The first truly cinematic genre remains deeply embedded in American cinema’s DNA. These movies best track that history.
The Old West is the great American fairytale, a time and a place mythologised as it was still happening by circus-like Wild West shows – in which real-life figures, such as the Indian-scalper Buffalo Bill, re-enacted their exploits on stage – and dime novels.
With the advent of moving picture, the Western became the first cinematic genre in the United States, further cementing the legends of both outlaws and lawmen – the likes of Jesse James and Wyatt Earp – in the Old West’s dying days.
The real Wyatt Earp lived in Hollywood and spent time on movie sets, where he met Western director John Ford; the 1903 silent short, The Great Train Robbery, often cited as one of the first narrative Westerns, mirrored the misadventures of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
In the silent era, Broncho Billy became the first cowboy star. In the 1930s, independent studios churned out a cattle drive-like slew of Western B-pictures to fill double-bills, and the 1940s and 1950s, when John Wayne became a major star, were a golden period for the genre. Later, revisionist Westerns and Italian-produced Spaghetti Westerns blew the old formula away, as the standard white hats and black hats (the goodies and baddies) were replaced with morally problematic anti-heroes. Native Americans, meanwhile, have been portrayed with varying degrees of sympathy, or even humanity – from Tonto-speaking Injuns to more complex depictions.
Even during years when the Western has been out of style, it remains so deeply embedded in American cinema that its conventions and structures always linger in the background of other genres. Because there’s more to the Western than cowboy hats, saloon doors, and spurs. Stories of tumultuous westward journeys, rapidly changing times, hostile landscapes, and violent ideological clashes speak to the creation – and identity – of the United States itself.
The below films have been selected not only as great films, but for representing various styles, subgenres, and eras of the Western – though you won’t find any singing cowboys here – while tracking the history of the genre.
Like many, if not all, Westerns after the classic era, Mel Brooks’ spoof is keenly aware of its own sense of genre – what the Western is, and what it represents as the mythic heart of American cinema. The story – about black railroad worker Bart (Cleavon Little), who’s hired as the sheriff of Rock Ridge, and Jim “the Waco Kid” (Gene Wilder) – is an affectionate send-up of the B-movie Westerns, complete with a town that’s a literal facade.
It’s famously puerile, of course – the most brilliantly flatulent film in comedy history (which is saying something) – and gleefully offensive in a way that just couldn’t be done now. Mel Brooks muddles the racial stereotypes, playing a Jewish Indian chief, while the characters go beyond the parameters of the genre, bursting on to the set of a musical – and even the Warner Bros cafeteria for a pie fight with other actors – before watching themselves on the big screen.
24. Django (1966)
The biggest name in Italian-made Westerns outside of Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, and Ennio Morricone. Django – played by Franco Nero – spawned many sequels (one official, 30-odd unofficial). Directed by Sergio Corbucci, it’s a clear cash-in on Leone and Eastwood’s A Fistful of Dollars – and like A Fistful of Dollars, derives from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo – but cranks up the bloodletting.
It begins with Django, a Union soldier, saving a prostitute from crucifixion on a burning cross, while he drags a mysterious coffin through the mud (which we later discover contains a machine gun big enough to make RoboCop think twice). Django then plays white supremacists and Mexican revolutionaries off against each other. It’s intense, with massacres, mangled hands, and someone’s ear being sliced off and fed back to them. The BBFC originally refused to pass it in the UK for “excessive and nauseating violence”.
23. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Director Andrew Dominik’s film (from the novel by Ron Hansen) is a pensive, if occasionally ponderous, meditation on Jesse James’s demise, which is stunningly shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins. The real Jesse James was a celebrity outlaw during his time, a legend after his murder, and a hero of classic Western movies. Dominik calls back to previous versions, but paints James and Ford (Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck, both sublime) as complex fellows.
James has a combustible aura – paranoid, magnetic, frightening – and keeps his soon-to-be murderer close, aware that the end is near. Ford, meanwhile, is a squirmy, about-to-unhinge fanboy stalker. James seems to invite his death, turning his back to dust a picture while Ford shoots him in the back of the head. It hits with a sickening jolt, like all the violence in this film. Ford is later surprised that he wasn’t applauded for the act.
22. Bone Tomahawk (2015)
Westerns have often masqueraded as horror – Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire western, Near Dark, for instance – but S Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk is the reverse: a brutal, gut-spilling horror film that roams the plains of the classic Western. It has all the trimmings: cutthroat brigands; a dusty frontier town; a dapper gunslinger; an impressively mustachioed sheriff (Kurt Russell) who doesn’t want any trouble; and a white woman carried off by savages.
