Top 10 Westerns of All Time

Next in the classification block of our genre tour, we head towards the wildest frontiers of the western, from the roots of the genre to its classics, its reinterpretations, its different variations around the world to this day, these are our picks for the 10 best

westerns

of all. To begin with number 10, we want to analyze one of the most essential organizing ideas of the West, that of the frontier of civilization and the life in which they are found, and one of the common characteristics of that theme is the classic hero of the western border uniting the world between civilizations in nature a man who came from one world crossed the border to the other learned their ways and returned to help them survive these are 7 hired gunmen who protect a Mexican city from bandits an outlaw defending a stagecoach of a tribe on the warpath is a big part of the victory in How the West Was Won and a grim chase after a raiding party of the entire Zhanna raid, but for our first pick we prefer the film that inspired it The Searchers Da the coincidence that we are Texans.

Texicano is nothing more than a human man. Well, I will win this year and next, maybe a hundred more, but I don't think it will be forever, someday this country will be a good place to be. bones of art are needed in the ground before that

time

comes Ford's Searchers is a mega classic and perhaps the prototypical western that we should learn from John Wayne ethan is a classic frontier hero and when his brother's family is raided and His niece is captured, it's a difficult five-year quest, but when his desert smarts, tough-man skills, and willingness to fight finally reunite his family, he's not quite willing or even able to participate while he remains outside and goes alone in the super famous final shot of the trapped searchers. always in the middle that is the frontier, it is that same survival advantage that is necessary to weather the external elements that a flourishing society needs to overcome the growing pains of its childhood and the inner darkness that may threaten to consume it this year.

It's Red River or riding in the highlands or 40 guns and for our second pick on this list it's a shame it has to be what it is Joey cat proud of me I tried it, it didn't work for me Joey there's no living room to kill With no turning back, Shane is a beautiful Western story about the necessary pacifism of a developed civilization and the violence through which peace was achieved, but it is also tragic in its irony as a portrait of the type of man like The Searchers Ethan necessary. win the peace but whose society cannot allow them to stay to enjoy it and this is the West in a nutshell where the civil meets the wild where the bad meets the good to be good be bad to be bad be good only in home in the forever -The frontier is shrinking, so some

time

s what you need your frontier hero is a bit of frontier justice that a society could never support, but sometimes it needs when civil justice fails and this results in a subset of particularly gory

westerns

within the revenge subgroup. -genre and among the best here you will find Notorious Ranch and High Plains Drifter and the Oxbow Incident and even Winchester 73, but for our personal favorite we are quite partial to Unforgiven, you would be William Munny of Missouri for women and children, that's true.

I've killed one of the kids, I kill almost everything you walk to crawl at one time or another and I'm here to kill you bill bill what you do for net Unforgiven is a crowd favorite and a neoclassical shot long after most of the other Westerns that dot this list, but feel as at home here as any of them, directed and starring Clint Eastwood, who is as iconic a Western protagonist as anyone not named John Wayne and a story about escaping the good men in history doing bad things and bad men. doing good things, has all the classic themes back on display with another half century of digesting the same old gray in slightly new shades, of course westerns aren't just for thematically complex surrogate mythological heroes built to resolve the ideological conflicts of our society, sometimes it's just good old fashioned cowboys and outlaws, in fact, the outlaw western is almost the oldest one there is, it dates back to the Great Train Robbery of Edwin's Porters and we've loved Jack's The Outlaw ever since. , Josey Wales and Butch Cassidy. and Sundance Kid, however, for our #7 pick we're going with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid feels like times have changed.

I think this was Sam Peckinpah's stab at the essential Western emotional revisionist based not on the story it purports to be, but the myths surrounding it. It is a story of men doomed in cities they are too big for while the two main characters continue their destiny to an all-too-predictable conclusion like all best westerns, it seems to be made with a sense of nostalgia for a savagery, freedom and anarchy that the filmmakers could never have known, but it fits because that's mainly why we're watching, at the same time. just like the man in black looking for a chance to live in our own wild world, of course, where there must be outlaws. being lawmen and it follows as a corollary that where there are outlaw movies there must be lawman movies - some of our favorites are the various shots of the shootout at OK Corral from Tombstone - My Darling Clementine or any of the real arenas However, for our 6th pick we actually have a tie for our favorite between Rio Bravo and High Noon listen the judges left town Harvey resigned and I'm having trouble getting the deputy, I guess it all happened too sudden, People have to convince themselves of law and order before they do anything about it, maybe because deep down they don't care, they just don't care to talk about why you haven't asked for new helpers.

