Top 10 Westerns — Cinema Sugar

10. Blazing Saddles

To declare the spoof movie as a vanished design model in film is an understatement. Spirit and wisecracks abound in the screenplay for Blazing Saddles (with Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor as predominant contributors), demonstrated by its briskly discharged and provocative premise. Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder launch themselves into their characters of Sheriff Bart and the Waco Kid, respectively, as they collaborate to challenge a deceitful land speculator. Blissfully intellectual in its goal to lampoon all facets of bigotry, the movie famously spoofs the tropes of the western film genre while also shooting down its sweeping generalizations and displaying the splendor of the old western landscape with a few stunning views, compliments of cinematographer Joseph F. Biroc. The movie was created earlier than the idea of political correctness and it illustrates that pretty clearly. That being said, the bigoted and offensive comedy isn’t fashioned at the cost of certain demographics so much as it is at the expense of those bigots themselves. There isn’t a figure in the movie who says something racist who doesn’t also happen to be a total moron. There’s something so gratifying about keeping the small-minded the object of ridicule, especially when the jokes are this funny. —Natalie Bauer

9. Near Dark

In Near Dark, Oklahoma farm boy Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) becomes infatuated with the alluring, dreamy vision that is Mae (Jenny Wright), an offshoot of a meager, itinerant country bumpkin collective who roam the greater scorched earth by means of their mobile home. Plot twist: they are all vampires, and soon Caleb is one too. Caleb’s crusade to liberate himself and later Mae of their inhumanity supplies Near Dark with its soul, but the film’s heart concentrates on sensationally elegant ultraviolence and director Kathryn Bigelow’s rather climatic and volatile bickering testimonials to the western heresy of Sam Peckinpah. Huge portrayals hail from Lance Henriksen as the booze-blistered ringleader, Bill Paxton in the role of a lifetime as a specifically cruel extortionist, and Joshua John Miller as a bizarre bloodsucking boy-urchin. The movie accelerates to a startlingly vicious peak with Mae forsaking her freeloading kin while daylight melts the derma from her bones, and then not long after it kind of dwindles down to an absurd B-movie footnote. The whole amalgamation of this movie is sublimely shot, an unforgettable backcountry vampire western soaked in hemoglobin from necks cut open by boot spurs and the blazing plumbum greetings of Gatling-gun annihilation that perseveres into limitless dusk. —Natalie Bauer

8. 3:10 to Yuma

This remake is the kind of western I always dreamed of as a kid, one that could really be mine. I grew up with the westerns my dad grew up with, and there’s something special about that. But the first time I saw 3:10 to Yuma I rejoiced at the opportunity to experience this type of movie featuring contemporary actors I loved on the big screen. The story centers on rancher and injured veteran Dan Evans (Christian Bale) who is struggling to keep his family afloat, and the infamous outlaw and murderer Ben Wade (Russell Crowe). Their stories come together when Wade is captured and Evans volunteers to get him on the train to Yuma prison for a hefty reward. Wade takes a particular interest in Evans’ personal character and studies him intently throughout the film. The story really begins to take hold of you when Evans’ son William starts to see himself, and everything his dad is not, in Wade. It’s a slow build, propelled by tension leading to the inevitable final showdown. The supporting talent—including Ben Foster, Peter Fonda, and Alan Tudyk—is staggering, as is the musical score by Marco Beltrami, which brings a modern, driving edge to the film. There are many westerns that have brought a tear to my eye, but I am consistently moved by this film in every rewatch. —Natalie Pohorski

7. Buck and the Preacher

Those familiar with Akira Kurosawa’s sweeping epic Seven Samurai will feel right at home with Sidney Poitier’s landmark directorial debut Buck and the Preacher. Only instead of seven samurai defending a poor village from bandits, we’re given two crafty cowboys (played to perfection by Poitier and Harry Belafonte) as they defend a community of recently freed slaves from a group of bounty hunters in a post Civil War America. Boldly original and revelatory, Buck and the Preacher stands tall in its reclamation of the Black experience in the old West and gives us one hell of a good time while doing so. —Kevin Prchal

6. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

An unlikely buddy comedy western with heart. The story pulls from the exploits of real-life outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who were part of the Old West’s Wild Bunch gang. In the movie, these two cowboys attempt a train robbery that goes sideways and forces them on the run from a pursuing posse with unknown intentions. They decide it’s best to get out of Dodge and head to Bolivia, but trouble only follows them. The true magic of the movie is the chemistry between Paul Newman and Robert Redford, whose timing and delivery are hilarious, along with the added layer of Katherine Ross as the schoolteacher who helps get them out of a tight spot while forming a love triangle of sorts. It’s quotable, endearing, and has one of the most iconic endings in cinema that really does the characters justice. —Natalie Pohorski