The sheriff leads a rescue party across the hostile land – the type of journey that’s typical of many classic Westerns. The creeping sense of lawlessness is palpable, as men are murdered in their sleep, or they murder passersby as a preemptive measure. But what they find at the end of the journey is more Cannibal Holocaust than The Searchers. These are not regular Injuns, but troglodyte, flesh-scoffing inbreds. The film’s big set piece is a moment of once-seen–can’t-unsee brutality.
21. The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
Don’t be fooled by the glaringly low-budget studio sets. This Henry Fonda-starring drama is perilously grim stuff, and years before the moral murkiness of revisionist Westerns became the standard. Set in Bridger’s Wells, Nevada, the story begins with news that cattle rustlers have murdered a rancher. Locals form a lynch mob to find the culprits.
The only objections come from a wizened old-timer and a black preacher, who saw his brother lynched as a young boy and still has nightmares about it. Led by a major who puts on his Confederate uniform for the lynching, they find three men and sentence them to be hanged the next morning. The mob are spoiling to execute the men, regardless of guilt, though doubts start to creep in. There’s an ominous wait for sunrise – a gallows-like branch looms above them – and the hanging, though unseen, is affecting: an inescapable, inevitable, unjust tragedy.
The only female-led movie on this list (though named after a supporting male character), it stars Joan Crawford as Vienna, a saloon owner who ruffles the feathers of Arizona ranchers with her plans for the incoming railroad. She’s targeted by sexually frustrated spinster Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge), who wants Vienna killed at any cost. Emma riles up a mob against her, which has shades of McCarthyism, but when it comes to it, Emma hasn’t got the gumption to kill Vienna herself.
They swap the cowboy’s traditional white hat and black hat dynamic for white dress and black dress, and it positively bristles with lesbian energy. Directed by Nicholas Ray, the film is vivid, campy, and stagey – as much of a melodrama as Western, with Vienna emoting over her self-made business, or her lost love with Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden). Some moments seem to wander in from a Western-themed dream.
19. Dances with Wolves (1990)
As a director, Kevin Costner has always been most comfortable in the Old West. Every film he’s directed has been a Western – even the postapocalyptic farce of The Postman. But Costner has never bettered this directorial debut, which won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Costner stars as Lt John J. Dunbar, a Union hero who wants to see the frontier “before it’s gone”. Sent to the remotest fort possible, he makes friends with a nearby tribe of Sioux.
As is often the case with Costner’s self-directed films, there’s an air of ego stroking – see the scene in which he becomes a Union hero, straddling a horse with his arms out Christ-like – but it’s a funny, stirring epic of undeniable grandeur. Costner recently returned to the West as director with Horizon: An American Saga, which missed its target at the box office.
18. No Country for Old Men (2007)
“What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?” Those words – spoken by Javier Bardem’s sociopathic bounty hunter, Anton Chigurh – are enough to send a chill up the spine. Or, indeed, a cattle bolt gun right through the cranium. The Coen brothers’ neo-Western is, unsurprisingly, pure Coens, but retains the raw, sombre edge of the original Cormac McCarthy novel. The story begins when Texan hunter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles across a drug-deal-gone-wrong and a briefcase full of $2 million.
Taking the money, Moss makes himself a target for Chigurh, who doles out a series of soul-troubling murders – strangling a policeman with handcuffs and puncturing a hole in the skull of an unlucky driver. Life or death is decided, quite literally, by the toss of a coin. The menace of the film hinges on Bardem’s performance, somehow even scarier because of his oddball haircut and generously-heeled cowboy boots.
17. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Robert Altman’s film is a different kind of Western – serene and almost dreamlike, with a harsh, wet, bitterly cold landscape wrapped in warming Leonard Cohen songs. Warren Beatty plays McCabe, who comes to the town of Presbyterian Church, Washington, trading off a supposed rep as an ace gunfighter. He opens a brothel – the jauntiest whorehouse in the Old West – which is managed by whip-smart madame, Mrs Miller (Julie Christie). McCabe falls for Mrs Miller, but she has his number from the start – a charlatan and a hustler.
Based in the northwest (actually filmed in Canada), it feels on the fringes of what we recognise as the Wild West – set in muck and snow, not on a Hollywood backlot. But even with its alternative perspective, it concludes, as Westerns should, with a shootout when hired guns come to town. It’s a strangely melancholic finale: McCabe scrambling in the snow to save his skin as the town chapel burns.
