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Best Westerns

Started by Chedney Honks, April 11, 2021, 08:15:31 PM

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Dusty Substance

Quote from: mothman on April 11, 2021, 09:22:07 PM
Good call. It's almost a proto-revisionist; "print the legend" could as well be a valedictory for the old style of western!

I think you're absolutely right! Will be sure to consider the extra meta level if I ever re-watch Liberty Valance.

mothman

As a valedictory film you really couldn't hope for anything better than The Shootist.

And while on the subject of dying from exposure to nearby nuclear tests, The Misfits - western or not?

Also, Hud? Were there still Phwoar threads, I'd be posting pics of Patricia Neal in that film there right now.

chveik

watched a couple Ford westerns recently. it's insane how racist that guy was.

Chedney Honks

Quote from: chveik on April 12, 2021, 07:16:55 PM
watched a couple Ford westerns recently. it's insane how racist that guy was.

Any recommendations? There's rumours of a racist boxset coming from Criterion later this year but I'm not sure whether to blind buy.

The Culture Bunker

Being set in the immediate aftermath of WWII, it probably doesn't count, but 'Bad Day at Black Rock' had Western qualities (set in a nowhere town in the desert, mysterious stranger rolls up, rubs some bad 'uns up the wrong way) and I think it's great. 

beanheadmcginty

The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford is incredibly beautiful. One of those Roger Deakins jobs.

chveik

Quote from: Chedney Honks on April 12, 2021, 08:02:03 PM
Any recommendations? There's rumours of a racist boxset coming from Criterion later this year but I'm not sure whether to blind buy.

i can't recommend any in good faith, i found them very boring, the only distraction being some nice shots and the aforementioned bigotry.



Chedney Honks

Sorry, I was partly poking fun at myself and because I thought the idea of a 'racist boxset from Criterion' was funny. I've only seen one Ford film, the very entertaining The Whole Town's Talking but there's a black doorman in that whose pidgin patois and manner were extraordinary to me in 2021. I have several Ford movies on the shelf to watch and I'm looking forward to them, so I hope the racist caricatures don't feature elsewhere.

notjosh

chveik, it would be good if you could name the films. Ford is a complex character and there are various accusations of racism levelled at his work - some justified, some not, in my opinion. To me, his most racist (and most overrated) work is the supposed anti-racist The Searchers, which features some quite nasty treatment of a Native American woman and an actor in make-up playing a Comanche chief, which is unusual for Ford as he typically employed people who lived locally in Monument Valley.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is indeed a masterpiece which works on many different levels. The last line is an absolute killer, and the looks on Vera Miles and Jimmy Stewart's face will never leave me. Quite similar to the ending of the The Graduate, though I'd be surprised if it was an influence. Lee Marvin is a fantastic villain in that, and it's fun to see Van Cleef as a heavy.

Stagecoach is the best if you want a good old-fashioned cowboys n injuns adventure. It was recently featured in a TCM series for cancelled films, supposedly because of 'racist depictions of Native Americans', though I don't remember anything dodgy besides the fact that the Apaches are portrayed as antagonistic to white settlers travelling through their territory (historically accurate I would presume). Just a great mix of action (with brilliant stunts from Yakima Canutt) and social commentary, and some really lovely understated chiaroscuro photography. This was John Wayne's star-making role after 10 years of ropey B-westerns and it's amazing to see him being reborn under a director who knew how to get the best out of him.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is probably my favourite and for my money the most Fordian of all the Ford films. Classic western moral philosophy, knockabout Irish drinking humour from Victor McLaglen, Monument Valley, and a beautifully sensitive performance from Wayne. The moment when he receives a leaving gift from his troops on his last day is so perfectly played it brings a tear to my eye every time.

The Iron Horse is a tremendously fun western epic about the building of the trans-continental American railroad. Released in 1924, this was the moment Ford went from reliable maker of westerns to star director. Cameos from Buffalo Bill, Abraham Lincoln etc. Just great entertainment.

