Favourite Western's

[AgentTR]

So far the best westerns for me..

Once upon a time in the west - So perfect movie, from the cast to the director

The Unforgiven - Great performances and I liked the story too

Edit: I almost forgot, The Magnificent Seven - based on Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai story, pretty cool!

Recently I saw the Proposition, although there were high expectations for it
I though it was very mediocre..

[ballyhoo]

easy answer is; any Western with Clint Eastwood or John Wayne!!!
but I'm a huge fan of "Young Guns", and always have been.

"Young Guns is a 1988 action/western film, directed by Christopher Cain and written
by John Fusco. The film stars Emilio Estevez, Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips,
Charlie Sheen, Dermot Mulroney, Casey Siemaszko, Terence Stamp, Terry O'Quinn,
Brian Keith, and Jack Palance."

[boddo]

Probably:

Hombre with Paul Newman

Ulzana's Raid with Burt Lancaster


and Lawman, also with Burt Lancaster (directed, you may be surprised to know, by Michael Winner).

[scoundrel]

This was really the first great milestone of John Wayne’s illustrious film career, but there’s a lot more to enjoy in Stagecoach than just him. I haven’t watched it for a while and I was struck afresh by the complex script and the sheer wealth of acting talent on display. It’s a really intimate film and the chemistry of the cast is perfect; all the relationships, even the minor ones, are superbly drawn. Each individual on the coach emerges as a distinct personality.

The story is beautifully paced. Right from the beginning the Apache are absently present as a brooding threat. But there are immediate tensions; these stem from the various human stories of the passengers. They are a fascinating and eclectic mix of people:

• Mrs Mallory (Louise Platt), heavily pregnant, is trying to rejoin her cavalry officer husband before giving birth to their baby. Accompanying her as a temporary companion is a thoroughly disreputable, dangerous and sinister gambler with impeccable gentleman’s manners, a man called Hatfield (John Carradine); there’s a lot of eye contact from Mrs Mallory, which Hatfield returns politely, yet the dodgy character is the one who seems reticent. Here is clearly a mystery; it is revealed a bit at a time. Hatfield is a former CSA officer and descended from the aristocracy of the town in Virginia where she also was born into a lesser but still respected family. He recognised her; she knows she knew him from somewhere. He dreads being recognised, having his fallen state ever known back in Virginia where he is thought to be dead; yet he sees Mrs Mallory in danger and cannot let her travel unprotected, for old times’ sake. In the end she knows him as he is dying of wounds, comforts his last seconds and promises to tell his father that he died honourably for her sake, which is no more than the truth.
• Dallas, a disgraced bar girl and Doc Boone make another odd couple. She is a prostitute who is being symbolically tarred and feathered, run out of town by hatchet faced matrons of the Ladies Reform League; such sweet ladies. He is a bankrupt drunkard MD who has washed up and needs to leave because he can’t pay his bills. He is a failed old man but he once did amount to something. He is kind to Dallas, who puts on a brave front but is living in quiet misery behind her bold façade; Doc can see past the brassy prostitute’s veneer. He has no pity for himself at all, but feels real compassion for her.
• Mr Peacock, a whisky salesman who is a bizarrely bourgeois and respectable family man. He is a city dweller, a fish out of water in the Old West, yet gradually he emerges as kindly, sweet-natured and quietly brave and by the end of the journey he commands the respect of the frontier men and women who have been his companions on the coach. There is a really well observed moment when this extremely quiet and mild man asserts the authority of a responsible adult over boisterous children, curbing the noise of the other men celebrating the birth of Mrs Mallory’s daughter at the bar because Mrs Mallory has just had a very difficult labour and they should be considerate and give her peace. Mr Peacock is not a weakling; he just doesn’t assert himself except when something really important is at issue.
• Mr Gatewood, a pompous and bombastic hypocrite banker, bemoaning the lawlessness of the wild west even as he absconds with $50,000 belonging to one of his customers; he steadily alienates everyone on the trip with his arrogant and disrespectful behaviour. As Don Corleone says in The Godfather, one man with a briefcase can steal more than a dozen men with guns. He is the venal, self-righteous and ugly face of the establishment.
• The wildcard is John Wayne’s Ringo Kid, an escaped convict set up on a false murder conviction by the perjury of the Plummer brothers. They murdered his father and brother and covered up the crime by pinning blame for the death of their foreman on the Kid and claiming self-defence on the Kid’s relatives. The Plummers are in Lordsburg and the Kid is going there, but his horse went lame, and the US Marshall is on the stagecoach, also going to Lordsburg because there’s nowhere else the escaped Kid would be going except anywhere where the Plummer brothers are. Ringo finds himself ambiguously both a prisoner and a guardian of the party as the threat of the Apache draws nearer.