16. The Magnificent Seven (1960)
John Sturges’s film doesn’t go much deeper than its testosterone-charged premise – a band of hired guns, led by Yul Brynner, protect poor Mexican villagers from a gang of bandidos – but it really doesn’t need to. Based on Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, it’s the Western as a glossy, macho ensemble. And nothing says macho ensemble like having Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson and James Coburn in the ranks. The Magnificent Seven are at first motivated by money, or the challenge, but eventually by doing the right thing.
Yul Brynner is almost mechanical in his steely cool and warns the bandits to quite simply “ride on” (Brynner would play a robot version of his gunfighter in the original film of Westworld). The final shootout is a riveting spectacle – all ricocheting bullet sound effects and men in big hats dying dramatically. A disappointment at the US box office, it was a hit in Europe and prefigured a decade of international Westerns.
Sergio Leone’s breakout Spaghetti Western changed the genre, making Clint Eastwood the next icon of the West (well, Spain and Italy, where the film was made) as The Man with No Name. Or “Joe”, as he’s called here – the first film of Leone’s Dollars Trilogy. Clint Eastwood wanted to get away from playing the white hat cowboy, Rowdy Yates, in Rawhide. Joe is certainly no white hat. Dressed in his poncho, chewing a cigar, he drifts into town and quickly kills four men for refusing to apologise to his horse.
Leone’s signatures keep it off-kilter – the dubbed dialogue, extreme close-ups, the Ennio Morricone score, and drawn-out silences – though it’s also refreshingly violent. The steel breastplate under the poncho trick is a classic (“aim for the heart,” he tells the villain), borrowed by Marty McFly – posing as Clint – in Back to the Future Part III.
14. Tombstone (1993)
Kurt Russell sports another magnificent moustache, playing Wyatt Earp in a broadly true account of the gunfight at the OK Corral. Earp, along with his brothers and Doc Holiday (played here by Val Kilmer), traded bullets with a gang called the “Cowboys”. Put through a 90s action filter, Tombstone stages the gunfight at the midway point (and at 90 seconds, it’s three times as long as the actual event). The real meat of the film is Earp’s revenge mission after his brothers are attacked.
Though, as Kilmer’s TB-ridden Doc Holiday says, “it’s not revenge he’s after, it’s a reckoning”. The film’s notable for the depth of its grizzly man’s man cast: Russell, Kilmer, Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton, Michael Biehn, Powers Boothe, Michael Rooker, Thomas Haden Church, Billy Bob Thornton, and, phew, Charlton Heston. A veritable posse of machismo. It certainly outgunned Kevin Costner’s rival Wyatt Earp film, which opened – and flopped – six months later.
Truly the granddaddy of classic Westerns. Directed by John Ford, Stagecoach helped revive the genre as a main feature attraction and turned B-movie player John Wayne into a box office star. A microcosm of white society (banker, doctor, doting wife, prostitute, salesman) travel from Arizona to New Mexico in a stagecoach, which is attacked by marauding Apache warriors. John Wayne joins the journey as white-hatted hero, the Ringo Kid, though it’s more layered than the white hat suggests.
Ringo has broken out of jail to avenge his murdered family, while the story’s more conservative characters are obnoxious or corrupt. The prostitute, Dallas (Claire Trevor), is the nurturing heart of it all. Filmed in Monument Valley, it also set the scene – quite literally – for many, many Westerns, and packs in thrilling horse stunts. The film has since been criticised for its influential depiction of Indians as a savage redskin menace.
Directed by Howard Hawks, Red River is the most significant film from the “cattle drive” subgenre of Western. John Wayne plays Thomas Dunson, who has a dream of breeding the top brand of beef by the Red River. Within minutes, though, Injuns have slaughtered his best gal. Years later, he takes his cows to market on a 1000-mile, three-month drive to Missouri (the sight of cows crossing the river is surprisingly majestic). But one of the cowboys is killed in a stampede, and Dunson, losing any semblance of reason, threatens to hang his own men.
His business partner and surrogate son, Matt (Montgomery Clift), wrestles the herd away, leading Dunson to pursue the more empathetic Matt. The role gave John Wayne a rougher edge, and he appears to physically transform – from dashing cowboy to a ghost of the Old West, stalking the plains. At its heart is a battle between ruthlessness and compassion, between the old and the young, and the capitalist march steering the United States of America.