You could get some, you know, yeah, what about my drivers? You could use them. I guess I have them. What had some well-meaning fans? What worries me most are their wives and children or that has 30 or 40 men, all professionals. The only thing they care about is earning their salary. Oh yeah, all we're doing is giving them more goals. To film it now we haven't fixed a tie here simply because we're bad pickers, we think we're pretty good pickers, actually it's basically our job, but these two films have a story to tell together, you see, High Noon is a wonderful western. about a marshal who has been abandoned by the people of his town to fight alone against a band of bandits and was written by a former member of the Communist Party under investigation by the American Activities Committee, which ended up earning him a bad reputation. name as an obvious metaphorical protest against McCarthyism and blacklisting, and thus came Rio Bravo, a film made by Howard Hawks and John Wayne as a not-so-secret response to High Noon, which they thought was the most American thing they'd ever seen. made. seen throughout his life filled with a sense of camaraderie, justice and duty that all good citizens possess, not just a single frightened Sheriff, so they are in ideological duel, they vividly positioned the Western as a genre not only about cowboys and Indians but also about what it is.

Now it means being an American hero. One of the most interesting things about the Western's particular brand of slightly historical anachronism is that we live in a world where the frontier has already disappeared, there are no more unexplored lands, no Wild West left to tame. very often we see the western as a swan song a love letter to a bygone era none of us remember a lament for a world that long ago became legend it's Wild Bunch it's The Shootist and it's one of our favorites the man which shot Liberty valance. Good thing, you've changed churches, high school stores, here we have John's Ford and Wayne again at their most introspective, taking a hard look at the genre they're both best known for.

The film is framed in retrospect, they become nostalgic and draw a line. from What the West was like to how a political career founded on the borrowed violence of a gunfight has become a legend on the back of an honest man in a place like a genre where legends are sometimes more valuable than facts, you will notice that the Most of our selections so far, with the exception of Unforgiven, have been from the classic era of the American Western somewhere between the '40s and '60s, and while the death of the classic Western reflects the death of the Wild West it had told its stories about the genre, don't just stop there sometime in the late 1960s the demise of the classic western gave way to the post western instead of the old western frontier we moved to other border societies instead of brave cowboys we met tired and obsolete men instead of horses we write pickup trucks we have Lonesome Dove in Paris Texas and El Topo and Blazing Saddles and there is no country for old men in Brokeback Mountain and hell or high water and even Logan and for our favorite Western post we prefer one of his first McCabe and Mrs.

Miller, how much do you weigh for tonight? Just use it, you can't hit anything with it, well that doesn't make sense, what kind of weapon is it, oh they are good weapons, that's what I have. There must be something wrong with her, no, it's me. I just can't shoot it right, let me see it, maybe I can fix it for you, okay, dubbed anti-western by director Robert Altman, McCabe and the Mrs. Miller often does exactly the opposite of what the genre would tell us to expect: he substitutes tumbleweeds for snowdrifts, heroines for fear, a hidden cat-and-mouse chase for a street duel in the middle of the street. and, in that way, it is a reflection of the evolution of American style.