Among his other westerns I really rate Three Godfathers (another brilliant Wayne performance) and Fort Apache (spiritual predecessor to Yellow Ribbon).

notjosh

A few other Westerns I like:

3:10 to Yuma (1957), which features two of the best performances of all time - Van Heflin and Glenn Ford are absolutely magnetic. Haven't seen the remake because I can't believe anyone could ever come close.

Destry Rides Again. Beautifully balanced comedy western where Jimmy Stewart plays the new town sheriff who doesn't believe in guns. Maybe the definitive version of his steely-reserve-hidden-behind-an-aw-shucks-persona. Marlene Dietrich is a lounge singer as she always was in this period and is sexy as hell (as is Stewart to be fair). Can't imagine anyone not enjoying this.

Shenandoah. Another great Jimmy Stewart one about a father trying to keep his kids out of the civil war. Most notable for Stewart's performance - maybe his best on-screen breakdown since Mr Smith Goes to Washington. Pretty much any western featuring Jimmy Stewart is great.

The Gunfighter, or The Magnificent One. A very poignant take on the ageing gunfighter trope, with Gregory Peck in typically excellent form.

No Name on the Bullet. Audie Murphy is a mysterious gunman who comes to town, presumably to kill someone, but no one can work out who. Feels like a really great feature-length Twilight Zone episode.

The Ox-Bow Incident, another one that feels like it could be a Twilight Zone episode, or an old time radio play. Westerns are better than any other genre at examining the tug-of-war between savagery and civilisation that goes on in the hearts of men, and this is one of the best examples.

Rio Bravo, as mentioned, is superb and features John Wayne at his most commanding. It's plot formed the inspiration for Assault on Precinct 13. Also Walter Brennan is in it, and the more people that watch Walter Brennan films the better as it's the only decent impression I can do.

Chedney Honks

Great posts, thanks. I have a couple of those on the shelf because I'd heard good things, but you've given me an appetite.

kalowski

Quote from: notjosh on April 12, 2021, 09:15:37 PM
chveik, it would be good if you could name the films. Ford is a complex character and there are various accusations of racism levelled at his work - some justified, some not, in my opinion. To me, his most racist (and most overrated) work is the supposed anti-racist The Searchers, which features some quite nasty treatment of a Native American woman and an actor in make-up playing a Comanche chief, which is unusual for Ford as he typically employed people who lived locally in Monument Valley.
The nasty treatment of "Look" is pretty much in character, though, isn't it? Maybe you could argue that the simplistic view of the Comanche leads to the marriage, but, of course, it does all lead to a key plot point: "She heard you."
Obviously much more difficult to argue for the casting of Chief Scar.
It's still a bloody brilliant film. I wouldn't call it "anti racist" but I would say it's pretty honest about Edward's racism, and the normal view of the Comanche by the white settlers.

notjosh

Quote from: kalowski on April 12, 2021, 09:37:52 PM
The nasty treatment of "Look" is pretty much in character, though, isn't it? Maybe you could argue that the simplistic view of the Comanche leads to the marriage, but, of course, it does all lead to a key plot point: "She heard you."
Obviously much more difficult to argue for the casting of Chief Scar.
It's still a bloody brilliant film. I wouldn't call it "anti racist" but I would say it's pretty honest about Edward's racism, and the normal view of the Comanche by the white settlers.

Yes, but it's played for comedy for the most part and reeks of misogyny to me. Not something I usually associate with Ford. I also find the bait and switch towards the end where we're almost expected to cheer Ethan for
Spoiler alert
not brutally murdering his 'tainted' niece
[close]
to be pretty tasteless. I've read countless sympathetic interpretations of the film and can never square any of them with what I'm seeing on screen.

Still love the bit with Ward Bond drinking coffee though, a beautifully sensitive moment.

Dex Sawash

Quote from: kalowski on April 12, 2021, 11:55:34 AM
Meek's Cutoff. I'd never heard of it. It's on Amazon Prime so I'll try and watch this week.
Anyone know it?