I relish the way in which the individual stories unfold and relations of the characters evolve along the journey. The central story is that of Dallas and the Ringo Kid. Initially shunned, Dallas becomes essential to the wellbeing of the party, especially Mrs Mallory, when she is in labour and afterwards when she is exhausted and ill and needs a nurse. Dallas is like a touchstone; in this company she is a pariah and the way the other characters interact with her displays their various degrees of good or ill nature. Ringo likes her from the start, seeing that she is pretty, honest and brave; also he is officially an escaped murderer on the run and isn’t going to make himself ridiculous by looking down on other people. Doc Boone is already her friend, but he is shunned as much as she is and loses nothing by the association anyway. The others initially show her the iciest of cold shoulders, but in varying degrees most of them relent as they start to appreciate her sterling good qualities as a companion in a tight spot.

Claire Trevor as Dallas was for me the standout player in this really strong ensemble. She brings out the great pathos of her story and also of the Ringo Kid’s victimised story. Their love grows very swiftly but is an organic and natural development; it’s so logical that these two marginalised victims of life should stand together in order to draw strength from one another. The sheer conflict of emotions on Claire Trevor’s face when Wayne’s Ringo Kid first asks her to marry him is exquisite, beautiful acting. It’s a revelation to Dallas that any man might still be able to love her, she having fallen so low, but she thinks it’s’ too late. What wouldn’t she give to have what Ringo is offering her? Yet how can she possibly delude herself and accept his offer?

He has an appointment with Death and she is going to Lordsburg to step down the very last rung and become a prostitute in a brothel. She is too ashamed to tell him plainly what she is (of course the Hays Code would not have such an admission any in the script) but can’t he see?! Why would he torture her with such a hope? I found it very telling also when she confides to Doc that Ringo has asked her, Doc can see how much she wants him and yet cannot offer her a crumb of comfort. Then he asks Ringo, the runaway convict, how old he was when they incarcerated him. “Sixteen, Doc, goin’ on seventeen.” Doc’s face never changes, but the little detail is a bitter extra turn of the screw. This man is about to go to his almost certain death and Dallas is the first real honest to God woman he has ever met. It’s much understated and really heartrending. Can they be each the very last chance for the other?

The Lordsburg section is a perfect resolution of their romance, made so by Trevor’s huge skill in the art of silent emoting. No actress born ever wrung her hands better than she did. First there’s the bitter humiliation of The Kid declining to let her walk away alone; she didn’t want him to see where her destination was, to know what she was about to sink to. This man is still in some ways a sixteen year old boy and she dreads the affront to his innocence, the loss of his illusions. He did ask her to marry him and even though she has no hope that this can ever be, the mere fact that he asked her and meant it is the only good thing that has happened to her for a very long time. She dreads his knowledge and his rejection as she would dread a red hot firebrand. The way Trevor visibly shrinks from Wayne when she knows he can see, that nothing is now concealed from him, is full of pathos; she runs away because she cannot bear to face him, but he can stop her with a single word, because that word is spoken without judgment.

Here’s the thing. Ringo really is an innocent in many ways but he’s not stupid after all. He knows what Dallas is; he always knew. But he has learned under great pressure what kind of person, what kind of woman Dallas is. He didn’t recklessly throw his cap at the first real woman he ever met; he chose the woman who is tough enough and brave enough to share her life in Mexico with a fugitive from justice, raise his children, be his companion all their lives and never repine. Dallas knows everything bad there is to know about Ringo and she still loves him. No…Ringo isn’t stupid. He knows when he's on to a good thing.

Claire Trevor’s bitter-sweet joy is very touching; Ringo knows exactly what she is and loves her anyway. The only trouble is, he has one rifle and three bullets between him and the Plummer brothers and she must wait outside the brothel which was to be her new home and see whether her thousand-to-one chance comes off and she gets to have a life. That’s a great scene too; the soulless honky-tonk piano playing in the background and Claire Trevor in silhouette, silent and tense with fear as she waits for the shooting to start. It’s a tableau of the eternal fate of women down the centuries, waiting and hoping against all the odds that their lives will not collapse in ruins simply because men insist on killing each other.

I love this film. I really do.

[DFFECHSWU]

1.) Unforgiven
2.) Dances With Wolves
3.) Open Range
3.) The Outlaw Josey Wales
4.) High Plains Drifter
5.) Tombstone
6.) 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
7.) Pale Rider

Some of the better movie quotes like this one from The Outlaw Josey Wales came from Westerns ... "Now remember, when things look bad and it looks like you're not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. 'Cause if you lose your head and you give up, then you neither live nor win. That's just the way it is."

[COP11]

Hud, Rooster Cogburn and The Unforgiven

[Estreeter]

A Fistful of Ravioli

never heard of it

CLICK

[kolzig37]

[madjack]

I'm not a great fan of westerns,but any with Clint Eastwood I'll watch many times

[Varagorn]

For me I would say:

A Fistful Of Dollars

For A Few Dollars More

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

All three brilliantly directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood as the "Man With No Name." Hard to say which is my favourite but I'll go for "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly just because it was the first of the trilogy I saw, has a great story and excellent soundtrack, and Eli Wallach as Toco is brilliant.