1. High Noon (1952)
Westerns are almost inherently grim: Traditionally, the quintessentially American genre would have us believe that the country was wrested from the wild by a few unrelentingly strong, stubborn, self-sufficient men bravely facing incredible odds and probable death. Still, Westerns tend to be about heroes, and heroes usually win. Which makes stark, morally muddy features like High Noon stand out. Gary Cooper won an Oscar for his portrayal of a weary-looking Old West marshal who, literally minutes after marrying Grace Kelly and hanging up his badge, learns that a killer he put in jail has been released and will be back in town for revenge in less than 90 minutes via the noon train. Operating in real time, Cooper re-dons his badge and scours the town, trying to assemble a posse to deal with the killer and his band, but all his friends and neighbors turn their backs on him, out of apathy, cowardice, denial, naïve hope that the problem will just go away, or even ambition for Cooper's job. As his hopes for help disappear one by one, Cooper looks increasingly strained and exhausted, and becomes more and more of a Christ figure, abandoned by his disciples and desperately wanting someone to tell him this cup will pass from him, yet holding to the courage of his convictions. In the end, Cooper dutifully faces the problem and triumphs, in a manner of speaking—he's alive, but his faith in humanity, virtually all his friends, and his belief in the things he spent his life fighting for are irrevocably gone. High Noon isn't about Western heroism, it's about surviving utter betrayal and moving on.
2. Track Of The Cat (1954)
Robert Mitchum plays a strong-willed son in a stressed-out ranching family; when a panther starts preying on their cattle, Mitchum takes to the hills, haunted by the words of an old Indian legend about animal spirits who exact revenge on greedy men. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Mitchum's family plays out a psychodrama worthy of Eugene O'Neill, as their individual addictions—to liquor, to God, to love, to art—prove just as destructive as any wildcat. Veteran genre director William Wellman was at the peak of his Hollywood success when he made Track Of The Cat, and he was willing to take chances, turning an offbeat psychological Western (based on a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, adapted by screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides) into a tone poem about man's uneasy relationship with nature.
3. Run For Cover (1955)
When James Cagney and his young riding partner John Derek take potshots at some birds flying above a passing train, the panicky railroad guards throw out sacks of money, assuming they're being robbed. Cagney and Derek try to return the money, but Derek gets shot and crippled by a local sheriff. When the town realizes its mistake, Cagney is named the new sheriff, just in time to confront the tyranny of a marauding gang. Director Nicholas Ray, working from a script by Winston Miller (adapting a story by Harriet Frank Jr.) shuffles through some of his pet themes, including the poison spread by disaffected youth, and the inability of violent men to escape their past. Run For Cover builds to a final showdown in which lifetimes of mistakes and bad luck come to a fatal fruition.
4. The Searchers (1956)
The Searchers opens by introducing a happy family, then having most of them die horribly at the hands of Comanche raiders (or "the Comanch," as star John Wayne insists on calling them), but even that isn't the really grim part. The grim part is the rest of the film. As Wayne and the family's adopted son, Jeffrey Hunter, track the Comanche, many miserable years pass, and the question of whether Wayne's wee niece—the family's one survivor—will be found alive becomes a question of whether she'll be sane and fit for white-folk society even if they do. Once they finally do reach her, Wayne decides that living with (and, to his clear, vivid disgust, being sexually compromised by) Indians has tainted her, and he promptly tries to murder her. The only thing grimmer than the actual action is the inevitable question—at exactly what point along the way did Wayne decide that too much time had elapsed, and that his life had to be utterly devoted to wiping out his niece rather than rescuing her?
5. The Tall T (1957)
Director Budd Boetticher, screenwriter Burt Kennedy, and actor/producer Randolph Scott made a series of short, tough Westerns in the late '50s, usually featuring Scott as a loner-by-choice, tortured by a tragic past. The Tall T—based on an Elmore Leonard novel—has Scott playing a much brighter, more social loner who becomes embroiled in a kidnapping plot when the stagecoach he's riding on gets hijacked by dandyish villain Richard Boone and his henchmen. Boone's crew meant to rob a money-transporting stage, but they hit a passenger stage instead, and while they wait for their real quarry to arrive, they hold the passengers hostage, setting off a game of psychological give-and-take in which even the "good guys" reveal themselves as less than noble. That is, all except for Scott, who so impresses Boone with his integrity and leadership that in the movie's most poignant scene, Boone all but asks if he can join Scott at his ranch. The tragedy of The Tall T is that even when the wicked have a change of heart, they're still damned by the choices they made long ago.
6. Man Of The West (1958)
In the '50s, director Anthony Mann made a series of "psychological Westerns" starring prototypical good guy Jimmy Stewart, and dealing with the struggle to remain virtuous and ethical in a world where brutality and greed are increasingly tempting alternatives. Mann cast another famously upstanding leading man, Gary Cooper, in his disturbing final Western Man Of The West; Cooper plays a family man confronted by his murderous outlaw past when the vicious Lee J. Cobb robs his train. When Cooper and companion Julie London are taken captive, Mann explores the gray area between good and evil as Cooper is forced to revert to his "bad" self in order to do the "right" thing, suggesting that darkness and light in each person can't be separated.
7. No Name On The Bullet (1959)
During the psychological Western decade, more than a few movies dealt with the sad lot of the professional gunfighter, forever doomed to be challenged by young bucks who want to make their reputations by proving that they're faster on the draw. For example, the 1950 potboiler The Gunfighter followed a legendary assassin's disastrous attempt to sneak back to his old town to see his girl, while 1956's The Fastest Gun Alive considers a poor soul who tries to hide his talent for gunplay at each new town he enters, but continues to be goaded into proving his mettle. Perhaps the darkest of the '50s gunfighter movies is No Name On The Bullet, with Audie Murphy as a tricky killer who always gets his victims to draw first, so the law can't touch him. He descends upon one small town like a specter, promising to take one of the citizens out, but not saying who—which forces all the locals to point fingers at each other, speculating over which of them has earned Murphy's retribution. Murphy is the unbeatable force: the guilt that everyone hides, and the fear they can't disguise.
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