mintys best westerns
Howdy Stranger. I’ve been mulling over the crafting of another ‘best of’ list for a while although we’re still some way off from reaching the next post milestone (I reckon I’ll hit number 400 around June time), nevertheless I have achieved another target – over 20,000 hits to this site to date with my Oscars 2010 post quite remarkably generating over 1,000 clicks in twenty-four hours, it just goes to show the power of Hollywood in the media landscape and it makes my staying up until 5am to see Bigelow make history seem somewhat worthwhile – I’m not naive enough to think many people tuned in to specifically read my comments as opposed to stumbling across the blog with a generic ‘Oscars’ search but still, I’ll take ’em…
I’ve mulled over tackling the best SF films, the best UK films or the best War films but I thought I’d go with the Western for a change, not a genre that gets a great deal of coverage on here due to its paucity of new releases these days. 
To keep things easy I have restricted myself to one film per director, thus I am controversially omitting Once Upon A Time In The West, Stagecoach and Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid in favour of other movies, I 
am also leaving out Shane as although it is considered one of the greatest Westerns ever made it just doesn’t connect with me. Although as you’ll see I’m being a bit ‘clever’ with my choices I’ve also decided not to include any of Kurosawa’s Fifties & Sixties work in here either as frankly the likes of Sanjuro, Yojimbo and The Seven Samurai would overwhelm everything else – just take it as red that they are amongst my favourite films ever, regardless of genre, although in this centenary week of his birth I should do something a bit more comprehensive. Anyway, as always these are my personal favourites with overlaps to widely accepted high points of the genre, lets saddle up and mosey on over to the saloon with the proviso that there are major spoilers for most of my choices, including the final scenes of certain movies in some cases – you have been warned.
Johnny Guitar – One of the strangest hallucinations to explode out of the Fifties studio system, Nicholas Ray’s phantasmagoric allegory is all about inversions. The bad guys dress in white, the good guys – Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden – in black although that trend is reversed during the toward the end of the film as seen above. The female protagonist is the real driver of the film, the active protagonist of the plot and its final bursts of violence rather than the usual male advocate. Like the best of Ray’s work – Rebel Without A Cause, Bigger Than Life, On Dangerous Ground – it levitates a genre piece into Freudian territory as Hitchcock did with his thrillers of the same era and to steal a phrase from Derek Malcolm the film is baroque in tone and design, making it arguably a precursor to the insanity of Jodorowskys El Topo. With support from the likes of Ernest Borgnine, Ward Bond and John Carradine it’s also a supporting star treat and the pathological villain, a McCarthyite moralist of the worst kind (note the questioning in the clip above), is again cast against type as a woman, personified in the rabid Mercedes McCambridge – an actress who lived to gain further notoriety when providing the possessed voice of Regan in The Exorcist…
The Searchers – Like most people I used to think that those hokey old John Wayne Westerns were pretty boring, clichéd nonsense, then my A Level Film Studies tutor made us watch The Searchers as a Christmas ‘treat’ and that preconception was blown to smithereens. If there is greater partnership of director and actor in cinema history to rival Ford and Wayne, Scorsese and De Niro, Kurosawa and Mifune then I’d like to hear it, Ford apparently confessing to friends after the shooting of this 1956 masterpiece that ‘I never knew that big sonofabitch could act’. Those Monument Valley edifices are the psychological manifestation of Ethan’s implacable, remorseless quest to recover his kidnapped niece from the savage, contaminating injuns. Ethan becomes all that he loathes, ‘corrupted‘ by the natives superstitions and beliefs during the course of his hunt, his racism damning him to eternal purgatory – the final scene, with its cleansing gift to the sun (omitted from the above, it’s not on YT) and banishment of Ethan to walk alone in the spirit world between the wilderness and civilisation made Godard weep and its influence on Scorsese, Schrader, Lucas and Spielberg is incalculable.
The Good, The Bad & The Ugly – Why I have opted for this over Once Upon A Time In The West is a good question. Despite West’s classic moments I have a more personal affinity with TGTB&TU purely due to my vivid memories of seeing it as a wee nipper, late night on the BBC way back in the distant Eighties – I thought The Man With No Name was just about the coolest muthafucker ever to walk the earth. I think it’s the whole quest narrative that I really enjoy, the brilliant twists and turns and culminate in that showdown which has embedded itself in the annals of legendary cinema. Sure it’s been mercilessly mocked and reproduced over the past forty years but that’s testament to its classic status, every Rodriguez, Tarantino and Walter Hill film would not be the same without Leone’s antecedent. Eastwood is never better for that era of his career, nor was the cunning Eli Wallach or the adamantine Lee Van Cleef, one of the all time great screen villains.
Yellow Sky – This could be tricky to explain but the first thing to apologise for is the horrible soundtrack to the clip above, it’s the only excerpt on youtube. It’s not the greatest film in the world but it’s one of those pictures I have fond memories of watching on a rainy August afternoon back in my youth, not expecting anything particularly special but getting a solid Western with a genuinely exciting final showdown. I’m sure its one of the those movies that was written in a fortnight and churned out by William Wellman in a couple of months on the Hollywood assembly line, much like the work of his stalwart journeyman directors Raoul Walsh, Budd Boetticher or King Vidor, nevertheless it’s terrific fun and one of those examples of great, classical American film-making of its period with terrific gothic cinematography from Joseph McDonald who has quite the CV. I’ve not actually done any research on it to see what the critical consensus is, I might have a poke around over the weekend…
Unforgiven – Clint Eastwood went on to make his masterpiece after learning the art of direction from Leone and Siegel, both of whom he dedicated his best film to during its final credits. A couple of articles appeared almost identically a few weeks ago, one excavating the iconic status of Eastwood’s persona and one somewhat less benign, the Leone line that Eastwood , “Had only two expressions: with or without a hat.” quoted in the latter is priceless. Unforgiven shows ole stony face playing brilliantly with his cinematic persona, detailing the consequences of a life of murder and violence returning home to roost, crafting one of the most excruciatingly tense show-downs as seen above. Like a lot of the best Westerns, some others included here, there is a thread of the mythic, folkloric West weaved into the film, colliding with the brutal reality of America’s genesis, built as it is on the bones of an indigenous population, a rabid religious fanaticism and unbounded Capitalism that seems to be unravelling as we speak. I’ll shut up now.