The missing sentiment is the post-World War II sense of American pride, heroism, and patriotism, giving way to the pessimism and shame of the Vietnam era. The Western genre tracks the shifting ideologies underlying it. Altman does to the West in McCabe the same thing he did with the pure war movie that takes it to a newer and darker world where we were not always such clear heroes, how not all westerns have much to do with the Old West, Not everyone is made in the Hollywood system, we wouldn't be fools either. If we didn't take some time to look at one of the most reliable sources for some of the best westerns ever filmed in Italy, these are the spaghetti westerns, originally low-budget Italian B movies filmed in the deserts of Spain that exploded with highly acted visual and musical of the American West gave us classics like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for a Few Dollars More and A Fistful of Dollars and deeper cuts like Django Bullet for the General and the Great Silence but on a list of the best I couldn't overlook the master and his masterpiece Sergio Leone and his Once Upon a Time in the West Martin once told me that I could never be like him now I understand why we are going to bother him knowing that you are alive somewhere so you found After everything, you're not a businessman, that's mathematics, an ancient race, other mortals would be alone and they would kill them, developed with Bertolucci and Argento in response to an exhaustive review of their own list of the best westerns that didn't seem like. too different from ours, frankly, Once Upon a Time in the West was another of Leone's Western revolutions.

It featured Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson instead of Eastwood, a slower Bleeker tone than his earlier more outlandish Westerns, and, of course, a score by the one and only. You and Morricone have the ingredients of one of the best crafted Westerns of all time, a great crescendo symphony to the American West, now most people would stop there, we have Hollywood, we have Leone and his pasta films in English. It's time to bring him home, but that would be a disservice to a genre that has seen the industry in almost every country try to remake Andry by mixing it up, you have weird Korean westerns like The Good, The Bad and We're Curry Westerns like Brazilian sholay. westerns like black cod, white devil's sauerkraut, westerns like Ursa Major's Children or Whitey, there are red Russian westerns and Australian kangaroo westerns, which is a term we didn't invent at all, so leave us alone, though , our favorite exotic western flavor has to be western ramen the Japanese interpretation with a pet name that gave us our number two pick sukiyaki western django what's that sound that's the sound of the Gion showed you temple bill what you know Mak and Ginja Boas on a distant island where these two clans were divided the war between the Reds and the West sukiyaki western django is the latest postmodern statement about the continued cross-pollination of the American West and Japan, as inbred as a family tree shaped like loop takashi miike uses the western to leave thediscovered the strangely incestuous connection of In the American Western samurai movie, you've had a Kiva Kurosawa who grew up on John Ford's westerns remodeling the samurai period drama in his style and then Leone ripping his cowboy plots off of Ku Asawa , which is taking its plots from the Western pulp when my K arrives. moves forward and comes full circle: reflexively steal from spaghetti, steal from samurai, steal from the American West to build a crazy melting pot that you just have to see for yourself, like this that finally in our first post we have reviewed the entire history of the western, it charted its thematic course around the world and at the time it was time to bring it home because not all cowboys wear hats, not all gunfights use revolvers, not all Sheriffs ride horses and not all Westerns take place in the West, sometimes the Arab John ends in unpredictable. ways to get wonderful results like Big Trouble in Little China, the Kung-Fu Western and Shanghai at Noon, the Eastern Western and the Red Sun, the Horror Western and Dusk Till Dawn and our favorite, the Space Western, which is nice on the nose, and Cowboys and Aliens, an absolute. debauchery in serenity and quite unforgettable in our number one choice.

Dumb Star Wars religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster so it's for me sis look I'm not in this for your revolution and I'm not in this for your princess I hope they pay me well with my corpse, well I'll continue with my chess buckle to attack that thing's rhythm, oh yeah, oh God, yeah, I bet it does, oh, everyone was complaining on our sci-fi list about Cinna fixing a gun and he forgot. Poor old Star Wars, but other than its interstellar setting, we don't think it has much in common with sci-fi movies, but it does have a lot in common with the western, think about it, you've got cantinas and bandits. gun duels and a frontier hero, a wild man who doesn't quite belong and who can't help but save the day on the frontiers of civilization and that's all because he actually fits neatly into the same tradition of influenced borrowing and remixing as gave us sukiyaki western django we have a whole episode on this that may fill in some of the more interesting blanks, but it is perhaps the funniest entry in the most advanced stage of what has been a long evolution of an art form of one of the most curious genres that have ever hit the big screen, which is why it is our choice for the best western of all time.

So what do you think you don't agree with any of our picks? We left out some of your favorite westerns, right? It's the haiku about it. Leave it in the comments below for us to tease, and be sure to subscribe for more Cinna Fix movie lists.