I've seen, just checked reviews and apparently I missed the point. It's got Milhouse Paul Dano

mothman

Obviously The Wild Bunch is the Peckinpah western that gets mentioned the most, but I really like Major Dundee and absolutely adore The Ballad of Cable Hogue. Would Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia be considered a western? There are pros and cons. Oh, and how could I forget Ride the High Country? It's possibly Peckinpah's most mainstream film, but it's still brilliant. And once you're onto Randolph Scott[nb]*GASP* Randolph Scott?![nb]RAN... DOLPH... SCOTTTTTTT...[/nb][/nb], then you might as well get into the various films he made with Bud Boetticher.

wooders1978

The True History of the Kelly Gang was a pretty good Aussie western I saw recently - think it was on Prime

timebug

Always loved 'The Ballad of Cable Hogue' myself.

Endicott

Quote from: mothman on April 12, 2021, 07:16:49 PM
As a valedictory film you really couldn't hope for anything better than The Shootist.

And while on the subject of dying from exposure to nearby nuclear tests, The Misfits - western or not?

Also, Hud? Were there still Phwoar threads, I'd be posting pics of Patricia Neal in that film there right now.

Both The Misfits and Hud get a big mention in Rich Hall's How the West Was Lost doc.

notjosh

Lonely Are the Brave, with Kirk Douglas, is another brilliant story about a cowboy whose time has passed. There seems to have been a spate of them in the early 60s. I wonder why?

Was it that the last few old-timers that had any memories of the 'old west' were almost gone? Perhaps the 'greatest generation' struggling to come to terms with post-war life, as the young upstart baby boomers marched off into their brave new world of LSD, walking on the moon and not being quite as racist? Or a way for veteran filmmakers to bemoan the death of the old studio system?

mothman

Ooh, good question. That's me pondering that for the rest of the evening now...

And the thing is, when they talk about a golden age of Hollywood westerns, most of the films they talk about were from the 1950s (with a few in the 40s). That's ONE DECADE. Maybe it's just me getting old, but a decade doesn't seem so long these days. In fact, when it comes down to it, most of the US's post war golden age, culturally, economically, was the 1950s. Ten years, twenty at best if you lump in after 1945 and up until the mid-sixties when the counterculture kicked in in earnest and Vietnam ramped up.

joaquin closet

Quote from: Chedney Honks on April 12, 2021, 08:02:03 PM
Any recommendations? There's rumours of a racist boxset coming from Criterion later this year but I'm not sure whether to blind buy.

For me, Fort Apache might be the one... Henry Fonda's character - so interesting.

Twit 2

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

notjosh

Quote from: mothman on April 13, 2021, 06:36:09 PM
And the thing is, when they talk about a golden age of Hollywood westerns, most of the films they talk about were from the 1950s (with a few in the 40s). That's ONE DECADE. Maybe it's just me getting old, but a decade doesn't seem so long these days. In fact, when it comes down to it, most of the US's post war golden age, culturally, economically, was the 1950s. Ten years, twenty at best if you lump in after 1945 and up until the mid-sixties when the counterculture kicked in in earnest and Vietnam ramped up.

That may have been the golden age for adult, critically-acclaimed westerns but I think the genre was probably at its most popular from the 1910s-1930s. The first movie made in Hollywood - Cecil B. DeMille's The Squaw Man in 1914 - was a western and of course there was a tradition going back to The Great Train Robbery. For the first few years they were just known as "outdoor pictures", and the proximity of places like Utah and Nevada to Hollywood gave them plenty of outdoors in which to film them.

Although they were pretty big in the 1920s, with a raft of cowboy stars (William S. Hart and Tom Mix are the two that are usually talked about as representing the moralistic and adventurous western traditions respectively)  the coming of sound in the 1930s meant that Hollywood movies became extra-American and the western really flourished. This was the era when every Saturday matinee show would have at least one western, John Wayne was pumping out a B-movie a month at Monogram and then Republic, and you had the big cowboy stars like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry doing 5-6 a year.

