Best Westerns
by Spencer Warren
Issue 109 - June 11, 2008

As I’ve written here before, the classic Western, which reached its apex in the 1950s, is the ultimate American movie genre, and the ultimate conservative movie genre.

It depicts the heroic essentials of our forebears’ taming and settlement of our vast continent, it dramatizes heroes acting in a universe of objective moral truth, and it presents us with moral conflicts, the answer to which defines our nature as human beings. And it does all this on a vast stage whose natural beauty, as captured on film by great directors and their cinematographers, elevates the audience and raises their sights toward high ideals. Viewing these wonderful films takes one back to an America before popular culture was debased, before the critical spirit of the left had turned many liberals into enemies of our country, and before the left had taken over much of Hollywood. The classic movie Western was largely played out by the mid-1960s, increasingly replaced by a revisionist view which by the 1980s and 1990s had made this once most popular of genres virtually extinct.

Before beginning our list, we must note some great Westerns of the silent era. William S. Hart set the image of the Westerner as the tall, slender, silent hero, slow to anger but quick on the draw. He also created the Western prototype of the “good bad man.” The Toll Gate (1920) is one of his best films. Two epics of the settlement of the Wild West are The Covered Wagon (1923) – a wagon train -- and The Iron Horse (1924) – the transcontinental railroad, directed by John Ford, who would become the greatest director of Westerns. Another superb Ford silent is Three Bad Men (1926) – three “good bad men” who rescue a helpless young girl.

Now to our list:

1. Shane (1953)
Director George Stevens transforms into an epic poem the Western staple of the weary gunfighter (Alan Ladd) who wants to hang up his holster and join civilized life – as defined by family – but who ultimately has to be what he is in order to defend family and civilization. Stevens elevates this old tale with his visual eye as a director (perhaps equaled in this genre only by Ford), his use of the setting of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, the musical score by Victor Young, and of course his choice of material -- the classic novel by Jack Schaefer. There is no more urban filmmaker than Woody Allen, who several years ago described the final scenes of Shane as “some of the best . . . I’ve ever seen in an American movie.” Stevens’s poetic visual direction also captures early in the film the essential heroism of the Western homesteader, Joe Starrett, as played by Van Heflin.

2. My Darling Clementine (1946)
Our first of many John Fords. Here he takes the legend of Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and Doc Holliday’s (Victor Mature) shoot-out with the Clanton clan at Tombstone’s OK Corral and elevates it to the highest level of myth with his trademark poetic visual style. Much of the film takes place at night and is filmed with Ford’s vintage long shots, which in daylight frame the story against the heroic American landscape of Ford’s beloved Monument Valley in Arizona. As an example of the visual subtlety of movies of this period, note how the town’s one street has buildings on one side only; the other side is open to the natural wilderness, with which Ford’s camera envelops the action. The film’s first of two famous scenes is the Sunday morning church dance on the site of the church-to-be, beneath an American flag high on a pole whipping in the wind – a wonderful image of the settlement of our young country, which takes place at the church site, not the government building. The second is Wyatt Earp’s shy good-bye to his new girl, depicting the lasting image of the hero as the strong, silent type, who also is always courtly toward women. We must not forget that no one could stage action better than Ford, and his Gunfight at the OK Corral is unsurpassed – exciting, short but never grisly.