Young, idealistic lawyer Ranse Stoddard (James Stewart) travels to the small town of Shinbone, where he’s robbed by bullying outlaw, Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Ranse wants to bring Valance to justice using the law but Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), Shinbone’s resident alpha, insists that it can only be settled the old-fashioned way: with guns. This film is among the last handful of Westerns directed by John Ford – a showdown for the soul of America’s future.
Ranse represents progress – teaching the townsfolk to read, write, and represent themselves politically – but, ultimately, violence gets the job done. The inevitable shootout is punch-the-air stuff, as the unmacho Jimmy Stewart faces the rougher, raucous Lee Marvin. Stewart’s Ranse also takes the one thing that would tame Doniphon’s heart, his gal, prompting Doniphon to drunkenly burn down his own house. But Ranse later sheds a tear for the passing of Doniphon and the ways of the Old West.
10. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Going against received wisdom, the Unionists are the villains in this Civil War revenge tale – Clint Eastwood’s second Western as director. Wales (Eastwood) is quite happy toiling the land in Missouri until Unionist guerrillas murder his family. He then joins Confederate bushwhackers and keeps fighting even after the war is lost. A wanted man, Josey’s reputation precedes him, along with the price on his head. “Reckon I’m right popular,” he admits. He finds a kinship with an old, sparkly-eyed Cherokee, Lone Watie (Chief Dan George), whose wits are as sharp as Josey’s shooting.
“Whenever I get to likin’ someone they ain’t around long,” grumbles Josey. “I noticed when you get to dislikin’ someone, they ain’t around for long neither,” the old Indian replies. The film’s more straightforward than its revisionist credentials suggest – Josey only kills men who have it coming – but the scars of war are plain to see, with an ugly welt running the length of Josey’s grizzled chops. “There ain’t no forgetting,” he tells us.
For A Few Dollars More – the middle film of Leone’s Dollars Trilogy – doesn’t quite make the round-up, but The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo in the original Italian) is arguably the most iconic Western of all time. Not least of all for the title – immediately conjuring the idea of desperadoes gunning for each other – and the Ennio Morricone theme (“OweeOweeOweeOw WahWahWaaah”) which strides around the cultural consciousness as the true sound of the sunbaked Western.
Indeed, Morricone’s theme is as important as the good, the bad, or even the ugly – Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach, respectively – who partner up and double-cross each other, multiple times, in a mission to find a buried stash of Confederate gold, landing on both sides of the American Civil War along the way. It’s also snarlingly funny stuff before – and even after – their Mexican standoff in a sprawling cemetery.
8. The Searchers (1956)
John Ford and John Wayne’s masterpiece is a full-blooded Western, rich with sumptuous scenery, goofball comedy asides, rousing song, and racial conflict. The opening scene – a view of the sandstone buttes at Monument Valley – is the Western at its most gloriously cinematic. Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, who returns from the Civil War as belligerent, evasive, racist, and loaded with (probably stolen) gold. When Comanches abduct his nieces, he sets off on a five-year rescue mission with Martin (Jeffrey Hunter), who – to Ethan’s disgust – is an eighth Indian.
Ethan’s prejudice is more savage, though. Stumbling across a dead Indian, Ethan shoots the corpse’s eyes to prevent him from entering the spirit world. When they eventually find his niece, Debbie (Natalie Wood), she doesn’t want to leave the Comanches; he’d sooner shoot Debbie than let her be. It’s Wayne’s most powerful role – see the moment he describes burying the body of his other niece with his bare hands. Ethan redeems himself, but there’s a sense that – like the dead Indian – he’s left to wander in limbo.
This all-time classic begins as wholesomely as any Western ever made. Shane (Alan Ladd) arrives in a Wyoming valley and helps sodbuster Joe (Van Heflin) toil the land. They chop wood to the sound of heart-swelling strings, while deer feed outside the homestead. It all looks a bit Seven Brides for Seven Brothers until Shane reveals what he really is beneath the tasselled buckskin: a rock-solid hardman. In a story based on the Johnson County War, ranchers try to muscle the salt-of-the-earth farmers off the land.
Shane comes to the rescue, fighting off a saloon-ful of bullies with punches so satisfying that a woman faints. But the true reverence is kept for the back-breaking work of the sodbusters. The real spoils of this new American land are what they can build as a community. “This is farming country,” says Joe, “a place where people can come and bring up their families.”
