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.

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.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

I just saw this AFI top 100 entry and you know there's no greater feeling in movies than watching an established classic for the first time. That's why i haven't seen every movie on the AFI top 100, The National Society of Film Critic's top 100 list, or every Oscar winner: there are a lot of rainy days to save them for.

Butch Cassidy is a Western that's injected with more humor and a sense of casual ease between the characters that I've never seen in a Western before, except a flat-out parody like Blazing Saddles. The very nature of the two main characters even lends itself to comedy. Comedy is often based around characters who are insanely stupid or intellectually deficient in some area. Butch and Sundance possess great intelligence when it comes to pretty much everything except they cannot grasp the concept of how much trouble they're going to get themselves into by robbing. Consider the inherent humor of these situations:

• You would think that they went to Bolivia to try to get away from being chased, but once they get down there, they go and start robbing every chance they get. Their excuse is that they don't think they'd make good farmers or ranchers. The scene in which they discuss this with Etta plays out as if they're going to a career cousnelor trying to figure out what their ideal job is and they have no sense of "well, maybe we should pick career choice A or career choice B because career choice C will severely increase our chance of getting killed."
• They think that they're going to be eligible to join the army despite the fact that they're the most wanted outlaws in the West
• They have Etta give them a crash course in Spanish so they can properly rob a bank as if the sight of guns and hand motions won't be enough. Butch also fumbles the presentation of the initial bank robbery and has to resort to some crib notes in his coat picket
• They're chronically inefficient as bank robbers. You would think that like in "The Wild Bunch" or "Unforgiven," Butch and Sundance would try to score one big job that would be enough to be financially secure, but Butch and Sundance rob with no end in sight. They do almost as if it's a weekly 9-5 job they have to show up to work at, as if they have rent and bills that need to be paid. There's no sense of "this is how much we need to buy some land." I don't even get the sense that they're even keeping track of how much money they're making. Etta says that they take too many expensive vacations and are poor gamblers, but somehow I don't buy that explanation entirely.

The main strength of the film is the chemistry between the two stars. The verbal interplay between Redford and Newman is the work of a great screenwriter as much as it is the work of two actors on their game, and Katherine Ross's character seamlessly blends in with the other two. Although we can admire her character for being romantically faithful to the Sundance Kid, she romantically fulfills the desires of both men in a sense. Butch Cassidy has prostitutes to go to for his sexual desires but Etta Place fulfills Butch's need for a domesticator (an emblematic figure in Western). She's someone that can cook him a hot meal and someone he can show off his bike to. I think the line, "You're riding on my bycicle, in some countries that would mean we're married," has a lot more to it beneath the surface. The beauty of this threesome is that she can give Butch something along the lines of what Ethan Edwards never got to have with his sister-in-law in the Searchers, yet she never betrays the Sundance Kidd. More than anything else, she acts as the moral compass that women often portray in Westerns. She goes along with the two to Bolivia when we feel that the heroes are justified in their quest for survival but when they can't stop robbing like it's a disease, that's when she foresakes them. Unlike, the classic Western hero, the Sundance Kidd's life does not revolve around a woman. In High Noon, My Darling Clementine, Stagecoach, Shane, or The Searchers, a woman or the awareness of a lack of a the domesticating woman plays a role in the resolution of the heroes' story. In this film, the characters are too oblivious to their goals to even notice she's gone, and perhaps if they noticed that she were leaving, then they might have known how far they'd have strayed.

Lastly, I want to touch up on another source of the film's greatness. The film is great because of the sense of suspense it builds up. Particularly when the railroad-possee is hunting them down and we don't even know who they are, it feels like the shark in Jaws where there's the thrill of an unkown enemy.

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.