3. Stagecoach (1939)
With this picture, Ford rescued the Western genre after almost a decade in the doldrums (except for the still popular, cheaply made B Westerns, where John Wayne was making his living). Again, we see an artist taking a hackneyed story -- here a motley group of passengers on a stagecoach trip through dangerous Indian country – and transforming it with his signature personal style. One example of many: Ford’s long shot as the stagecoach starts out on the rugged trail – taking in the imposing scenery in the background ( Monument Valley again) which will witness its travails – is alone worth the price of admission. Several times Ford uses the noble buttes and mesas of Monument Valley in extreme long shots of the stagecoach’s journey – this man did not need color or widescreen to create epic vistas. Two more standard scenes as directed by Ford are probably the greatest ever in the long history of Westerns. The first is the Indian attack on the stagecoach as it reaches endless flat ground. Despite the comparatively primitive equipment Ford and his crew had to employ (not least their motor vehicles), this thrilling scene could not be bettered today, seventy years on. Finally, when all seems lost, the passengers having run out of ammunition and the arrows flying closer and closer, we hear a distant trumpet, whereupon Ford cuts to the cavalry, galloping hell for leather, with “The Battle Cry of Freedom” blaring on the soundtrack. This scene, like all of Ford’s and all of these films, truly has to be seen in a big movie theater. I wanted to stand up and cheer when I saw it this way. The second scene raised to classic status by Ford comes when the stagecoach has arrived safely in Lordsburg. The Ringo Kid (John Wayne, in the role that made him a star), has a score to settle with the Plummer brothers, who murdered his brother. Their ritual confrontation in the deserted town street, preceded by the ritual saloon scene, is a perfect demonstration of Ford’s genius as a director, in particular his economy of expression. Also note that as the shooting starts, Ford cuts to Ringo’s girl (Claire Trevor), waiting anxiously in the distance. Ford uses long shots and cutting away from the violence to allow the audience to experience the emotions on its own, whereas contemporary directors tend to shove it down the audience’s throat with extreme close-ups and lots of gore.

4. Fort Apache (1948)
Ford had a rather formal visual style, as can be seen in his non-Western dramas of the thirties, such as The Informer (1935), his first best direction Oscar. His filming here of the formation of the cavalry for its (insane) attack on the Indians -- long shots of lines of troopers forming up in great open space – brings that style out of doors, with a more natural, less self-conscious manner than in his thirties films. This scene, culminating in the Indians’ overrunning of the troopers’ last reboubt, which disappears amidst the dust kicked up by the thundering hooves of the braves’ galloping horses, is another of Ford’s unforgettable set-pieces, which, again, needs to be seen on a large theatrical (i.e. not multiplex) screen. All directors with strong visual styles have their films somewhat miniaturized on home video. This film also carries interest for our current debates about American national identity. Leftists like the Obamas, other liberals (including Bush “conservatives” like the president and Condoleeza Rice) define America in terms of the gulf they perceive between our ideals – whose meaning they tend to corrupt – and the reality of American life. Anything less than perfection is cause for denigrating our entire national experience. But to Ford, America is a family. The regiment in the film is led to disaster by a stubborn, foolhardy officer from the East (Henry Fonda), but its action is still glorious because the true glory of America, its identity, lies not so much in its abstract ideals but in the daily lives of the people who make up America – and in its history, their history. That is why Ford dwells in the film on the families at this Western outpost -- the Irish Sergeant-Major (Ward Bond) reading his Bible, then looking up first with surprise, then with pride, at his newly arrived son, just posted to the fort upon his graduation from West Point. The women looking out from a hilltop, one (Shirley Temple) commenting, “All I see are the flags,” as the regiment departs on its fateful mission, its trumpets blaring “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” Ford was a New Deal liberal, but like most people of his time, compared to today, he was a cultural conservative.

5. Seven Men from Now (1956)
After John Wayne, Randolph Scott was the biggest Western star of the fifties. Like Gary Cooper, Scott fit the taciturn, lanky mold of the Western hero better than Wayne, and he also was, with Cooper, was the most accomplished horseman. Scott turned 60 in 1957, but he kept himself very fit, and his final films before retiring in 1962 are his best; several, starting with this one, are among the greatest of all Westerns. From 1956 to 1960 Scott made seven Westerns with director Budd Boetticher. The best of these were written by Burt Kennedy. Running only about 80 minutes, with small casts, these films ran on the second half of double bills. But today they have enormous reputations because of how they encompass ideals of the Western with the utmost simplicity; simplicity is their art. Scott always plays a more complex hero, and the villains also are more rounded characters. Scott’s character is an older, lonely, hard-bitten man who is on a search, for the men who murdered his wife in a hold-up, or for his wife, long ago kidnapped by Indians, and so on. Along the way he encounters a couple, or a woman, who need his help. In the course of each film, he dramatizes the basic nobility of character of the Western hero, the plainspoken knight on horseback. This film had not been seen for many years until it was restored and shown at the New York Film Festival in 2000. The then 84-year-old Boetticher was in attendance; he received a standing ovation, having lived to see his little film attain immortal status. Lee Marvin fans take note: his widow says this film features Marvin’s personal favorite of all his movie death scenes from his initial roles as the bad guy!