5. Hell or High Water

After decades as a TV actor, but before creating the sprawling Yellowstone media universe, Taylor Sheridan wrote a triptych of hardscrabble, thick-skinned westerns—Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River—as fine as any in the modern era. Hell or High Water stands tallest among them for many reasons, including Chris Pine (the best Hollywood Chris, for the record) at his most rugged, Ben Foster as his short-fused brother in crime, and Jeff Bridges at his surliest. But this story of two bank-robbing brothers and the lawmen on their trail finds its strongest appeal in how it balances the timeless with the contemporary, staging a classic cat-and-mouse crime spree within the sparse landscape and post-Great Recession dilapidation of West Texas. It’s a requiem for dreams deferred, and a clear-eyed meditation on the many forms of justice, revenge, and brotherhood. —Chad Comello

4. Unforgiven

One of only a handful of westerns to win Best Picture, Unforgiven remains rightly celebrated 30 years on as a watershed film in the genre and a directorial masterclass by Clint Eastwood, who also stars as the killer-turned-farmer William Munny lured into a bounty hunt in 1880s Wyoming. Yet despite Eastwood’s presence, this is far from a glorified shoot-‘em-up: the aging and teetotaling Munny initially struggles to shoot or ride a horse, lacks the noble cause of a traditional hero-cowboy archetype, and soon regresses to his nihilist mercenary mode with small aims and a large body count. The film is a dead-serious journey of myth deconstruction, both about the exaggerated exploits of frontier fabulists and the supposed virtues of the Wild West. And the quartet of Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris, and Gene Hackman—the latter positively electric as the sheriff Little Bill—make that journey of this stone-cold modern classic a deliberately paced yet enthralling experience. —Chad Comello

3. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Amidst the bloody, rampant chaos of the Civil War, three rough and tumble vagabonds spar, scheme and match wits in seek of a hidden fortune. The good (Clint Eastwood), the bad (Lee Van Cleef) and the ugly (Eli Wallach) make every second of the film’s three-hour runtime count, with each scene more compelling and unpredictable than the last. The final installment of director Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is widely considered to be one of the greatest westerns of all time and I’ll tell you one thing, Blondie: Between its genre-defining score by Ennio Morricone, masterfully idiosyncratic direction by Leone, layers of allegory, and its quintessential conclusion amassing to nothing short of cinematic bliss—it’s not only one of the great westerns, but a landmark contribution to cinema’s good, bad, and ugly history. —Kevin Prchal

2. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

When the upstanding and scholarly Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) is roughed up by a band of outlaws led by the vicious Liberty Valance, he’s taken to a refuge where he meets his archetypical contrast Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). Assisting in the only way he knows how, Doniphon offers Stoddard a gun. “I don’t wanna kill him,” Stoddard says. “I want to put him in jail.” Doniphon replies, “I know those law books mean a lot to you, but not out here. Out here a man settles his own problems.” It’s this two-sides-of-the-coin synergy that fuels this masterful film through its emotional peaks and valleys, all the way to its exhilarating and unforgettable showdown. Towering works like The Searchers, My Darling Clementine, and How Green Was My Valley hang high in the halls of director John Ford’s career. But ‘round here, Pilgrim, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance has the winning hand. —Kevin Prchal

1. High Noon

Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 western High Noon tells the story of a small-town sheriff preparing to take on vindictive criminals hell-bent on killing him once they arrive on the high-noon train. It’s a simple task, complicated by the fact that he spends most of his available prep time being spurned and abandoned by his friends, former associates, his old flame, the pious town churchgoers, his deputy, his mentor, and even his fresh-off-the-vows wife—all of whom have excuses to avoid helping him. Crucially, the film was inspired by screenwriter Carl Foreman’s experience being blacklisted during the Red Scare of the 1950s for his Communist ties, adding a rich interpretive layer onto the film that would make it renowned yet divisive. (John Wayne, a leading Hollywood Red-hunter and blacklist promoter, hated this movie and made Rio Bravo as a response to it. High Noon is better.) But its reputation isn’t based on politics alone. At once traditional and revisionist, High Noon’s unique blend of stark cinematography, tight editing, a Best Actor-winning performance by the notably all-American and anti-Communist Gary Cooper, and a 85-minute runtime playing out this tense story in real time all factor into what makes it the essential western. 🎶 Do not forsake this film my darlings…🎶 —Chad Comello