Western

[7] John Wayne took home the Oscar for his performance as crotchety Rooster Cogburn, an alcoholic US Marshall recruited by a young girl (Kim Darby) to capture her father’s killer and bring him to justice. Wayne is low key as always, but it works pretty well for him. Except for Robert Duvall as the villainous Ned Pepper, the rest of the casting leaves something to …

[7] Errol Flynn tries a Western on for size (his first of eight), seizing the sheriff’s badge and cleaning up the lawless town of Dodge City. He’s with his usual leading lady, Olivia de Havilland, and his usual sidekick, Alan Hale, all under Michael Curtiz’s sure-handed direction. (In fact, there’s a scene in the saloon where rival groups compete in song, a scene Curtiz would …

[6] On one hand, Arthur Penn’s take on Billy the Kid isn’t as whitewashed as other tellings. On the other hand, why should we care that some hot-headed simpleton ran out and got himself shot? Despite an admirable effort from Paul Newman, I couldn’t quite invest in the character as much as I’d have liked, but the movie still moves at a brisk pace and …

[8] Quentin Tarantino’s eighth film (because he’s counting) is a three-hour long claustrophobic western about eight characters holed up in a lodge during a snowstorm who all have reason to kill one another. Leading the ensemble cast are Kurt Russell as a bounty hunter, Jennifer Jason Leigh as his ruthless, almost feral captive, Samuel L. Jackson as a Union major delivering corpses for reward money, …

[7] John Wayne stars in this Howard Hawks western about a tyrannical cattle farmer who invests over a decade of work into the mother of all cattle drives, only to have it threatened when his adopted son — played by Montgomery Clift — launches a mutiny against him. I always love to see Howard Hawks playing with gender roles and male archetypes, and Red River …

[6] Seth MacFarlane (creator of The Family Guy) both directs and stars in this send-up of the American Western. MacFarlane is plenty charismatic to carry a movie and he has great chemistry with leading lady Charlize Theron. Even though her character is married to a rough-and-tumble outlaw (Liam Neeson), she naturally falls for MacFarlane’s charms and agrees to help him learn to shoot a gun so …

[4] Errol Flynn clings to the last few years of his good looks in Montana, before his opium and alcohol addictions sent him to an early grave at the age of 50. Montana seems unintentionally silly to me — it’s all about cattle herders vs sheep herders, a sort of West Side Story for the northern plains. Alexis Smith plays Flynn’s love interest (making you …

[8] Franco Nero stars as a coffin-dragging vigilante who fights his way out between a gang of Mexican bandits and a militia of white supremacists in Django, one of the most famous of the spaghetti westerns. While director Sergio Corbucci certainly tries to emulate the style of Sergio Leone, Django is nonetheless a tight, well-paced, grittily entertaining piece of B-cinema. Franco Nero carries the movie …

[8] I never particularly liked Westerns until I saw this film, my first ‘Spaghetti Western.’ Most people credit Sergio Leone for inventing the genre. If it weren’t for his so-called Man With No Name trilogy (three films starring Clint Eastwood, of which A Fistful of Dollars is the first) the sub-genre may have never taken flight. What Leone did was take the stagey, polished, over-produced …

[5] Armie Hammer (The Social Network) stars as the legendary masked man while Johnny Depp picks up the mantle of Tonto in this big-budget version of The Lone Ranger from director Gore Verbinski (The Ring) and producer Jerry Bruckheimer. It’s painfully obvious that the creative team is working very hard to rekindle the flame they ignited with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, complete with …

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