6. My Darling Clementine (1946)
Another John Ford classic and still the finest retelling of the gunfight at the OK Corral. Henry Fonda, playing Wyatt Earp, is the archetypal lawman who rides into town and cleans up the streets, though he didn’t mean to get involved – he only stopped by for a shave and a haircut. The film belongs to Victor Mature as the sickly, hard-drinking Doc Holiday, played like a sad, scowling block of granite who bubbles with manly emotion. Almost eighty years on, the black and white still looks beautiful, with literal shades of film noir in Tombstone’s shadowy, dangerous corners.
But the film has heart – most obviously in the unrealised romance between Earp and Doc’s former gal, Clementine (Cathy Downs) – but there’s a romance with the genre itself. See Earp sitting on the porch, rocking back his chair, surveying the Old West. The power of the climactic gunfight lies in the silence – other than a dog barking and cowboy boots scuffling in the dirt – before any shots are fired.
The title of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western masterwork is apt. It’s the film that best captures the Western as the great American fairytale – a story of murder, revenge, and the railroad (not to mention Charles Bronson’s harmonica playing). Leone frames it as a not-quite-reality, though when he pulls the camera back to reveal the still-under-construction Flagstone City, it’s a stunningly believable depiction of a frontier town.
Indeed, the near three-hour yarn feels more authentically American than Leone’s Dollars Trilogy, though much of it was shot in Spain. Claudia Cardinale is delectable as Jill McBain, a prostitute who comes to Flagstone and finds her new husband and stepchildren have been murdered. She gets back up from a couple of gut-toting tough nuts – Charles Bronson and Jason Robards – in a fight against Henry Fonda as sociopathic gunslinger Frank, who plays like an older, evil doppelganger of his Wyatt Earp. Morricone’s score, meanwhile, floats dreamily, and is disarmingly jovial at times.
In this twist on the lawman-cleaning–up-the-town Western, Marshall Will Kane (Gary Cooper) has already straightened out Hadleyville and locked up local villain Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald). Kane marries and is set to leave town, ordinarily a happy ending, but gets word that Miller is coming back to Hadleyville on the noon train. Kane seeks help from deputies and neighbours for the noon showdown, but they turn their backs on him – some even revel in the impending violence.
The film is commonly interpreted as a parable about Hollywood’s communist blacklist – screenwriter Carl Foreman was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisted himself – though it’s also been read as an endorsement of the USA’s fight in the Korean War. Ticking down in real-time, it jangles the nerves, all charged by the heft of Kane’s integrity – particularly when he starts to write his last will and testament at two minutes to noon. The shootout, followed by Kane discarding his tin star in the dust, is masterful.
This Paul Newman and Robert Redford classic understands the relationship between early cinema and tales of the Old West. Directed by George Roy Hill, it begins as a crackling sepia newsreel about their train robberies – just as The Great Train Robbery would have looked in 1903, when Butch and Sundance were still at large – and casts moments of their legend in sepia hues. Everything else is timeless Hollywood class.
Butch and Sundance are too charming, too devilishly handsome, to ever be true bad guys – you just have to admire the sheer gall of their hold-ups – but they’re forced to go on the run in Bolivia. The best moments are the stuff of cinematic legend, too: frolicking on a bicycle to the sound of Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head; leaping from a cliff in a daring escape; and bantering while surrounded by hundreds of Bolivian soldiers. “For a moment there I thought we were in trouble,” says Butch, knowing they’re about to die.
The Western flew to Europe in the 1960s for the more violent Spaghetti Westerns. The violence then came back to the US for Sam Peckinpah’s bloody masterpiece. Pursued by a posse of bounty hunters, Pike Bishop (William Holden) leads the eponymous bunch to Mexico, where they tangle with a dodgy general. The Wild Bunch was made against a backdrop of American unrest – Vietnam, assassination, race riots – and shows a period of violent transition.
The Old West is dying, about to be overrun by the age of the car and machine gun. And the bunch are far from heroes – they’re vile, murderous mercenaries. Pike decides to finally do the right thing – “let’s go,” he tells the bunch – and they stroll into town for a balletic bloodbath against the general’s men, effectively a suicide mission. The violence shocked audiences at the time, though the film has other surprises in sidestepping genre convention. Pike is killed before he gets to have a long-awaited showdown with an old partner.
Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winner blasts the Western myth apart, telling the story of the once-cold-hearted killer Will Munny (Eastwood), who comes out of retirement for the bounty on two prostitute-mutilating cowboys. But the aged Munny and his partner, Ned (Morgan Freeman), no longer have the skills nor stomach for it, while the self-spun exploits of other gunmen turn out to be more hot air than hot lead.
