who started this tradition of the pulp fiction hero and sold that image back to the folks back East, so that convention has started for longer than Westerns.

Later in the semester, we saw Sam "Bloody Sam" Peckinpaugh's The Wild Bunch which was considered to be later in the evolution of the genre. The film was just as compelling a story as Stagecoach or High Noon, but it was also very bloody and gory. One of the students delivering a report on the film said that one of the themes of the movie was "The indiscriminate nature of the gun." He noted that the film stressed the myth that a bullet would never hit a woman or a child when someone fired it. And it's true: Guns do tend to defy the laws of physics by discriminating against their target. It seems that whenever a sharpshooter aims at James Bond, he has a rare miss. There are whole armies firing at James Bond and he runs fast and manages to emerge unscathed but logically, one of those bullets will hit the guy. The message from these movies is that a true hero won't get shot and that's potentially dangerous to a world.

As the genre has evolved, it seems like film directors like Clint Eastwood, Sam Peckinpaugh, and Martin Scorsesee in the urban crime genre have dutifully attacked the myth and that's where their brilliance comes from. Eastwood's Unforgiven is self-referencing as he inserts a pulp writer (played by Saul Rubineck) directly into his movie of the exact same kind that romanticized the West and those conventions in the first place and through his eyes, we see myths being made in the process.

Scorsesee really has built a reputation for attacking the romanticism of violence head-on. In Goodfellas, he starts out showing the romanticism of the mob life but slowly disintegrates it throughout the film. In The Departed, however, he really targets that convention about the "indiscriminate nature of the gun" I was thinking of.
*Spoiler warning*









You go through the movie thinking that Jack Nicholson is one of those invincible larger-than-life heroes who partially because he has been alive so long and partially because of those conventions you think that no matter how many bullets go whizzing by in a shootout, he will emerge unscathed. But, no, just like that, in the most anticlimatic way, he is shot by Matt Damon in something that isn't thought out particularly well. You get the feeling that if Matt Damon were thinking through his actions, he wouldn't have shot the guy who he'd been devoting all his time to risking his career to protect. But that's just the point: to shoot a gun, you don't have to think about it very long. All you have to do is just apply one inch of pressure and in a quarter of a second, massive consequences can happen.

The same thing happens to Leonardo DiCaprio. Because he's the hero and we're conditioned to believe, he'll get his happy ending, we're absolutely in shock because it all happens so quickly. But that's really how guns work.