Your five favorite westerns.

[Palatine]

Not the best of all time although I suspect great movies will dominate. Just the film and maybe a sentence why it's a fav. This is a target rich environment.

1- The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. An absolute epic, a wonderful drama about getting the stolen gold, set inside the larger drama of the Civil War. Huge movie making at its finest blew me away when I saw it as a 20 year old.

2- Once upon a time in the west. Arguably the best opening of any film, western or not. Incredible performance by Hank Fonda, a bad, bad man behind blue eyes.

3- Unforgiven. An unvarnished look at western brutality. A film with no good guys.

4- Blazing Saddles. Also one of the best comedies ever made. Would be impossible to make this policitically incorrect film today. Nailed all the western movie cliches. I recently showed it to my college age nephew and watched his stunned belief at what he was seeing as he laughed his head off.

5- The Magnificent Seven. The Original is and always will be a classic even if the storyline is "borrowed."

Honorable mention: Tombstone, the best of any OK Corral movie, the street scene is a classic. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Wayne, Jimmy Steward and Somers, Connecticut's own Gene Pitney sang the title song.

It would be easy to list a top ten or twenty as there are that many great films in this genre.. But I'm comfortable with these five, which probably change anytime I watch a western.

 

[CL82]

1) True Grit
2) Unforgiven
3) The Cowboys
4) City Slickers
5) The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

 

[dbmill]

Hard for me to name just five favorite westerns, but I'll give it a try in no particular order.

Stagecoach (John Ford)
My Darling Clementine
Red River
El Dorado
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

If I expanded this list out a little more, you would see several more John Ford/John Wayne collaborations (Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande, and The Searchers), Rio Bravo, and the original version of 3:10 to Yuma.

 

[Jay-Bone]

TGTBTU
OUATITW
The Wild Bunch
Shane
The Great Silence

More contemporary:
The Quick and the Dead
3:10 remake
Tombstone

 

[huskeynut]

Only my top 5. Difficult decision but here goes:

The Magnificent Seven
Stagecoach
Tombstone
Broken Arrow
High Noon

 

[M.S.G.]

The Mandalorian

 

[ZooCougar]

This is a tough one. So many are good.

The Good the Bad and the Ugly-duh

Tombstone-Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday. The ultimate lethal, loyal and morally questionable anti hero sidekick

The Mad Max Movies-Duh

Unforgiven-And Duh
Sicario-New Age Western
No Country For Old Men
3:10 to Yuma (both)
The Wild Bunch

 

[Aluminny69]

I love Robert Duvall as a cowboy. I loved Lonesome Dove and Open Range.

 

[CL82]

The Mandalorian

Firefly

 

[Palatine]

Interesting I didn't see Shane on the list. it's a good movie but it hasn't aged as well as some others. At one time it was the standard for westerns. Palance does rank up there for bad guys. Really Evil.

 

[ZooCougar]

Firefly

Firefly and Mandalorian? We’re including kids shows in this?

 

[CL82]

Firefly and Mandalorian? We’re including kids shows in this?

Less that than acknowledging that they’re both basically westerns. Especially Firefly.

 

[HuskyHawk]

Great thread idea.

1. Unforgiven. I have an unusual view on this. It's a glimpse into how the love of a woman turned a terrifying killer into a good man, and then, when she was gone, how the murder of a friend flipped the switch the other way.
2. Tombstone. Just a classic. Great cast, classic story done well.
3. The Searchers. Have to get John Ford & John Wayne on the list. This is better than True Grit. Stagecoach is probably #2 in the Ford/Wayne catalog of westerns.
4. The Outlaw Josie Wales. Despite the fact that Josie rode with that piece of Missouri excrement Quantrill that burned Lawrence, KS, I always enjoyed this the most of Clint's early westerns.
5. Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid. Just a personal favorite. So many classic lines came out of this.

Honorable mention: Stagecoach, 3:10 to Yuma (both), The Good The Bad and The Ugly, For a Fistful of Dollars, High Noon, Red River, Blazing Saddles, Once Upon a Time in the West (too long), Rio Bravo, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Can't include The Magnificent Seven, because it's stolen and Kurosawa did it better.

