8. The Shooting (1967)
The Old West was a strange, fearful, and isolating place, according to Monte Hellman's strange, fearful, and isolating low-budget classic The Shooting. Often described as an "existential" Western, The Shooting has a conventional setup (an uneasy alliance of enemies must rely on each other to survive treacherous territory) that's presented as a most unconventional stream of dead ends, roads to nowhere, and futile attempts to see or understand what fate has in store. Millie Perkins hires bounty hunter Warren Oates to take her to the town where her son was killed. Already paranoid after his partner's murder and brother's disappearance, Oates discovers he's being tracked by Jack Nicholson, another bounty hunter and Perkins employee, itching to gun him down. An eccentric storytelling style coupled with the oppressive desert setting—so open, yet so claustrophobic—ensured that The Shooting wouldn't be widely seen until Nicholson became a name actor several years later.
9. Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)
When he made 1968's Once Upon A Time In The West, Sergio Leone had already won acclaim for helping usher in a new era of revisionist Westerns with the Man With No Name trilogy he made with Clint Eastwood. Leone was ready to abandon the genre, but he was enticed back in part by the chance to work with one of his favorite actors, Henry Fonda. The result is arguably his best film. Once Upon A Time takes as one of its major themes the destructive influence of the "civilizing" process, as a murderous turf war breaks out over the railroad line being built through the Arizona frontier. That motif, in which the supposedly good forces are the most evil, found its most shocking expression in the audacious casting of Fonda as the cruel, violent lead villain, though he was at the time iconic for playing virtuous heroes in movies like 12 Angry Men and The Grapes Of Wrath. As Leone told Fonda when convincing him to take the role: "Picture this: the camera shows a gunman from the waist down pulling his gun and shooting a running child. The camera pans up to the gunman's face and… it's Henry Fonda."
10. The Wild Bunch (1969)
Sam Peckinpah's lyrically violent story of the end of the Wild West leaves its audience almost nowhere to turn in its depiction of corruption, savagery, betrayal, and twisted machismo. William Holden leads a crew of aging professional robbers whose way of life is becoming impossible as the march of progress brings the force of law down on their necks. Holden's men are vicious thugs, but the other side consists of power-hungry dictators like Emilio Fernandez's Mexican general, and crooked lawmen vividly described by their reluctant leader as "egg-suckin', chicken-stealing gutter trash." The opening image sets the tone, as children watch a phalanx of ants overpower and kill a larger scorpion: In the end, they're all disgusting insects.
11. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
Director Robert Altman called his McCabe & Mrs. Miller an "anti-Western," and to be fair, it does skips a lot of the genre trappings; instead of cowboys, Indians, marshals, and desperadoes, it has grubby entrepreneur Warren Beatty, who comes out to the western frontier to launch a grubby whorehouse consisting of some grubby girls turning tricks in grubby tents. The whole thing is about as far from heroic as possible. Julie Christie classes the joint up when she becomes Beatty's partner and makes his "brothel" into a serious business concern, but she's no particular help when some mining-company reps decide to kill him for refusing to sell the business to him. Like Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid two years earlier, McCabe & Mrs. Miller has its wry, even lighthearted side, but the ending is shattering and brutal. The difference is that Butch and the Kid go out fighting, in a final flash of wild bravado; Beatty's McCabe, by contrast, tries to squirm out of his fate, only fights when he absolutely has to, and goes down ignominiously and alone, for a questionable cause, while the woman he loves obliviously indulges her drug habit above. It's like Altman was erecting a warning sign: "Look out, '70s cinema starkness starts here."
12. Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid (1973)
It's telling that Pat Garrett's name comes first in the title of Sam Peckinpah's profoundly sad, controversial final Western. By the time the original, studio-botched version of Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid was released in 1973, the Billy The Kid story was already pretty well-worn territory for Westerns, so the focus here is on the man hunting him. Once again, Peckinpah expresses ambivalence (if not downright hostility) toward the conformity of "decent" civilization in what amounts to a character study of once-proud, now-defeated lawman James Coburn, who is forced to destroy his surrogate son—and by extension, his older, purer self. In a sad twist of fate, Peckinpah's beautiful meditation on personal compromise wouldn't be seen as he intended until after his death in 1984.
13. High Plains Drifter (1973)
Revenge is a common theme in Westerns, but the cold fury of frontier justice doesn't get much colder than in Clint Eastwood's second directorial effort, a supernatural-tinged tale of vengeance based on a script by Shaft writer Ernest Tidyman. Eastwood plays a dark variation on the already dark Mysterious Stranger role he'd perfected in Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns, appearing out of the desert haze to protect an Arizona town threatened by three outlaws who have already killed the town marshal. But the townsfolk have gotten far more than they bargained for: Eastwood begins to make bizarre, sinister demands, including painting every building in town red and renaming the place "Hell." Soon, it's increasingly apparent that the targets of his righteous rage aren't just the outlaws, but the secret-keeping citizens as well. (The hardboiled tone sometimes goes too far, especially in the disturbing sequence in which the stranger responds to one woman's insults by raping her—and it's strongly implied that that's what she wanted.)
« Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next »
- Comments