The Best Westerns Ever Made

Alan Le May's 1954 novel gave John Ford the plot, and Ford gave it to John Wayne as Ethan Edwards, a man who spends years hunting his abducted niece with murder rather than rescue in mind. Jeffrey Hunter and Natalie Wood fill out the search. It opens and closes on a doorway, and that last shot — Ethan framed in it, turning back toward the desert while the family walks inside — is the most honest ending the genre has.

Henry Fonda turned the part down before Sergio Leone and Eli Wallach talked him into playing Frank, and Leone then vetoed the brown contact lenses Fonda had planned — he wanted those innocent blue eyes doing the killing. Everything you need to know about the tempo arrives before a line of dialogue does, in the opening, where three gunmen wait at a railway halt with a creaking windmill and a fly crawling across a lip.

Several hundred Spanish soldiers built Sad Hill Cemetery near Santo Domingo de Silos so Sergio Leone could stage his finale inside it, and Ennio Morricone wrote to a brief about corpses laughing in their tombs. The Ecstasy of Gold plays over Tuco's run through the graves after the $200,000 in gold coins, Eli Wallach sprinting while the camera circles faster than he can. The three-way standoff that follows gets its own cue, The Trio.

David Webb Peoples wrote the screenplay, Clint Eastwood directed and starred, and the picture took four Oscars at the 65th Academy Awards in 1993 — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Gene Hackman and Best Film Editing. Hackman's Little Bill beats a man half to death in the street while patiently explaining that he is keeping the peace. Every myth Eastwood spent thirty years selling gets billed back to him.

Sam Peckinpah ran six cameras at 24, 30, 60, 90 and 120 frames per second through the shootouts, then cut the results together until time itself stretches and snaps. Set on the Mexican border in 1913, it hands William Holden's gang one last job and no future at all. First assembly of the opening robbery ran twenty-one minutes; the released version is five, and those five minutes reset what screen violence could look like.

Monument Valley got its first John Ford Western here, and Ford predicted his young lead would become the biggest star ever because he was the perfect everyman — the 1939 picture duly hauled John Wayne out of B-movies. A drunk doctor, a banker and a woman the town has run out share the coach, and the seating arrangement does as much work as the Apache chase, shot across the salt flats at Lucerne Dry Lake.

Clocks keep turning up in frame because the marshal has until midday and the film runs almost exactly as long as his wait. Fred Zinnemann directed; Gary Cooper won Best Actor at the 25th Academy Awards in 1953, one of four Oscars the picture collected. The crane shot that pulls back and up from Cooper standing alone in an empty street makes the entire argument in a single move.

Howard Hawks built this one as a rebuttal: he did not believe a good sheriff would run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking for help, and John Wayne called High Noon un-American. So Wayne's Chance turns help away, and Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan hold the jail. The night everybody stops to sing in the cell block should derail it. It halts the plot dead and the picture is better for it.

James Stewart and John Wayne shared a film for the first time here, with Lee Marvin as the outlaw of the title. John Ford shot it in black and white on studio soundstages — which reads as thrift until you notice the whole thing is a memory — and it opened in America on 22 April 1962. Newspaper editor Maxwell Scott says print the legend, then burns the reporter's notes: the genre confessing, out loud, what it had been doing all along.

Ending a cattle-drive epic in a fistfight should be a disaster, and it is exactly why this sits at ten. Howard Hawks and Arthur Rosson spend the whole drive north turning John Wayne's Tom Dunson into a tyrant his own men walk away from, then decline to punish him for it. Borden Chase and Charles Schnee wrote the 1948 script; Montgomery Clift's Matt Garth takes the herd, and the two of them settle it swinging in the dirt.

Vilmos Zsigmond and Robert Altman flashed the negative before exposure to fog it, so the whole picture looks like a photograph left in a damp drawer. Three Leonard Cohen songs carry it — The Stranger Song, Sisters of Mercy and Winter Lady — and Julie Christie was nominated for Best Actress. Warren Beatty's gambler dies in deep snow while the town, forty yards away, fights a church fire and never notices.

Watching a man pull a glove on should not frighten anybody, and Jack Palance makes it the hinge of the film: nominated for Best Supporting Actor as the hired gun Jack Wilson, he takes an age to get ready and then kills the farmer Torrey outside the saloon in a second. George Stevens directed in 1953. Joey Starrett follows Shane into town on foot for the last gunfight and spots the blood afterwards.

Snow, in a genre that runs on dust. Sergio Corbucci shot his 1968 Western in the Italian Dolomites around Cortina d'Ampezzo and set it in Utah in the winter before the Great Blizzard of 1899, with Jean-Louis Trintignant as a mute gunfighter and Klaus Kinski as the bounty killer Loco. Loco's gang shoot down Silence and everyone in the room and ride out, and a title card comes up over the snow: the massacres turned opinion against bounty killers.

Roger Deakins shot it and was nominated for Best Cinematography at the 80th Academy Awards, alongside Casey Affleck for Supporting Actor. Andrew Dominik adapted Ron Hansen's 1983 novel, lost a three-hour cut to the studio and released at 160 minutes, taking $15,004,319 worldwide. The killing happens with Jesse standing on a chair to dust a picture, back turned, everyone in the room already knowing.

Hailee Steinfeld was thirteen and came out of roughly 15,000 applicants at open calls the Coens held in Texas in November 2009. Their version returns to Charles Portis's 1968 novel and tells it from Mattie's side, which is why Rooster Cogburn cheerfully perjuring himself from the witness stand lands harder than any gunfight. Ten nominations at the 83rd Academy Awards, no wins. The 1969 John Wayne film is a different picture.

Nick Cave wrote the screenplay and scored it with Warren Ellis, and John Hillcoat shot on location around Winton in outback Queensland, where the flies work as a supporting cast. Ray Winstone's captain offers Guy Pearce a deal: kill your older brother or your younger one hangs at Christmas. Emily Watson laying a proper English dinner table in that heat unsettles more than the shooting does, because it is the same colonial project carried on with cutlery.

Whether this counts as a Western is worth arguing; Tarantino calls it a Southern. But it opens in Texas in 1858, Dr. King Schultz shooting a Speck brother off his horse to buy Django's freedom, which is as Western as openings get. Christoph Waltz took Best Supporting Actor and Tarantino Best Original Screenplay; it grossed $426,076,293 worldwide. At Candyland later, DiCaprio cut his hand on a smashed glass for real and stayed in character; the take was kept.

Mel Brooks co-wrote it with Andrew Bergman, Richard Pryor, Norman Steinberg and Alan Uger, and Madeline Kahn was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 47th Academy Awards. Warner Bros. executives wanted the campfire flatulence cut and Brooks refused them. The brawl then punches straight through the wall into a Busby Berkeley musical shooting next door, out to the commissary, out onto Burbank.