I think it was after the war (during which there were obviously far fewer westerns produced) that filmmakers became much more interested in the old west as an arena in which to explore the darker aspects of human nature, and the wisdom of using violence to defeat violence [nb]arguably, this ought to have happened after the first world war too, but I'm not so big on my silent westerns so I'm not sure[/nb]. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the people behind these films had grown up on westerns in the same way that modern filmmakers have grown up on superhero films, and were interested in making them darker and more mature. Plus, with the advent of television there was a natural place for the cheaper, less complex western stories to go, leaving cinema to explore darker themes. (This is mostly speculation on my part)

I often look at Jimmy Stewart's pre- and post-war films as illustrative of the change in the American psyche. Of course, there was strength and maybe a little darkness in his 1930s films, but after the war he starts to bring his pain and anger to the surface to a degree that is fairly startling (beginning with It's A Wonderful Life). Supposedly when audiences saw his name on screen at the test-screenings of Winchester 73 they laughed as he seemed like such an unlikely presence in a serious western. They weren't laughing by the closing scenes. The fact that this came out the same year he played his ultimate aw-shucks role in Harvey just shows why he was the best.

Ignatius_S

Quote from: notjosh on April 13, 2021, 06:06:28 PM
Lonely Are the Brave, with Kirk Douglas, is another brilliant story about a cowboy whose time has passed. There seems to have been a spate of them in the early 60s. I wonder why?

Was it that the last few old-timers that had any memories of the 'old west' were almost gone? Perhaps the 'greatest generation' struggling to come to terms with post-war life, as the young upstart baby boomers marched off into their brave new world of LSD, walking on the moon and not being quite as racist? Or a way for veteran filmmakers to bemoan the death of the old studio system?

Partly it was  television and trying to compete with it. There was a huge amount of Western TV shows that were massively successful (plus a decent amount of radio ones) and the studios looked to telling stories that weren't being told in those shows. Also an argument could be made that the volume of Western shows created a fatigue of the genre, which meant Hollywood had to come up with something 'new'.

Personally, I think there was an element of natural evolution; there was had been questioning of the mythological West (or at least, looked at in a different way) and with something like Warlock, the gunfighter was presented as someone who still had their uses, but their time was running out and seen an embarrassment to the new society.



Ignatius_S

Quote from: mothman on April 13, 2021, 06:36:09 PM
Ooh, good question. That's me pondering that for the rest of the evening now...

And the thing is, when they talk about a golden age of Hollywood westerns, most of the films they talk about were from the 1950s (with a few in the 40s). That's ONE DECADE. Maybe it's just me getting old, but a decade doesn't seem so long these days. In fact, when it comes down to it, most of the US's post war golden age, culturally, economically, was the 1950s. Ten years, twenty at best if you lump in after 1945 and up until the mid-sixties when the counterculture kicked in in earnest and Vietnam ramped up.

Would say that it's usually the 1940-50s that's said that, but it's a subjective view and one that leaves out an awful lot of significant work - such as what notjosh says, never mind what happened in other places of the world.

mothman

The advent of colour certainly played a part. As notjosh highlighted, there were classic westerns from before the 50s. And there were some darn good films from that period too. But when most people today think of a classic Hollywood western, chances are it'll be from that twenty years after the war. There's something about the big western stories that needs colour (OK, most of the time - High Noon and Liberty Valance are notable exceptions).

Chedney Honks

Really fascinating discussion herewith. For what it's worth, I've seen a few Westerns over the last couple of days and I definitely prefer the 50s B/W stuff. I really enjoyed The Wild Bunch and OUATITW, but they seem like a different type of movie from High Noon, Shane, Yuma and Day of the Outlaw.

zomgmouse

Quote from: mothman on April 13, 2021, 08:50:39 PM
There's something about the big western stories that needs colour

This reminds me of How the West Was Won. An impressive spectacle.


Quote from: zomgmouse on April 14, 2021, 06:26:00 AMThis reminds me of How the West Was Won. An impressive spectacle.

That was on last night and it's an absolute delight of a film.