1960 – John Wayne – The Alamo has some things going for it. The cinematography often creates an effective sense of scale in its panoramic angles. The lighting and color add to the ambiance, especially during the evening and dusk scenes. The score nicely blends the martial-sounding strains of Mexican music with that of American popular melodies. All this combines pleasingly at times …
1958 – William Wyler – The tensions of the Cold War may stand behind this western of two feuding families, based on a novel by Donald Hamilton. James McKay (Gregory Peck) is an ex-sea captain who travels west to San Rafael to meet up with his betrothed, Patricia Terrill (Carroll Baker), heiress to the immense Terrill ranch. Out of his environment, McKay is a stranger to the machismo…
1969 – George Roy Hill – What's not to like about this enormously appealing film? Not much, but there may be a few reasons to quibble a bit with its rank as number fifty on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Best Movies. The general approach of presenting two outlaws as antiheroes, the anti-establishment tone, and the infusion of comedy all seem to derive fr…
1964 – John Ford – Throughout his career the venerable John Ford often examined the effects of civilization coming to the American frontier. The famous comment by Frederick Jackson Turner that “the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization” receives one of its best cinematic expressions in a Ford film like My Darl…
1931 – Wesley Ruggles – This maudlin, melodramatic film is of interest more for historical than for dramatic reasons. It represents an early effort in the sound era to make a convincing epic. Based on Edna Ferber's novel, the film begins with its best moment, a sweeping recreation of the 1899 Oklahoma land rush. Yancey Cravat (Richard Dix) takes his wife Sabra (Irene Dunne) f…
1990 – Kevin Costner – The modern western has become more sensitive to the charge of injustice to the American Native (or perhaps more sensitive to political correctness). Unlike previous sensationalized and exploitative predecessors such as A Man Called Horse and its two less-accomplished sequels, Dances With Wolves is much more sensitive and effective. “I felt that economic…
1956 – George Stevens – The adjective “sprawling” is overused but fits exactly the feel of George Stevens' movie of a Texas cattle family. From the grand opening music to the sweeping panorama of barren West Texas cattle land that runs to the horizon, Giant lives up to its name. The center of the movie is the ranch Reata, half a million acres with its nearest ne…
1952 – Fred Zinnemann – The 1950s brought a new aspect to the western. Previously, many westerns consisted of simplistic tales and glamorous characters in outdoor settings. Critical respectability emerged with the increase of psychological intensity of both character and plot. No longer the mere confrontation of good guys and bad guys, westerns now began to reveal greater moral ambi…
1963 – Henry Hathaway, George Marshall, John Ford – This is the episodic story of the panoramic exploits of three generations of the pioneering Prescot family. Beginning on their trek west during the 1830's and continuing through the taming of the West, the storyline is simple but impressive in its grandeur of landscape and exciting action sequences. The film's efforts…
1970 – Arthur Penn – The revisionist urge especially prevalent in the 1970s of questioning the received truths and myths handed down from the past has rarely been exercised more fully than in Little Big Man. Just as the romanticized version of the Custer's last stand in They Died with Their Boots On casts Errol Flynn as an inspiring George Armstrong Custer, this legend-smashi…
1980 – Walter Hill – A cult favorite, The Long Riders is a stylistic shoot 'em up, telling the story of the infamous James/Younger gang and starring the Carradine brothers, the Quaids, the Keaches, and the Guest siblings. The film opens with the robbery of a small bank in which Ed Miller (Dennis Quaid) needlessly kills a bystander and is forced out of the gang by Jesse…
1960 – John Sturges – The most compelling aspect of John Sturges' translation of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai onto the more familiar terrain of the American West is its rich sense of the end of an age. Seven gunslingers band together to help a Mexican village resist the despoiling raids by the bandit Calvera (Eli Wallach), but these men are haunted by the rootlessnes…
1969 – Sergio Leone – The final gunfight in this intricately plotted story concludes with the survivor fitting a harmonica into the mouth of the man he has just shot. The victim's dying breaths are then transformed into eerie music as they wheeze out across the prairie in a dissonant death rattle. This scene, like all of the film, shows director Sergio Leone's emphasis…
1937 – Cecil B. De Mille – The popularity of the western in the 1930s led to more quantity than quality in films. John Wayne's career is a good example: cast in an important role in Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail in 1930, Wayne still failed to become a star (the film failed too) and spent the rest of the decade in B-westerns and serials until 1939 when he finally reached …
1948 – Howard Hawks – A success at thirty-two thanks to Stagecoach, John Wayne by all accounts was beginning to wonder if at age forty-one he might be headed from leading roles to character parts when Howard Hawks cast him in Red River as Tom Dunstan. It was one of the first times that Wayne played a character older than he was at the time of the film and certainly the first time he…
1956 – John Ford – Director John Ford once said in describing himself, “My name's John Ford. I make westerns.” Ford may have simplified his own legend, but if so, the legend, not unlike his favorite scenery, is monumental. By this decade Ford's attitude toward the western was changing. He was becoming more introspective and melancholy. These feelings culm…
1953 – George Stevens – With the 1950s came the two most influential westerns of their time— High Noon and Shane. Though High Noon was the more intense and introspective of the two, it was Shane that won more widespread acclaim and was the number three moneymaker of 1953. Its format and style have won it the reputation for being the one of the best examples of the Hollywood w…
1965 – Andrew V. McLaglen – This underrated film features a great star performance by James Stewart as a crusty Virginia patriarch with six sons and a daughter in the waning days of the Civil War. Widower Charlie Anderson (Stewart) tries to keep his family out of the hostilities that close in on his farm. He does not own slaves, has never asked for any government help, and sees no r…
1939 – John Ford – Director John Ford loved praising Stagecoach for not having a single respectable person among its characters. This theme of social ostracism serves as a linchpin to unite the film and seemed to interest the director even more than the many staples of the genre that this pioneering movie (Ford's first sound western) helped to establish. The nine people who g…
1992 – Clint Eastwood – “You ain't ugly like me,” Will Munny (Clint Eastwood) says gently to Delilah (Anna Thomson), a prostitute whose face is covered with stitches from a slashing by a customer, “it's just that we both got scars.” In Unforgiven, physical scars aplenty are present, but it's the emotional and spiritual scars that dist…
1969 – Sam Peckinpah – When this film appeared, it was notorious for its use of slow-motion violence that emphasized the grace and beauty of something audiences had been conditioned to regard as ugly. Since its release, however, this shock has receded as the mainstream of films has largely adopted Sam Peckinpah's use of slow-motion. The Wild Bunch today seems noteworthy for w…
Film historian Louis Giannetti has called the western the most popular epic genre in the United States. Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail (1930) is probably most noted as the film that announced the potential of John Wayne as a star. This should not overlook the initial use of 70mm to produce a spectacle that displays magnificent and vast scenery while relaying the saga of a wagon train on its tr…