6. The Naked Spur (1953)
As written in our James Stewart centenary tribute in the last issue (http://www.acuf.org/issues/issue108/080524med.asp), Anthony Mann directed Stewart in six Westerns in the fifties. Like Scott, Stewart’s heroes were more complex characters than audiences were used to. No one staged violent action better than Mann (though Ford and Boetticher match him), and he approached Ford in his spectacular use of landscape, using it as the setting for his climactic final clashes between good and evil, most memorably in this picture: a promontory looking down on a river rushing through a deep gorge.

7. The Hanging Tree (1959)
Along with Boetticher and Mann, Delmer Daves was, after Ford, the greatest director of Westerns. The films of Boetticher, Mann and Daves focus on personal dramas without Ford’s epic context; their scripts also tend to have more interesting characters and be tighter than Ford’s, who had a weakness for low comedy and horseplay. Daves (see my discussion at http://acuf.org/issues/issue92/070922med.asp ) directed six Westerns between 1956 and 1959, with his last, The Hanging Tree, being his masterpiece. Another Western stalwart in one of his last roles, Gary Cooper, plays Doc Frail, the toughest man, though a doctor, in a remote mining town. Like the Scott and Stewart heroes, he has some emotional pain, unknown to us, lurking from his past. For some reason he wears black, the symbol of a penitent. He is feared by everyone, except the needy, to whom he tends with kindness and generosity. The early scene when he feeds milk to a poor young girl, and a later one when he restores sight to a woman blinded in a stagecoach hold-up (Maria Schell), mark Daves as an intimate director with unusual sensitivity and delicacy. He also could build up a crescendo to a thrilling climax like no one else. Here, Doc Frail is saved from a frenzied mob, which is dragging him to the “hanging tree” (led by George C. Scott in his first film) in an outburst of rage at this man they had long feared and hated. But he is rescued by the woman whose eyesight he had restored (and whose affections he had spurned due to his past) and whom he had just rescued from rape by a drunken miner (Karl Malden). This explosive climax, with the Doc now in need and the woman as his savior, leads to Doc’s moral catharsis.

8. The Searchers (1956)
Most critics cite this Ford effort as the greatest of all Westerns, but the story is too simple to carry the weight of all the themes Ford seeks to dramatize: civilization versus savagery, the violent man of action (Wayne in his greatest role as Ethan Edwards) who is needed to defend civilization but who (like Shane) cannot join it, and white racial prejudice and violence as something of a mirror image of the Indians, to name the most prominent themes. It would seem reasonable to surmise that the latter is the reason so many critics (leftists all) love this film. The first forty minutes, including the Comanche attack on the homestead (not seen but suggested), the Texas Rangers going after the Indian raiding party, and Wayne’s departure on his epic quest for his kidnapped niece, all filmed against the epic buttes and mesas of Monument Valley in the new widescreen VistaVision, are among the most spectacular scenes Ford ever filmed. How exciting to see his stunning compositions, subtlety and economy of expression move to the larger canvass of the bigger screens of the fifties. But, the film trails off and Ford’s traditional plot is not up to his thematic ambitions.