Despite the comment on The Madalorian, even Star Wars is a western. But I'll exclude it because it's a hybrid western/sci fi. Just like Cowboys and Aliens.

 

[HuskyHawk]

Interesting I didn't see Shane on the list. it's a good movie but it hasn't aged as well as some others. At one time it was the standard for westerns. Palance does rank up there for bad guys. Really Evil.

The kid Joey is too annoying. "Shane"..."Shane", I just want to smack him.

 

[dbmill]

The kid Joey is too annoying. "Shane"..."Shane", I just want to smack him.

I first saw "Shane" when I was a student at UConn. That was pretty much my reaction, I found the kid so annoying that I didn't want to watch that movie again. The kid pretty much ruined the movie for me. At some point during the last 10 years or so, I got around to watching "Shane" again. I now find it to be a solid western, and I will watch it when it shows up on television. However, partly due to the kid, I would not rate it among my favorite westerns, but it is certainly more than watchable.

 

[boba]

Not yet mentioned:
High Plains Drifter (Should be #1)
Lawman
Pale Rider (prefer to Unforgiven)
Valdez is Coming
Silverado (For the camp factor: Danny Glover shooting John Cleese's hat off was the campiest)

 

[ZooCougar]

The Assassination of Jesse James was probably one of the most boring movies ever.

Has anyone even mentioned The Revenant?

 

[superjohn]

Lone Star
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The Wild Bunch
No Country for Old Men
Wind River

 

[Veteran]

Not the best of all time although I suspect great movies will dominate. Just the film and maybe a sentence why it's a fav. This is a target rich environment.

1- The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. An absolute epic, a wonderful drama about getting the stolen gold, set inside the larger drama of the Civil War. Huge movie making at its finest blew me away when I saw it as a 20 year old.

2- Once upon a time in the west. Arguably the best opening of any film, western or not. Incredible performance by Hank Fonda, a bad, bad man behind blue eyes.

3- Unforgiven. An unvarnished look at western brutality. A film with no good guys.

4- Blazing Saddles. Also one of the best comedies ever made. Would be impossible to make this policitically incorrect film today. Nailed all the western movie cliches. I recently showed it to my college age nephew and watched his stunned belief at what he was seeing as he laughed his head off.

5- The Magnificent Seven. The Original is and always will be a classic even if the storyline is "borrowed."

Honorable mention: Tombstone, the best of any OK Corral movie, the street scene is a classic. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Wayne, Jimmy Steward and Somers, Connecticut's own Gene Pitney sang the title song.

It would be easy to list a top ten or twenty as there are that many great films in this genre.. But I'm comfortable with these five, which probably change anytime I watch a western.

My favorite line from Blazing Saddles is, "Somebody go back and get a boatload (and they didn't say boatload) of dimes".

The comic genius of Mel Brooks can never be overstated. Or maybe it's just that my immaturity can never be overstated.

 

[Hey Adrien!]

1- The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. An absolute epic, a wonderful drama about getting the stolen gold, set inside the larger drama of the Civil War. Huge movie making at its finest blew me away when I saw it as a 20 year old.

I'm no Western expert, but I watched this for the first time in Theodore C. Van Alst's film class at UConn, back in the 2007-2008 school year. It freakin' blew my mind!

I have a poor attention span with most movies, but I was locked in for the entire three hours. Haven't seen it in a few years and will soon, thanks for reminding me about this film.

I did like No Country for Old Man too. One of the few films that I liked after reading the book first (in general, I avoid movie adaptations of books that I love. I don't like how the imagery of the movie tends to replace my own imagery from reading the book. For example, I hated The Great Gatsby and refuse to ever even see a clip from The Giver).

The book is almost like a screenplay for the film (a theory one of my English professors thought was done by Cormac McCarthy's choice to make some extra money on the book after decades as a "starving writer". It worked, haha.

 

[Scud49]

1. For a Few Dollars More
2. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
3. One Upon a Time in the West
4. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
5. Blazing Saddles