The 50 greatest westerns

Director: Simon Wincer
Cast involved: Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Danny Glover

Oh bury me not on the lone prairie

But, you cry, ‘Lonesome Dove’ is a TV mini-series, not a movie at all! Well, let’s look at the credentials. Adapted from a book widely considered the best ever written in the western genre, a book written by Larry McMurtry, author of ‘The Last Picture Show’ and ‘Terms of Endearment’, and starring not just Duvall in his prime, not just Jones and Glover on the verge of theirs, but a whole host of great movie character actors including Diane Lane, Frederic Forrest, Angelica Huston, Chris Cooper and William Sanderson, this is as cinematic as TV gets.

Sure, it was directed by a guy poised halfway between ‘DARYL’ and ‘Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man’, but we’ll let that slide: in its epic emotional sweep, in its breadth of landscape and action in its depth of character and awareness of history, ‘Lonesome Dove’ is every bit as artistically valid as half the movies on this list – and it’s a damn sight more entertaining than most of ’em. TH

Director: Kevin Costner
Cast involved: Kevin Costner, Robert Duvall, Annette Bening

Fields of dreams

Few contemporary filmmakers still believe in the power of the western like Kevin Costner. Yet his most artistically successful foray into the genre may be his most overlooked. Granted, it’s easy to understand why its reputation is less than that of Dances with Wolves or Wyatt Earp – it’s not a film that insinuates itself with much force. 

Costner and co-star Robert Duvall are cattle ranchers who run afoul of a small-town landowner and a corrupt sheriff in 1800s Montana. The dialogue is soft-spoken, the landscapes painterly, the characters rugged yet largely subdued. But a palpable undercurrent of tension rumbles just beneath the film’s calm surface, eventually manifesting in one of the more impressive – and startlingly realistic – shootouts in the entire western canon. MS.

Read more about 'Open Range'

Director: Jane Campion

Cast involved: Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee.

For the love of Bronco Henry

Should this slow-moseying psychological drama technically count as a ‘western’? Sure, it’s got the iconography: the wide-brimmed hats, the dusty landscapes, the one-horse town with more cattle than people living in it. But anyone expecting streetside shootouts or bodies getting tossed off saloon balconies – or simply a glimpse of a cute canine – is bound to be disappointed. Most of the violence here is emotional, and while some of it is administered verbally, the majority unfurls internally, wounding the soul before overcoming the body.

As a meditation on the corrosive nature of toxic masculinity, though, The Power of the Dog – Campion’s return to film after a ten-year hiatus – deserves a spot within cinema’s most masculine genre, as that’s precisely where it derives its own quiet power. It’s what makes pale, waifish Kodi Smit-McPhee and Kirsten Dunst, as his concerned, tortured mother, seem trapped in a world in which they don’t belong, which is the point. Benedict Cumberbatch, playing far against type, at first appears to be doing a parody of a rough-hewn, brutish man of the land – and that, it eventually turns out, is also entirely the point.

Other films on this list have flipped gender roles and subverted other conventions of the genre. None, however, seize upon those tropes quite the way Campion does, and use them to tell such a raw, devastating story. MS

Director: Michael Winterbottom
Cast involved: Peter Mullan, Milla Jovovich, Wes Bentley

The life and death of a man of character

Less a spaghetti western than a ploughman’s western (honk!), Michael Winterbottom’s wintry morality play relocates Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ from Wessex to the West Coast to startling effect. Wes Bentley – wooden but, for once, quite winning – plays a railroad surveyor newly arrived in Irish immigrant Peter Mullan’s northern Californian fiefdom of Kingdom Come (you can hear the fates conspiring already!) to assess whether the Central Pacific is fit to pass through.

The enormous boon this might generate for Mullan and the town inspires dirty politicking, gut-wrenching revelations, a swooning love story, thunderous shootouts and an impossibly moving climax. Modern sensibilities hold sway throughout, and it’s an undeniably European take, but this is still a fine western in the most classic sense. ALD

Read more about 'The Claim'

Director: Frank Perry
Cast involved: Jeff Bridges, Sam Waterston, Slim Pickens

’Til the end of the day

‘Oh, give me a home with a low-interest loan, a cowgirl and two pick-up trucks. A colour TV, all the beer should be free. And that, man, is Rancho Deluxe!’ The ’70s produced a gold rush of moseyin’, mournful modern-day westerns such as Paul Newman and Lee Marvin’s broke-ass last cattle drive ‘Pocket Money’ and easy-going Steve McQueen rodeo lament ‘Junior Bonner’ – films in which the cowboy way continued to exist only as a dodge for forgotten men or as a fading carnival sideshow.

The feel was invariably elegiac, yet the film that edges them both off our list, the marvellous ‘Rancho Deluxe’, achieves a tone close to mockery. Scripted by Thomas McGuane – writer of ‘The Missouri Breaks’ and ‘Tom Horn’ – and starring Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston as a couple of smaller-than-small-time Montana rustlers, it’s a sweet, strange, sad little film that presents the west as a nine-to-five refuge for throwbacks, affected playboys and the outright deluded, all stung by the realisation that the chairs are on the tables.