The Wild Bunch – The film along with Bonnie & Clyde that redefined cinematic presentations of violence, it’s another of Peckinpah’s laments for an era where your word was your bond, when crude and brutal men fought valiantly against the encroaching modernity that eclipsed their generations ethos and ideology. It’s use of multiple perspectives in the editing and judicious employment of slow motion – surely Peckinpah’s greatest gift to cinema – that ushered in a new wave of techniques that is still omnipresent in today’s action movies. It’s Cormac McCarthy before he was published, the scene where the Bunch march to their certain death, in a futile rescue attempt which they all know is doomed to failure yet must attempt due to their masculine code of honor brings a courageous tear to the eye. They don’t make them like William Holden, Ernest Borgnine and of course Warren Oates anymore…
Assault On Precinct 13 – ‘In the meantime, I’ve got this plan…’ (0.30), probably one of my all time favourite lines. I can hear the cries of consternation from here, ‘that’s not a Western, where’s the horses and cowboys?’ Well of course it’s a goddamn Western, transplanted to the 1970’s urban inner cities with the gang members standing in for the Indians, the Hawksian motley crew of law breakers and enforcers forced to gel in order to survive in such a perilous environment. It’s widely accepted as Carpenters remake of Rio Bravo, a fact confirmed by his use of the pseudonym John T Chance in his role as editor, the name of John Wayne’s character in one of his Hawk’s finest pictures. This isn’t just one of the greatest Westerns ever made, its one of the greatest films period for the Mint, it will always occupy a position in my all time top five. One day when it gets another screening In London I’ll treat you to a full review but for now just consider the soundtrack, or the shoot out or the effortless brilliance of Napoleon ‘Got a smoke?’ Wilson. I fucking love this movie.
Il Grande Silenzio – One of the all time great endings. One of the other Sergios, this time Corbucci has been steadily gaining kudos amongst the cult and genre crowd over the years and I’d argue this is his best movie. Like many others I was introduced to this gem on the Moviedrome series and was as shocked as everyone else when the cavalry didn’t ride in at the last minute and save the day, when the hero and his woman were mercilessly gunned down, when the villains triumphed with no consequence. Apart from that it has an unusual Winter setting which is frigidly refreshing and a host of political allusions and genre reactions – a mute hero in opposition to Eastwood’s monosyllabic paladin – that provide the movie with an intriguing density. Apparently Haneke is a big fan, just make sure you pick up the version with the original ending.
Heavens Gate – Not many films can be held directly responsible for destroying an entire studio. It’s one of those great butchered movies, existing in many forms since the original five and a half hour cut was screened back in the late Seventies, it’s a mess but in some ways that is the beauty of it – you can see a sprawling, genuinely epic masterpiece that simultaneously has been sliced to incoherancy yet has moments of exhilarating wonder, sometimes the history of a movie and its production challenges are as attractive to us film nerds as the final product. I caught the 219 minute print that did the rounds a few years ago at the NFT (where else?) and it was one of the most magical viewing experiences I’ve enjoyed, I had to laugh when I saw people leaving the auditorium to complain about the sound quality of the print during the opening acts as it’s allegedly supposed to be like that, the relentless barrage of industry on the Mid-Western prairies designed to drown out the ambitions and dreams of the individual characters. It’s a beautiful picture, its closest kin being Apocalypse Now which also shares a pedigree of having a production history that is equal to the films fictional ambitions, take a look here for the background to a genuinely historic movie that retains a unique fascination.
The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford – Any A list starring movie with that many syllables in the title is to be admired. I’ve covered this before but another recent viewing proves that the film retains its elegiac beauty, its balance of legend and curious emphasis on celebrity make it a definitive product of its time that I’m certain will endure. It has a great cast of supporting players who are going from strength to strength such as Jeremy Renner, Sam Rockwell, Paul Schneider and Garret Dillahunt, not to mention Casey Affleck’s mesmerizing turn as the disconcerting Ford. Roger Deakins vision for this film, with the remarkable contour manipulation that is apparent in that clip above is stunningly original, I’m probably wrong but I’ve never seen such a conceptually brilliant evocation of such a specific period.
As always I’m sure I’ve missed a few gems, close nominees were the aforementioned El Topo, Bad Day At Black Rock, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Dead Man and of course any of the great Anthony Mann Westerns, particularly The Naked Spur which narrowly missed out on a ranking place. Don’t let that trailer mislead you, it’s one of Stewart’s most psychopathic performances, inverting his nice-guy star persona that he’d 
crafted through the likes of Harvey, The Philadelphia Story and Its A Wonderful Life that Hitchcock recognised and channeled for the obsessive tenor of Vertigo. In terms of upcoming entries to the genre it should be interesting to see what he Coens are going to do with their True Grit remake and I’m eagerly awaiting the potential Blood Meridian conversion (which I’ve just starting reading), next up on the blog however is a change of pace – it’s time to Kick-Ass.
Minty's Menagerie 
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