Some Westerns Worth Watching
All Westerns, as my wife first told me, are about “dirty men and guns.” On their faces, this is true. You would be hard-pressed to find a Western that does not feature dust- or filth-covered men wielding firearms. However, I think Westerns are popular because they are, fundamentally, about taking action. This is why the frontier is so alluring to so many people, especially the emasculated and artificially constrained males of today. Western men were men who did things that needed doing, and to hell with the consequences. They would take revenge when wronged, bust a man in the mouth for speaking ill, and generally face down any who needed facing. Compare and contrast that to today’s culture of cowardice and litigious indecision.
I absolutely love Westerns for all of these reasons and many more. Here are a few of the Western movies I like, and why:
Pale Rider
Clint Eastwood’s best Western movie to date, better even than Unforgiven. It’s slow to develop, but that is its appeal. This is a Western that tells you a great deal without ever really telling you anything at all. Eastwood, the “pale rider” of the title, is a preacher with a gunman’s past. That past is never really told to us. Rather, it is left for us to assume in hints. We see Eastwood’s bullet-scarred back, and at the culmination of the film a villain we’ve not seen until the movie’s last few minutes recognizes Eastwood for who his character is supposed to be. The final gun battle is worth the slow boil to get to it, though it’s not long or complex. Rather, it is simply the payoff we’ve been waiting for, and the confirmation of what and who Eastwood’s character is supposed to be.
Unforgiven
Eastwood’s blockbuster does something that few other movies could. It gives us a real sense of believable history, because it’s about an aging gunfighter trying to put his past behind him (and failing). Given that Eastwood has been in so many Westerns down through the years, it is as if his cinematic history provides a very weighty backstory for the gunfighter he plays in this movie. The film also features incredibly good acting from Gene Hackman. Morgan Freeman is always good, of course, but his character doesn’t have a lot to do in this. When Eastwood embraces the bloody past from which he’s been trying to hide, it’s all you can do not to cheer as he visits payback on those who’ve done him wrong.
Open Range
Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall are superb in this sweeping hymn to freedom and individual rights. Costner and Duvall are “free grazers,” cattlemen who run afoul of a rancher who feels free to abuse them and run them off. The movie takes a long time to develop, but culminates in one incredibly long, incredibly cool gunfight. While there are some technical errors, these can be ignored for the sake of the righteous battle in which Duvall and Costner engage against overwhelming odds. What sets this movie apart is that it has an ending very much unlike what you’d typically predict from such a movie. It leaves a smile on your face.
Silverado
A much younger Kevin Costner costars with a dizzying cast of famous actors, including Scott Glenn, Kevin Kline, Danny Glover, Jeff Goldblum, John Cleese, Brian Dennehy, and Linda Hunt, in this relatively fast-moving tale of revenge and justice. It’s a treat to see so many big stars in one place, with Glenn and Kline at the center of it all. Dennehy is notable as a smiling villain, and Golblum is shifty and armed with a knife.
Once Upon a Time in the West
This Charles Bronson vehicle incorporates the traditional revenge tale — which unfolds over the course of the film as a harmonica-playing Bronson slowly revisits the memory that drives him — but also features several other villains and subplots. You’re not really sure, at some points, who the bad guys are and who you’re supposed to root for. At the center of these gunmen is Peter Fonda, as blackhearted a bastard as you’d like to see in one of these movies. Jason Robards plays a secondary villain who morphs into the lesser of two evils, and thus an almost heroic figure (perhaps something of an anti-hero). There is a subtext to this film that is hard to put into words, but basically the movie itself acknowledges that the frontier is ending, and the whole movie is about the progress of the railroad that will end the lifestyles of those fighting over it. The opening sequence itself is masterful in its imagery. It will make you thirsty just watching it.
The Spaghetti Westerns
Eastwood’s “spaghetti Westerns,” the ones that put him on the map, include Hang ‘Em High, Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. They’re all fun, but kind of interchangeable. Lee Van Cleef appears as both a villain and a protagonist, depending on which movie you watch. Fistful of Dollars is also noteworthy because it is based on the Kurosawa film Yojimbo, the storyline of which was also appropriated for the Bruce Willis action film Last Man Standing (and the David Carradine trainwreck The Warrior and the Sorceress).
There’s also High Plains Drifter, which I don’t generally classify with those others. In it, Eastwood takes revenge on an entire town, so it’s worth watching just for that.
The Outlaw Josey Wales
A dark, bitter film, this one is Eastwood at his deadly best, taking revenge on the forces of the North after his family is killed. The Civil War politics don’t really enter into this; there are only good men and bad men, and among the bad are those Eastwood hopes to kill before they stop him. Along the way he sort of learns to live again, though the darkness that pervades his character makes you wonder if he’ll ever really get the hang of it. Unfortunately this movie is also infected by Sondra Locke, who had a long-term romantic relationship with Eastwood and thus shows up in many of his movies. She’s kind of annoying, if you ask me, even on her best days. (To see her at her annoying worst, catch her with Eastwood in The Gauntlet, where he plays a cop trying to get a witness — played by Locke — from point A to point B before the mob and corrupt police officers can assassinate her.)
The Quick and the Dead (Sam Elliott)
Based on a Louis L’Amour novel, this somewhat obscure movie is actually very, very good. Tom Conti and a remarkably attractive Kate Capshaw (I say remarkably because usually she doesn’t come across as such, but manages to do so in this) play homesteaders from the East who are set on by a vicious group of thugs intent on raiding the family’s heavily laden wagon, which the thugs wrongly believe to contain items of value. To the rescue of the family (which includes a young boy) comes Sam Elliott, a traditional Western gunfighter. Elliott spends a lot of time coming on to Capshaw and making Conti look foolish, but it is Conti who surprises us all with his courage. Elliott is always a pleasure, with his “Beef: It’s What’s For Dinner” deep-voiced delivery and convincing tough-guy stare. (If you want to see more of him doing this, check him out in, of all things, the Whoopi Goldberg action movie Fatal Beauty. There’s also Shakedown, in which Elliott costars with Peter Weller. That one’s even more action-packed, as Elliott takes on the bad guys with a .45 Magnum automatic.)
The Quick and the Dead (Sharon Stone)
Let me say, right off the bat, that is not a “good movie” in the traditional sense. It is a big-budget cinema film, yes, but by those standards it’s ridiculous. It is ridiculous because it is a fantasy Western, a Western that takes place in this unreal parallel dimension where every Western stereotype, cliche, and misconception is always true. In the movie, a colorful cast of gunfighter characters (each with his own gimmick or trademark) engages in a quick-draw competition to see who is the fastest. Gene Hackman, the sponsor of the contest, is the corrupt bad-guy who owns the town, so of course one of the contestents is a hired gun the townspeople have brought in to kill him. Thrown into this mix is Sharon Stone, who’s come looking for some very Charles-Bronson-in-Once-Upon-A-Time-In-the-West revenge. Lance Henriksen is great as “Ace,” the flashy gunfighter who is more talk than skill. And a young Lenoardo DiCaprio plays “the Kid,” whom you’ll start rooting to see gunned down before fifteen minutes have elapsed. Stone is actually quite believable in this movie, despite her relatively wooden acting. It’s a guilty pleasure but a pleasure nonetheless.