The last waltz has played itself out and nobody even bothered to dance. ALD

Read more about 'Rancho Deluxe'

Director: Kelly Reichardt
Cast involved: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Shirley Henderson

Director: Kelly Reichardt
Cast involved: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Shirley Henderson

Road to nowhere

Slow? Yes. Enigmatic? Sure. Boring? Perhaps to casuals. But Kelly Reichardt’s wagon-train saga is also a harrowing deconstruction of the western mythos. Set in 1845, it follows a small band of settlers advancing through the desolate Oregon desert, led by a frontier guide who appears increasingly lost yet refuses to ask for directions, even after coming into contact with an indigenous Cayuse man who clearly has a better hold of the terrain. Typical dude, right, ladies?

Told predominantly from the perspective of the wives in the caravan, highlighted by a captivating Michelle Williams, Reichardt quietly upends several of the genre’s traditions, despite shooting in the 1.37:1 aspect ratio of many classic westerns. Ain’t no campfire singalongs here, just a mounting hopelessness surely reflective of what many westward expanders experienced. (Indeed, the story is loosely based on an actual incident.) It’s not the most ‘fun’ movie on this list, but it may be the boldest – and most truthful. MS.

Read more about 'Meek’s Cutoff'

Director: André de Toth
Cast involved: Robert Ryan, Burl Ives, Tina Louise

From bad to terse

The dictionary defines ‘stark’ as ‘forbidding in its bareness and lack of any ornament, relieving feature or pleasant prospect.’ It’s a description that gets as close as possible to describing accurately André de Toth’s offbeat western set in the Oregon hills.

Whether in regards to the crisp, harsh photography, the series of tense stand-offs that frame the narrative or the punishing final ride into the snowy wastes. Robert Ryan excels as the murderous cattleman come to town to hunt down the pesky varmint who has been fencing off the icy pastures on which his cattle used to chomp.

Instead he finds himself desperately defending the town – with his wits as often as his Winchester – against magnificent bastard Burl Ives and his especially vicious gang of on-the-run desperadoes. Fierce, intelligent, exciting and just about as stark as they come. ALD

Read more about 'Open Range'

Director: Arthur Penn
Cast involved: Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Harry Dean Stanton

The Penn is mightier

It’s in the deep cuts of the Missouri River as it snakes through Montana that we find the soggy-bottomed romance and pantomime sadism of Arthur Penn’s schizophrenic range western.

Rustling is the name of the game but the plot rides pillion to a series of darkly comic existential vignettes in which death and desperation play out an escalating series of uneasy two-handers.

As such, it’s a complex/clever-clever western that doesn’t work for everyone. Does Jack Nicholson’s inalienable urbanity distract from his performance as a raggedy-ass dirt farmer?

Do the ludicrous acting choices afforded Marlon Brando by his star-power detract from the lethality of his character? Does Arthur Penn’s hands-off direction allow the plot eventually to settle into a roundelay of psychic showdowns and pornographic violence? The answers to all are ‘yes’.

But then, the frontier was replete with displaced Easterners, insane poet-warriors and purposeless brutality, so maybe it’s time a film that’s too often dismissed as a top-heavy, blow-dried vanity project is given its dues. ALD

Read more about 'The Missouri Breaks'

Director: Robert Aldrich
Cast involved: Burt Lancaster, Bruce Davison, Joaquín Martínez

Blood on the tracks

If Sam Peckinpah forced open the floodgates of balletic, consequence-free screen violence with ‘The Wild Bunch’, then it was Robert Aldrich’s gory cavalry western which presented the grim realities of range warfare. Not 20 minutes in, and we’re shown three Apaches playing a game of catch with a dead soldier’s innards. Not much later, an old yokel is punished for defending his patch o’ land by being scalped.

And having his face pulverised. Burt Lancaster keeps the toothy grins in lockdown as MacIntosh, a grizzled tracker with an Apache sidekick who is drafted in to the US cavalry to help put an end to a string of savage attacks undertaken by irate Apache chief, Ulzana.

Its central conceit – that it’s only natural to be driven to extreme violence when witnessing the suffering of friends and countrymen – may feel a little reactionary to contemporary eyes, but it remains a hard-hitting and rugged adventure movie that makes up in charisma and suspense what it lacks in political correctness. DJ

Read more about 'Ulzana’s Raid'

Director: Mel Brooks
Cast involved: Gene Wilder, Cleavon Little, Madeline Kahn

Mad Mel’s Pryor convictions

By 1974, the traditional western was sailing so close to self-parody that it would’ve been easy for Mel Brooks to take an old plot, stuff in a few bad puns and call it a day. That he instead turned to Richard Pryor, then on the very edge of superstardom, to help him craft a film which would be not just funny but edgily relevant says a lot about Brooks’s willingness to take risks – once upon a time.

The result may be imperfect. Pryor really should have been allowed to play the lead, and the entire subplot with Madeline Kahn as lisping Teutonic chanteuse Lili von Schtupp is bizarre and inexplicable. But ‘Blazing Saddles’ contains enough glorious one-liners (‘Mongo only pawn in game of life…’), iconic scenes (the campfire, the rogues’ lineup, the set-shattering finale) and sheer genre-busting bravado to carry it through the cactus patches. TH

Read more about 'Blazing Saddles'