9. High Noon (1952)
Many readers must have been wondering when we would get to this famous film, for which Gary Cooper won his second best actor Academy Award as the abandoned marshal who stands alone against the criminal gang out for revenge against him. Not only the townspeople, but even his new bride (the young Grace Kelly) turns her back on him – she is a Quaker. The ballad that opens the film, sung by Frankie Laine (lyrics by Ned Washington, music by Dimitri Tiomkin, a Russian who wrote many Western scores in this period) is the perfect expression of the manliness of the Western hero. Written by the subsequently blacklisted Carl Foreman, the film actually is a parable against McCarthyism. The film represented a new step for Westerns, later followed by the revisionist Westerns of the sixties and later, in that the cowardly townspeople are seen as not worth saving. John Wayne was disgusted by the end, when Cooper’s Will Kane, having killed three of the four bad guys (his wife shot the fourth), confronts the townsfolk, removes his badge and throws it in the dust. The director, Fred Zinnemann, though receiving far more acclaim in his time than Boetticher, Mann and Daves, has now had his reputation eclipsed by them. Zinnemann’s direction is rather studied and self-conscious, in contrast to the greater vigor and spontaneity of the others. Daves’s original 1957 version of 3:10 to Yuma (see link for Daves above) is known as the poor man’s High Noon because its plot revolves around the same moral dilemma – should the hero stay and fight, or flee for the sake of his loved ones? – but is preferred by many for this reason.

10. Comanche Station (1960)
Our title “Ten of the Greatest” was chosen because it is not fair or worthwhile to reduce the many great classic Westerns to such a small number. One cannot make distinctions, for example, between the best films of Boetticher, Mann and Daves. So, with a promise to return to this subject in future, we will end with the final Scott- Boetticher classic. Scott is Jefferson Cody, deep in Indian country to trade, hopefully, for his long-ago kidnapped wife. But the woman produced is another kidnap victim, the wife, Mrs. Lowe (Nancy Gates) of a wealthy man in town. In perhaps the best scene of the series, Mrs. Lowe is seated at the campfire Cody has started before they retire for the night (well apart). She is looking up at Cody, who is standing, with the camera facing her, placed behind and just to the side of Cody. He is dressed in black. She haltingly asks him, if his wife had been kidnapped by Indians (she does not yet know why he came upon her, nor do we), would he still love her if he got her back. (In the civilized world of 1960 popular culture, words like rape were not spoken, but left between the lines.) Cody, still standing with his back to the camera, quietly answers, “No m’am. If I loved her, it wouldn’t matter at all.” Boetticher’s placing of the actors in this shot, plus Cody’s black costume, makes the scene dramatize – visually – our Western hero as the archetype of a noble soul.

Ronald Reagan’s Best Western
Our favorite movie star, Ronald Reagan, made a few movie Westerns in his time, in addition to hosting and starring in some episodes of TV’s Death Valley Days. His best is the little known Tennessee’s Partner (1955), from a story by Bret Harte (and filmed twice before). Reagan is a good-hearted fellow known only as Cowpoke (“My friends call me Cowpoke,” he tells everyone he meets) who arrives in town to marry his beloved, Goldie. Goldie (Coleen Gray, an appealing actress of the period) is suitably named, because she is a gold-digger. She is known as such to the tough gambler in town, Tennessee (John Payne), who, unbeknownst to the kindly Cowpoke, appears to have a past with Goldie. Cowpoke saves Tennessee’ life when some varmints try to kill him, but is deeply wounded when told about Goldie by Tennessee. Cowpoke is such a great guy he just can’t believe ill of his sweetheart, and she comes between him and Tennessee. Well, Cowpoke and Tennessee find themselves saving the day in the end, with Cowpoke’s goodness unimpaired. Critic Peter Bogdanovich calls this Reagan’s “most likeable performance.” (I would add his Sergeant Bill Page, on leave in wartime New York, falling for Eleanor Parker’s slightly cooky aspiring actress Sally Middleton, while forced to sleep on her apartment sofa as the hotels are all booked, in the very charming Voice of the Turtle (1947)).

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattleline.com's media critic.